When, two days later, at dusk, my family arrived in a station wagon and I in a lumbering, half-orange rental truck, the number of cats gathered on the back porch seemed no smaller than it had been, though visibly more frantic. They yowled upward, showing their curved fangs, their arched rough tongues, the rosy membranes of their throats. A few kittens were staggering with weakness, yet joined in the common mew of protest, of need. I kicked my way through the crowd but, once safely inside, gave my son, Max, a twenty and asked him to drive to the grocery store in Fern Hollow and buy enough cat food to see us through. He looked alarmed and said he always got lost in Fern Hollow. My wife overheard us and came over protectively. “Max hasn’t been to that store more than three times in his life,” Evelyn said. “When we came to visit we always went to the supermarket in Morgantown. Why can’t he go there?”

“It’s two miles further and closes at five-thirty. Also my mother thought the little stores should be patronized to keep them in business.”

My wife sighed and rolled her eyes upward. “Your mother is dead, darling. We can buy at the big store if we want to.”

“It’s closed, I just told you. We can’t stay here with these cats yowling all night.”

“Maybe they’ll stop yowling once we turn off the lights,” she said. “Isn’t it time they faced reality?”

“I’ll go, dammit,” I said, thinking they would all protest at having me, the leader of our mourning party, leave them alone in the old stone house, with its rustling rodents and airless, ill-lit rooms. We were all still in the kitchen, where my mother’s antique hand-wound mantel clock had stopped ticking and chiming. Its melancholy, gulping gong had kept watch over my insomnia on many a boyhood night.

Hiram, my daughter’s husband, said, “I’ll go for you, Dave, if you’ll tell me the way.”

He was being kind, but he is also unctuous and prematurely balding, with a Princetonian complacency that makes me want to kick him. I let my irritation with the others taint my reply: “It would take too long to explain. There are about six forks and none of them are marked.”

“He’s the country boy,” my wife told Hiram with a collusive smile. “Let’s let him go.” To me she said, “You love those windy old roads. You can commune with your mother.” My mother had not been pleased by my marriage at an early age, and her displeasure had leaked into the open, as things in families will. “And you can pick up milk and orange juice for our breakfast and maybe bread for toast. I guess we can get by on your mother’s stale cereal.”

Nancy, my daughter, said, “I’ll come with you, Dad.”