“This story’s not yours,” she told her mother, in her smart-ass seven-year-old voice.

Her mother looked up in surprise, which gave Leora a secret thrill. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, I mean that’s not you,” Leora answered. “It’s by someone named Ellen, like you, but the last name is different. So it’s by some other girl who’s also called Ellen, but not you.” Leora smiled, triumphant.

Her mother looked at Leora and leaned back a bit, opening her eyes wide, as she always did when she was telling Leora something she needed to know. “Ah,” she said, “well, it may not seem like that’s me, but it is. That used to be my last name, but I changed my last name when Daddy and I got married. Most women change their names when they get married.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

If Leora had been a different kind of child, a fairness-minded child, she might have asked all of the obvious questions. Like why didn’t Daddy also change his name, or why didn’t Daddy change his name instead of her changing hers, or why did anyone’s name need to be changed at all? But that didn’t interest Leora. She wasn’t a fairness-minded child, and she rarely cared when other people used her toys. Instead she was a conservation-minded child, the kind of child who never allows her parents to throw anything of hers away, no matter how useless or ugly. Things to Leora had lives of their own, little lives, created for a purpose, and she couldn’t bear to throw out anything. Old toys would gather dust in her bedroom, untouched for years.

And so she asked a question that her mother surely didn’t expect: “So if you aren’t using that name anymore, then who is?”

Her mother paused a moment and thought. “No one, I guess,” she said, avoiding Leora’s stare. “My sisters had that name, but now they’re married. And Grandma and Grandpa had that name their whole lives. But you’re right, no one uses it now. If Grandpa had had brothers, they would have used it, but he only had sisters, no brothers.”

“So what happened to that name?”

“Well, that sounds like a good idea for a story, doesn’t it?” her mother said. That was what she always said when Leora asked her questions that she couldn’t or didn’t want to answer. Then, with a look of extreme distraction: “Come on, let’s finish putting these things away.”

Leora never wrote the story, of course. But while she lay in bed at night trying to fall asleep, she thought about it, for days. What had happened to all those names? Perhaps there was a place somewhere where all the unused names were gathered, a giant dried-out desert valley where the names, shriveled and lifeless, lay at the bottom.

As the years passed, Leora met more married women, more immigrants, went to more museums. Slowly there gathered in the Valley of Discarded Names hundreds, even thousands more: Rogarshevsky thrown away in favor of Rosenthal, Rosenthal thrown away in favor of Ross. Ross tossed out for Steinberg (a marriage), Steinberg cast away for O’Brien (a second marriage). Liu discarded for Lou. Anand Gupta for Andrew Gordon. Natalya for Natalie. Wilhelm for Bill. Jesus for Jeff. All those names discarded, only written, not spoken, like the name in the corner of her mother’s composition, sitting at the bottom of the valley like untouched bones. “Come on, Yehudah,” Rivka had said. Leora knew that Yehudah was a dried-out name, one that Jason had found at the bottom of that valley and that he wanted to speak back to life. But she couldn’t help seeing all the greeting cards he had written her, stacked up in the bottom of her closet, and the essays he had written for medical schools about care for the elderly, filed away in some office somewhere, fluttering down into that valley with his signatures.