“Mom? It’s me-ee!” I called again, though, being an expert in empty houses, I no longer expected a reply.

I was in the kitchen starting a note when I looked up to see my mother making her wordless way down the stairs. She had on jeans and a yellow sweater embroidered at the neck. Her hair was flattened as if she had just woken up. It struck me that this place, the stage of my childhood, had become the house of an elderly couple. In her slow progress toward me, I saw stair lifts, walkers, and home help, a high bed installed in the bay window. I saw my mother and my father leaving the house they loved and the neighborhood that no longer particularly loved them.

“Hello, dear,” she said.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

Her eyes slid out from under mine. “Oh, just one of those days.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“Hardware store. Something to fix the back door. Rain got in and swelled the wood.”

“Kind of late in the day to go shopping.”

“I think he wanted to get out of the house. This is a nice surprise. On your way from work? Cup of something?”

“Yes, please.” Once we were seated with our herbal tea, I asked again what was wrong, confident of a buoyant response; then I could tell her my news. Instead my mother’s eyes brimmed with tears she made no effort to hide.

“What is it, Mom?” I went over and hugged her from behind. “What is it?” I repeated, with foreboding.

There was in my mother a well of darkness she was determined not to see. She stepped around it and gazed resolutely past it. This gave her a sunny temperament, twice-yearly migraines, and a low tolerance for bad news. When my brother and I were small, my father had cut disturbing articles from the newspaper before handing it over. She read around the holes scissored out of the pages. Through the years this story had been relayed as fact; recently I’d begun to suspect it was a family myth, or a onetime stunt recalled as a regular occurrence. In any case, it was a cruel irony no one had the heart to point out that the person who’d lost her own mother at the age of ten, the person who most feared calamity, would have to face the death of her only granddaughter.

“Lightning strikes twice.”

“What did you say?”

She angled a weak smile up at me. “Lightning strikes twice.”

“I was just thinking that.” I passed her a tissue. We both kept one on our person at all times. I returned to my chair to give her some privacy.

“I’ve been thinking about my mother,” she said slowly. “I don’t know why.”

“Has something happened?”

“Everyone loved her. My father never recovered, you know.”

“Of course not. Of course he didn’t.”