Next morning, as I fed them, I told the cats, “Eat up, sweeties—your days are numbered.” I had half expected to have rifle shots ring out in my sleep, but the day broke still and dewy. The cement porch was decorated with wet paw prints. A continent of gray cloud was moving up into the sky beyond the telephone poles and the surviving orchard trees. When we moved here, there had been a pump on this porch, and all our water had been drawn up into pots and buckets. At first, it had been a challenge to my strength to work the metal handle through the first dry shoves, before the water began to flow. By the time we got plumbing and an electric pump, the action had become as automatic as turning on a faucet. Like turning the can-opener handle, pumping had its own catchy rhythm, its mechanical song.

My mother had set out a few potted geraniums at the corners of the porch and hung wind chimes from an overhead hook. She had seen them in one of the innumerable catalogues she received, and had ordered them; the idea amused her. It was a fortunate gift in life, it occurred to me, to be easily amused. These chimes, and inquisitive scratchings from inside the walls, had not kept me from sleeping, though I had feared they would. The day’s appointments clarified my future: I would get back to New Brunswick by nighttime and in two more days would bring my family here for my mother’s funeral, with a U-Haul truck to take away what of her furniture we decided not to give to the auction house. Heading up the road with Josie in the car, I swung into the Schwabs’ and asked Adam if he would keep an eye on the house. He and his wife live in a little new ranch house close to the road; his parents still live in the sandstone house, a twin to my mother’s, down by the barn that he has turned into a fancy fruit outlet. He smiled as he said he would, implying that it wouldn’t be necessary. This part of the world might be changing, but people didn’t yet go around robbing the houses of the recently dead.

“I really appreciate,” I said, “your helping Dwight shoot the poor cats.”

He looked puzzled. “I haven’t heard any about that, but it’s I guess not so big a problem,” he said, as if he were reassuring my mother that he could get her tractor started.