I looked at her wearily. “I’ve had enough family for today, Petra. I’ll call you when I feel up to spending an evening with you.”

“I cleaned up your kitchen, I apologized for taking out your mom’s dress, I think you could show some kind of response.”

“Do you?” I was kneeling by the trunk to lay my mother’s gown inside but turned to look at Petra. “My response is that you are a wonderful young woman with a lot of energy and goodwill, but you’ve lived your whole life in a privileged bubble. Come back and see me when you’ve thought through how you’d feel if your mother was dead and your only memento of her was treated like … like a towel for mopping up coffee.”

She stared down at me, her face a mix of surprise and anger. Her cellphone rang. She pulled it from her shirt pocket, looked at it, looked at me, and bolted from my living room. I heard her cluntering down the stairs in her heavy shoes, the sound drowning her voice as she answered her phone.

I sat for a time on the floor, my mother’s dress still in my lap. I smoothed the tissue, my throat tight, remembering how Gabriella looked onstage at the old Athenaeum Theatre, her only major recital before she became too weak to perform. She had been luminous in this gown, and her voice had filled the theater.

I looked at my watch. I had about an hour to get downtown. Instead of replacing the gown and my dad’s dress uniform jacket, I started rummaging through the trunk myself. My mother’s music, a box of my old school report cards, my birth certificate, my parents’ marriage license, my mother’s naturalization papers.

Another thin box held reel-to-reel tapes. My mother had recorded herself when she began training seriously again. She went to a professional coach but could afford only a single session a month. Mr. Fortieri, the instrument maker, had a Pioneer recorder, a beautiful piece of machinery, that he let my mother borrow. It weighed a ton, and I remembered helping her carry it home on the train.

Mr. Fortieri lived on the Northwest Side, and it was a day trip for us to go there and back: the Illinois Central downtown, the Ravens-wood El to Foster, and then the long bus ride across Foster to Harlem, where Mr. Fortieri lived in an old Italian enclave. While he and my mother discussed music in Italian, I was given a quarter to buy gelato or a cookie at Umbria’s on the corner.