Then, all we knew in that early morning light was that the hall lamp was still on and she had not come home.

She had told me about the Cocoanut Grove one night when I sat on the bed and watched her getting ready for sleep. She put big white circles of cold cream around her eyes and then tissued off the mascara, the eyeliner, saving a corner to dab all around her lips. She tied her hair in a turban, something she had seen Rita Hayworth do in a movie.

“Stars are painted on the ceiling,” she said. “It can be a blizzard outdoors or pouring rain, but inside, it’s always warm, and the palms are swaying and the stars are shining and the music is playing. On a beautiful night, they can even open the ceiling to the real night sky.” There were zebra-skin couches, she told me, and palm trees that looked so real you needed to go up and touch them, and famous people were always surrounding the bandstand and the long shiny bar.

My father had taken her there for her birthday, and it was all she’d talked about for weeks after. There were leather walls and a rolling stage: She had seen Jimmy Durante. She had seen Rudy Vallee. She turned then and looked at me, her whole body animated with the descriptions of what people were wearing. One woman wore a floor-length sable with matching hat, and another was in leopard. She said that was the kind of place where people got discovered; she had even heard about a young woman who got noticed just because she looked like Claudette Colbert.

Just a couple of weeks before I lost my mother, she called me into the kitchen to explain menstruation and to tell me where she kept her pads. I was horrified at the time, and even cried and asked why she was doing that to me. I thought she had called me in there to taste what she was cooking or to tell me something funny. Why, on that beautiful afternoon, was she telling me those things? And now, I feel so lucky that she was the one to tell me. and that I remember it all so clearly.

“Used to be mothers would slap their daughters when this happened.” My mother laughed. “But I would never do that to you,” she said, and waited for me to look up. “It’s a good thing. It is. It’s how I have you.”

Sometimes, I close my eyes and work hard to hear that again: “It’s how I have you.” The limbs on the tree outside the kitchen window were bare, the sky gray and promising snow. She had just cut up a chicken and the pimply-skinned parts lay sprawled there on the counter, her damp hands warm on my back. Sometimes, I stay there as long as I can.