As for my mother, it is strange, once a life is over, how little there is to say about it. I could feel her in the room, polite but taking sardonic note, for future reference, of our collective failure to quite rise to the occasion. People had always struck her as inept, compared with animals. It galled me on her behalf that the minister, in the very strenuousness of his oratorical attempt to evoke what had made dear departed Irma so special, had forgotten to signal the organist to play “A Mighty Fortress.” How many Lutherans get buried without, one last time, “A Mighty Fortress”? I felt it as a scandal, albeit minor. Ignominiously my living kin gathered up all the uneaten food and went back to the forlorn house, with its rotting sills and teeming population of invited pests. The cats, though it was not their dinnertime, were swarming hopefully on the back porch; some of the barn cats had ventured up to the house and made gray streaks in retreat across the lawn as our car pulled in.

The house was stuffy and still inside. Evelyn went around tugging open the sticky windows, in contravention of my mother’s theory that closed windows sealed the coolness in. She and Nancy and her family were dying to get back home; we had left it to a neighbor to feed fat old Josie, along with our own sleek cocker spaniel. Max and I were to stay a day or two—whatever it took—and load up the truck and get the house clean enough for the realtor to show. Everywhere we looked, from the refrigerator full of cold cuts and potato salad to an attic holding a half-century’s worth of broken furniture, crockery wrapped in ancient brown newspapers, albums of ancestors whose names nobody now knew, and Life magazines of special historical interest, we were overwhelmed. Nancy put Peter down upstairs for his nap. Evelyn had a headache, Max and Hiram turned on the television set, and I escaped by getting in the car and driving to Emmetstown. My mother’s note had offered a clue.