In the vase across from the live bouquet of somethings Wilson brought home for her one day last week is a single dried rose that he vaguely remembers having bought for her from a rose peddler come into a bar where they were drinking. But he has bought her more than one rose this way, and so which night was this rose from? When and where? How long has it been sitting here, so brittle that when Wilson lifts its vase to better visualize Ruth’s dresser without it a petal falls to the floor? Without it, the dresser looks almost bare despite everything else on it—the lamp with Ruth’s clip-on earrings dangling from its shade; the beaded necklaces hanging from the corner of the mirror; the old wooden jewelry box propped open and filled not with jewels but with old thread and rusted buttons, safety pins and dry-cleaning tags unfastened from a blouse or skirt and set down here again and again out of habit; the photograph of Isabelle on Halloween one year, a little Aladdin in yellow silk trousers that balloon around her legs.

Wilson sets the vase down where it belongs and lifts the photograph. The frame is an old one, engraved with Ruth’s initials and a date from more than thirty years ago. And the photograph—what year was that from? Wilson wonders. Isabelle is very young in it, he thinks, only two or three—three, he decides; when she was two, he remembers quite clearly because it was her first real Halloween, she was a bumblebee, and he had half carried her from door to door in their building, crowding with witches and ghosts and Supermen into the cramped space of the elevator. In the photograph, Isabelle is mid-step, and mid-speech, it looks like from her open mouth and almost indignant eyes—but is it indignation? Indignation, concern, worry, purpose, it could be any of these things. But her look is a serious one, he thinks; the camera has caught her in the middle of something that at that moment was, for her, important, wherever it was that that step was taking her, whatever it was that she was saying.