Before they’d turned sixteen, they had made their dads drive them everywhere at all hours, and their dads had done it without complaining, even though Liz’s had only one arm and Joan’s was occasionally inebriated.

“They were the last decent guys,” Liz whispered.

One afternoon, while Connie sat with their father, Joan and her sister went back to the house intending to go through it and figure out what to do with things. Joan had opened the drawer of the buffet in the dining room where they kept the communal combs and brushes, bobby pins and barrettes, and in the very back she found a brush with their mother’s hair preserved in it from long ago. Before death; before chemo, even. The hairbrush defeated them entirely, and they decided to find someone to come dismantle the house and sell what could be sold.

After the service, after everything, Joan gathered two boxes of stuff from the attic, found Sheba, then called her sister from the phone in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette and staring out the window the way their mother used to do.

“That was fun, experiencing another death with you,” her sister said. “Let’s do it again soon.”

“Next time it can be mine,” Joan said. “Just kidding.”

“You need to make friends out there,” her sister said. “Liz agrees. We discussed you.”

“You don’t disgust me,” Joan said. Outside, a black squirrel was sniffing around under the tree.

“I mean it,” her sister said. They were both their mother now.

The black squirrel came to the sliding glass door and put his front paws up on it, peering in. After they said goodbye, Joan filled all the feeders for the last time, found a jar of peanuts in the cupboard, and emptied it around the base of the tree.

“I filled your feeders, Dad,” she called into the empty house, then got in her car and drove back to Ithaca.

Once she got back, she quit smoking, except for a couple of times a day when she went down to stand in the alcove with Alana, whose sister had died during the three weeks Joan had been gone. They shivered companionably, backs against the cold stone of the building, not saying much, just watching the smoke as it hurried away from them like everything else.

She started going to a yoga class where everyone was more flexible than her and to a meditation class run by a super-crabby monk in a messy living room.

“I have to move shit off the rug to put my cushion down,” she told Pat.

“Can’t anyone say they’re monks?” Pat asked.

“I think they’re real. They all live in that house and wear gowns,” Joan told her.