“Isn’t it Peter’s suppertime?” Evelyn asked.

Peter was my grandson, two years old.

Hiram said, “I’ll put him in his jammies, Nance. You keep your dad company.”

“I want Peter to come,” she said. “I want him to see what an old-fashioned country store looks like.”

“It’s not that old-fashioned,” I said, defensively. They treated this working rural area as if it were a theme park. So I had turned on my only ally, my daughter. The cats’ crying was getting on my nerves. They were scraping and scratching against the screen door in their hunger.

“Car ride, yukk,” Peter said.

“Nobody come,” I decreed. “Cat food, orange juice, milk, doughnuts.”

“We don’t believe in doughnuts,” Hiram quickly said.

“O.K., no doughnuts,” I snapped.

“Get them only for yourself,” Evelyn told me, as if they might bring me illicit but delicious mother-comfort.

“Pretzels,” I proposed instead. “Anybody here who doesn’t believe in pretzels?”

It was a relief, as it always had been, to get out of the house and into the car and onto the rolling freedom of the leafy roads. Newish ranch houses, built in homely mixtures of wood and sandstone and vinyl siding, added their window lights and mowed yards to the scattered habitations that I remembered. My mother used to recall being allowed to ride in the gig with her father when he caught the train into Alton at the Fern Hollow station, and then, though she was only nine or ten, bringing the gig back to the farm by herself. Of course, the horse knew the way. In the darkness, thinking of a little beribboned girl bringing a horse and carriage through three miles of forest and tobacco fields, I missed one of the forks. Rather than turn around, I took what I remembered as a shortcut, but it led to a dead end at a forsaken gravel pit. I began to sweat, with the claustrophobia of my youth. It took forever, it seemed, to backtrack and find Fern Hollow. But Stoudt’s Keystone was still open, with its two gas pumps and side porch loaded with horse feed and sacks of fertilizer. Behind the counter, Roy Stoudt nodded in recognition, though I was disguised in a city shirt and blazer. When I told him what I wanted, he said, “I was wondering how those cats would manage.”

“Not so well. The neighbors promised to shoot some but they haven’t yet. I need just a case, to tide us over.” I pictured the kittens staggering with hunger and said, “Maybe two cases.”

“Your mother favored the beef mix and the seafood medley.”

“Fine. Anything.”

“She used to say they turned up their noses at pork; they were Old Testament cats. She was a funny one. You never quite knew when she was pulling your leg.”