I spend three days a week editing Mrs. Tyburn’s life. No anxiety here about becoming a youth-unemployment statistic; there’s plenty to do. Boxes of photographs and slides, dozens of hours of 8 mm films. Letters, diaries, insurance inventories, wills, deeds.

I go through to her kitchen, bigger and brighter than the last few apartments I lived in with my parents, light the stove, put on the kettle, and drop two bags of Earl Grey into the porcelain pot with the violets on the side. The grandfather clock chimes in the hall. In moments like this, when it’s quiet and I’m surrounded by her Victorian array of specialist dishes and utensils that have only one very particular use—the olive pitter, the grape shears, the tiny saw for slicing lemons, the silver sugar tongs—I know that this job could go on forever. And then I start to wonder if maybe she’ll just die soon and let me off the hook.

But I know there’s no use dwelling on it. I’ve agreed to it, to go through every frame of her life and adjust it to her satisfaction. And maybe then I’ll have my own life. Maybe I’ll be able to take six months and trek through the Andes, climb pyramids, sit in an arroyo in the desert and sing with the coyotes.

“What an interesting skirt. Is it new?”

I spill some hot water onto the counter as Mrs. Tyburn enters. She tuts at my clumsiness through dust-pink lips. Her hair is pinned into the sort of intricate knot that you only see in old pictures. She’s finally managed to find a color of pale blond that recedes easily into her white roots without jarring the eye. She’s tiny, as if age takes a little piece off her body as the minutes go by. She doesn’t have the droopy bottom and boobs some women get in menopause. She’s just compacted, like she’s shrinking to death.

Somehow, though, I always feel smaller when I’m with her, like her kind of aging is contagious. It makes me uneasy.

“Yes, it’s new. I mean, new to me at least. Do you like it?”

Her expression doesn’t change. “Red.”

Charcoal slacks, black boat-neck top, pearls. I shrink and feel that I have to really reach to take down the cups and saucers. She takes a pair of reading glasses out of the drawer that holds the notepads, pens, and the ten-year-old phone book. The pearls of the chain on her glasses match her necklace exactly. I take my notebook out of my bag and turn to the most recent page.

“So, where were we?” she asks.

“Sophia’s diary, June eighteenth, 1977.”

“Oh, yes. Read back the last paragraph.”