Minutes continued to drip like leaky faucets from the roof’s edges. I could hear Hazel downstairs, busy with my great-aunt, making her comfortable. Apparently, according to what Hazel had described, Great-aunt Nettie spent most of her day with bleak, dark eyes sinking deeper and deeper into her earliest memories. She sat in the living room, occasionally working her fingers to do what to anyone else would be her invisible needlework. Hazel told me that from time to time, she would ask questions about people who were long dead or talk about her husband as if he had just left for work. Sometimes she stood by the window, waiting for him to appear. It seemed like she was caught in the echo of time. The present didn’t exist, and the future was as empty as another false promise. I would have had more sympathy for her if I wasn’t feeling so sorry for myself.

I heard it grow silent downstairs, and then, moments after, Hazel came up to ask me if I wanted to go with her to do some shopping.

“Yes, I’ll go. I promised my father I’d send him a telegram.”

I was still undecided about what I would write, and I didn’t want to tell Hazel what I was thinking yet.

“Oh, I’ll take you right there. It’s near the fish market,” Hazel said.

Downstairs, my great-aunt had fallen asleep on the sofa, her head back against the cushion and her mouth open, resembling the mouth of someone suddenly amazed. Her chest lifted and fell like a fireplace bellows.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

“Oh yes. She’ll be like that for hours,” Hazel told me. “I lock the door behind me just in case she wakes and has some thoughts about goin’ out. She’d get hit by a horse and carriage for sure or lose her way.”

I was still feeling quite tired and depressed, probably just as much from my disappointment as from the amount of limoncello I had consumed. If I never saw another lemon, that would be too soon, I thought, no matter how wonderful Garland thought his discovery was.

Hazel and I left the house. As we walked through the streets, she talked about the old days, when my great-uncle was still alive and he and my great-aunt were such prominent people. She was obviously used to the noise and the dust. Anyone seeing her would think she acted like someone walking in a field of wildflowers, serenaded by a chorus of sparrows, robins, and bluebirds.

“If your uncle and aunt had lived in London, he’d have been knighted,” she said. “Believe me that.”