She called me from his phone, the one in the study with the automatic dial. She introduced herself, said she was in my brother’s study—though she called it a den—sitting at his desk. She told me she had just then pushed the button labeled “brotherkins.”

I was surprised that Nicholas had me on his automatic dial. As I learned today, most of the buttons on this telephone are marked with names of restaurants.

The woman lives several blocks west of here, in a fifth-floor walkup on Horatio Street. She took me, when I arrived, into a small, orderly kitchen, where she was cooking a hot dog for a four-year-old boy. Some lentils were soaking on a counter in a pot. I supposed they were soaking for soup. She was a hefty, unfashionable woman—an unlikely friend, I thought, for Nicholas to have.

The woman turned the hot dog, said she would be with me in a minute. Then, quietly, in other words than these, she asked me not to refer to my brother by name in front of her little boy.

She chose her words to talk around what the boy could understand, but I put it together that my brother had been, of all things, the little boy’s godfather, that the little boy had adored him and had taken it hard when told of his death.

The woman told the little boy to wash his hands for lunch. When he was out of the room she said she didn’t know why she had told him when she did, that she could have waited, but it had seemed to her to be a time when the best thing to do with the truth is get it over with, get it behind you the first chance that you get, because it is not a thing that will turn out better later.

The little boy came back, showed his hands to me. He seemed all right. It was the woman who didn’t.

I tried to imagine my brother and this woman as friends. I tried to imagine Nicholas being friends with a woman who calls a study a den. I could imagine neither thing, nor could I imagine my brother as any child’s godfather. When I could imagine nothing else, though I do not cook and am in no way partial to lentil soup, it came to me all at once to ask the woman for her recipe.

The woman gave me a look from the stove. She said nothing. I watched her fork the hot dog from the pan, put it on a plate, and cut it into bite-sized pieces. She put mustard on the pieces and set the plate down in front of the boy.

The woman apologized that she had nothing to offer me except some vermouth. At the same time, the little boy said that he did not want mustard, he wanted ketchup. The woman took his plate to the sink, wiped off the mustard with a paper towel, and pounded ketchup from a bottle onto the pieces, for the boy.