So, despite her respectable clothes, this is a beggar. “I’m sorry,” Janice says again, in a harder tone, “but I don’t believe I can help.” Her hand moves to swing the heavy door shut. Nelson is off at the treatment center and Ronnie playing golf at the club with some other retirees so she is alone in the house. Not that the girl looks violent. But she is bigger than Janice, bigger-boned, with a dangerous fullness to her being there, as if defiantly arrived at the end of a long wavering, like a client taking the plunge of offering thirty thousand more than she can afford. Her eyes are set in squarish sockets showing the puffy look of sleeplessness and her hair, cut raggedly short the way they do it now, is mixed of light-brown and darker-brown and gray strands.

“I don’t think you can either,” she agrees. “But my mother thought you might.”

“Did I ever know your mother?”

“No, you never met. You knew each other existed, though.”

Janice does wish Nelson were here. He could tell at a glance if this person were over the edge, and give it one of those names he had—bipolar, schizophrenic, paranoid, psychotic. Psychotic, you see and hear things, and can murder without meaning it, and then in court seem so innocent. The varnished grain of the door under her hand calls out as a potential shield and a slammed end to this encounter, but the something pleasant and kind and calm about the girl, who is these as well as troubled and trembling, holds the door open. The dry warm air of this early-fall day in southeastern Pennsylvania—children tucked back into school, the mid-morning streets quiet, the vegetables in the backyard gardens harvested or gone to seed—lies on Janice’s face as a breath from the past, her visitor having come from this same terrain.

“I nursed her at the end, she didn’t like hospitals, they made her feel penned up,” the light, considerate, shaky voice goes on.

“This is your mother,” Janice says, in spite of herself entering in.

“Yes, and of course being a nurse I could do that, administer the meds and see that she was kept turned in the bed and all that. Only it was strange, doing it for your mother. Her body had all these meanings for me. She didn’t like being touched, as long as she had strength. Though she could come on free and easy with some people, she was really a freak about her privacy, even with me. She didn’t like telling me anything, except then when she knew she was dying.”

The girl as her nervousness eased has skipped a stage of her story without being aware of it. “What did you say this had to do with me?” Janice asks.

“Oh. I guess—I guess you were married to my father.”