“Yeah, that was a problem for me even.” At Rutgers, I would have said “even for me.” The local lilt was not hard to slip into. Stoudt’s Keystone was a long dark store, its floorboards hollowed by wear, with gleaming nailheads where generations had shuffled past the cash register. It still sold little tubes of flypaper and plugs of chewing tobacco. I had trouble deciding, amid the abundance of packaged carbohydrates, which brand of pretzels to buy. I settled for a bag that claimed, NEW!: Lo Fat, Lo Sodium.

As he rang up my purchases, Roy went on, “She used to say to me, ‘My boy thinks I’m crazy, feeding all these cats, but it’s my only luxury. I don’t drive a Mercedes, and I don’t wear mink.’ ”

“I never said crazy. I may have said misguided.”

“She did trap some and take them down to the humane society,” he pointed out. “It was just nature kept getting ahead of her.” There was a slyness mixed in with his amiability; I felt how much of a local joke she and her cats had been. “There,” he said. “I’ve given you the discount for quantity I used to give to her.”

“You don’t have to do that.” I could have bitten my tongue. I could hear his response coming, like the pedantic distinction, made much of in the third grade, between “can” and “may.”

“I know I don’t have to, David, but I want to. She was a good customer,” Roy said. “We’ll miss your mother around these parts. She was of the old school.”

The cat-food section of Stoudt’s Keystone would certainly miss her. I said what I should have said in the first place. “Thanks a lot for the discount, Roy.”

Outside, under the moth-battered lights, bits of abandoned railroad gleamed in the parking lot, where it hadn’t paid to wrest the iron tracks from the blacktop. They crossed the little road, pointing on either side to tunnels of darkness. The woods had still not fully reclaimed the right-of-way; the rails were gone but the spalls and creosoted ties had been left and discouraged growth. Through that dark gap my grandfather had once sped to Alton, over stony creeks and iron bridges, sparks flying.