The memory pulled at her, and she held the razor a long time before placing it in a box and moving on to the bedroom. There, she went through her mother’s dresser, breathing in the familiar cedar and fingering the dozens of stockings in varying shades of black and tan, the bra and panty sets fastened together with small cedar clips, the carefully rolled slips and camisoles. At her mother’s nightstand, she found a tall stack of magazines and books—biographies of Pamela Harriman and Babe Paley and Slim Keith. She didn’t realized her mother had been interested in these women, and she sat down and slowly thumbed the pages before boxing them atop old dog-eared issues of Town and Country and Vogue and Vanity Fair. She emptied the narrow nightstand drawer, bagged the match-books from hotels in Barcelona and Milan and Hong Kong, and neatened the pieces of scrap paper, each a To Do list: call Miriam re museum meeting, pick up sunglasses, return J’s shoes to KC, check costs for benefit hall, Carmel week of 7th? She collected her mother’s herbal supplements, the echinacea and melatonin and grape seed extract; her silk eye pillow; her boar’s bristle hairbrush; her cucumber hand cream; her silver hairpins and brass cuticle scissors. But no secret diaries, no clandestine letters. Only traces of her mother, the remnants of a life more complex than just the disgust that Josie now realized was only one aspect of her mother, not the vastly complicated layers of a whole person, an entire universe. All of this had been eclipsed by rancor and guilt and pain, grown large and all-engulfing. Josie had never been able to see this, to see this Carol Maura Morgan, née Johnson, a little girl from Gam-bier, Ohio, who had grown up to become her mother, but neither had her mother been able to see her, to understand the complexity of a little girl who didn’t even know herself.

Josie held a gardening book in her hand and flipped through the pages; page fifty-seven was earmarked and underlined. She read, “Though they have an ancient history, the popularity of roses as we know them today started with the Empress Josephine and her garden at Malmaison almost two hundred years ago. While Napoleon was off harrying the neighbors, Josephine was collecting and cultivating roses.” Next to this, her mother had penciled in a few exclamation points. Josie smiled. Her mother had bought a rosebush for each of Josie’s birthdays, pinks and whites and yellows clustering around the back of the house. Josie closed the book and went to the window. She could see the flow-erless rose bushes, and she counted—one, two, three, four; all the way to twenty-eight. Even after Josie had left, her mother had continued planting, each birthday a celebration.