“Oh, don’t I know.” She spoke with an increasing gentleness, as if to a disabled man. Though her fingernails were short and unpainted, her face was made up with that faintly excessive care of minor officialdom—of small-town postmistresses and small-city lawyers’ secretaries. I suddenly knew that this composed executive woman was the stocky girl of years ago, the teen-age executioner. She had assumed that I recognized her at once, as she had me. A young male minion in dungarees and ponytail opened the door to the fragrant beyond, said a few unintelligible words, received a confirming nod, and closed the door.

Lamely I continued, “I think she got overwhelmed and couldn’t see beyond dishing out the cat food every day. There’s an absolute mountain of tin cans in the woods!”

She thoughtfully scratched below her fair little ear and I caught a whiff of her perfume. “You know, David,” she told me, “a population like that is self-limiting. With the inbreeding and the crowding, cats like that are very susceptible to disease. There’s even a kind of cat AIDS that’s around now.”

“Great; but there’s still a lot of live ones yowling around the back door. My family’s come down for the funeral and they’re scared to go outside. I can’t just walk away, the cats’ll migrate to all the neighbors! One of the neighbors promised to shoot some, but that’s a nuisance for him and I doubt now he’ll do it.”

She changed the angle of her listening head, and her professional patience seemed momentarily strained. “What I started to suggest was, if you still have the traps in the barn, you could set them and bring in one or two every day. The ones you don’t eventually catch will be so feral they’ll keep to the woods.”

“But I can’t stay!”

She blinked at my fervor. Somehow she had seen me as replacing my mother on the property, its eighty-two acres of milkweed and horseflies and red mud, as if my whole life had been killing time until I could take possession.

“I live in New Jersey!” I insisted. “I have to get back to my house, my job.”

“You’re putting your mom’s place up for sale?”

“I have to! I can’t take care of it! Already the buildings are falling down.”

She pursed her lips slightly as she took this in. “It’s considered a nice place around here, but if you can’t, well, you can’t. Your mother wouldn’t want you to do the impossible.” Yet a loyalty to my mother drove her, after a pause, to go on, “Though I know she always spoke of you as the one who’d take charge. She’d say to me, ‘Amy, I know the neighbors think I’m crazy, but I’m just holding the fort for Davey.’ How many days can you stay, then?”