There is a lot of preparation. Through Mercedes, she borrows a wheelchair from the hospice center. She gets a van with a ramp from one of the guards at the museum. Her father wants to wear a suit. Mary helps him get dressed. His body has shrunk. The pants and jacket seem made for a different man. She ties an ascot loosely around his throat. She combs what is left of his hair.

“I want the windows open,” he says in the van. She rolls them all the way down. Mary is already feeling exhausted, but her father seems refreshed. As she drives, she looks in the rearview mirror and watches him lean his face into the breeze, the way a dog might.

Dr. Fisher is waiting for them at the handicapped entrance. He insists on giving a tour. Mary feels awkward introducing the men, but her father is friendly. He asks questions about the collection and its history. When Dr. Fisher spends twenty minutes describing the life cycle of a turtle, her father bats his eyes before spitting a wad of phlegm into his handkerchief.

At last they turn in to the exhibition hall. Dr. Fisher has lost some of his steam and Mary is thankful for the silence. She wheels her father up to a set of camels, dromedary and Bactrian.

“Oh, sweetheart,” her father says. “Just look at that sand.”

Mary suddenly feels choked. She is not prepared for compliments, although she is proud of the texture and light she has given back to the dunes. She tries to deflect the attention, insists that the pyramids in the background are crude, but her father points out that it was Everett’s choice to include them, not hers.

“Makes the animals look a little shabby.” He tries to wink, but instead closes both of his eyes.

Mary is unsure if her restoration has drawn her father’s interest, or Everett’s paintings underneath. She has copied strokes, matched colors, followed lines, given trees and animals dimension and shade, but none of this is truly hers.

They wheel past the migration of the wildebeests.

“I’d like to try my hand at this,” her father says. He knocks on the glass. “It’s like a time capsule.”

Mary tries to imagine him well enough. The last painting he did was a self-portrait, a ghostly rendering in blues and blacks. He’d tacked it to the wall of their living room and then said he was going to bed. When she opened the door to his room, he had the covers pulled up to his chin. His face looked frightened. She suggested they go to the hospital, and he did not say no, and it was then that she first felt it—the hollowness of what her life would be without him.