“Ha, ha, Dad, very funny,” Leora muttered from the backseat. Her parents ignored her. Leora suddenly thought of their summer trip, where in many places they had hired a driver and a guide who would sit in the front, turn backward to face Leora’s family in the rear of the car or the van, and lecture to them about the passing buildings—or, in places that didn’t have passing buildings, then passing mud huts, passing trees, passing cliffs, passing baboons. For a moment, it seemed to Leora as if her mother were the guide and her father the driver in some strange foreign country, and she felt that confused curiosity that had often comforted her last summer in strange countries, wondering where, exactly, these people were taking her.

“Well, whatever. So he’s an old guy, and he reads the Old People page. And he travels a lot. Maybe he just wants to meet someone else in town who likes to travel,” her father offered.

“I think there’s a little more to it than that,” Leora’s mother answered. “I mean, think about this guy. His granddaughter dies, his son picks up and moves to California with the daughter-in-law and grandsons”—true, Leora thought; it was frightening how quickly Naomi’s parents and little brothers had moved away after she died—“and now what’s he supposed to do with himself? I think he’s really just looking for someone to talk to,” she said, then paused, as if she had said more than she intended to.

Leora tried to catch her mother’s expression in the rearview mirror, but it was too dark to see anything. She sat back and looked out of the car, peering into the uncovered windows of passing houses to catch glimpses of interiors, decorations, furniture. Houses had interested her ever since she was a child, when she had kept a dollhouse. Not some sort of horrible pink plastic contraption, but a real dollhouse—an exact miniature replica of a three-story town house, complete with painted clapboard siding, a shingled roof, and furnishings of 1890s-style grandeur. But Leora could hardly think of it as her dollhouse, because really it was both hers and Naomi’s. When Leora acquired the empty shell of a dollhouse as a birthday gift long ago, Naomi had been enchanted by it. They built up the house together, laying down the grout for the hexagonal floor tiles in the kitchen, putting up the outrageous paisley wallpaper that resembled the pattern Naomi’s mother wouldn’t let her get for her real room, setting the nonfunctional grandfather clocks past their own bedtimes, arguing for weeks over the names of each of the little dolls. One day Naomi’s parents saw her interest and asked if she too would like a dollhouse. But Naomi said no. She already had a dollhouse: Leora’s. The dollhouse remained in Leora’s bedroom long after they had grown too old for it, but after Naomi’s death Leora couldn’t bear looking at it anymore. She hauled it down underground to the basement and buried it under boxes of her brother’s old toys.