She looked her age, midfifties, but good with it. She looked physically relaxed, the way you do if you work out just enough. She’d let her thick blond hair fill with gray, and it was swept back from her temples and forehead, a little severely. I always thought of her face as a far more beautiful version of mine, her features more delicate, her chin smaller, her nose not quite so fleshy. Now wrinkles spread around her eyes and mouth, and her skin was a little weather-beaten, polished by the Florida sun. But she still had the family eyes, limpid and clear gray, what one of her boyfriends used to call smoke-filled.

We ran out of facts to swap, and the silence was briefly awkward.

She said, “It’s good of you to come. It’s important to be with family at a time like this. Et cetera.”

“So it is,” I said. It was true. For all the unending tension between us, as I looked into that face that was so like my own, I felt a certain peace I had lost since Dad’s death.

But she broke the spell by saying sharply, “I know you think I should have stayed longer after the funeral.”

“You’ve got your life to live here. It was easier for me to handle it.”

“I suppose it was,” she said. It was a coded put-down, of course. You had the time because, by contrast with me, you don’t have a life. That’s sibling rivalry for you.

I pulled her scrapbook about Regina out of my jacket pocket and put it on the table. “I found this at home. I don’t remember you making it.”

“Before your time, I suppose.”

“I thought you might want it.”

She pulled the dog-eared little book toward her. She didn’t pick it up, but turned the pages with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. It was as if I had presented her with her afterbirth pickled in a jar. She said coldly, “Thanks.”

I was irritated, with her and myself. “Shit, Gina. Why do we find it so hard to get on? Even at a time like this. I’m not here to fight—”

“Then why?” she said coldly.

“For Rosa,” I said without hesitation. I was satisfied to see how her smoke-filled eyes, so similar to mine, widened.

That was when the boys burst in, to our mutual relief.

“George!” “Hey, Uncle George . . .”

Michael was ten, John twelve. They were wearing summer gear, T-shirts, shorts, and huge, expensive-looking trainers. Michael had some kind of complicated Frisbee under his arm. I actually got a hug from Michael, and a punch on the shoulder from his older brother, hard enough to hurt. From those two I took whatever I could get.

I could see their gazes wandering around the kitchen. “Go to my hire car and take a look in the boot.”

“The trunk,” they chorused.

“Whatever. Go, go.”