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.

Everyone in the meditation group, including her, seemed a bit off in some way, but she liked closing her eyes and imagining the path through her park for forty-five minutes every Wednesday night. This foot, that foot, this foot, that foot. She liked the Rumi quotes in dime-store frames hanging precariously on nails here and there. LOVE IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND EVERYTHING. This, that, this, that, until eventually there was nothing but the gray sky of her mind and the faint odor of the carpet.

Someone who worked in her building showed up at yoga class, a pale woman with bobbed hair like a flapper’s and dark lipstick. It was her clothes that Joan had noticed more than the woman as she went up the stairs past the journal office in the mornings: billowy slacks and tailored dresses and narrow skirts with crisp blouses and once, in the fall, a soft belted jacket with felt flowers appliquéd on it, which sounds terrible but wasn’t. The last thing Joan would see after the outfit went past were the shoes—flats, ankle boots, or, sometimes, a pair of slender wingtips that looked like men’s shoes except for the heels. The woman was quietly hopeless in yoga class; when they bent over to touch the floor, she was still basically upright.