LATER THAT EVENING, after Carrie and Rose had helped out at the shelter and were back home, Carrie remembered the picture of her mother that she'd seen at the library. Rose had just come out of the bathroom wearing her old chenille robe—she always changed out of her clothes as soon as she walked in the door because that way they stayed new longer and didn't have to be replaced—and she still had on the low-heeled black pumps she wore every day. Carrie stared at her and tried to reconcile this present-day mother with the one from the past.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Rose asked.

“No reason,” Carrie said.

Chapter 3 - New York City 2008

THE CAB LURCHED to a halt. Carrie pulled herself out of her daydream and looked out the window. They'd arrived at her mother's apartment building. She paid the driver, got out of the car, and looked up at the town house where she had lived for more than twenty years—she and her mother had moved in right after Bobby's death. The apartment was on the fifth floor—it was a walk-up—and it was laid out as a railroad flat, the outside door opening onto a small entryway, which gave way to a small living room. You walked through the living room to get to a tiny kitchen and an equally tiny bathroom, and beyond that was the only bedroom in the apartment. Rose had assigned the bedroom to Carrie, announcing that she herself would sleep in the living room on a foldout sofa. She did it for all the years that she and Carrie were in the apartment together, and never once complained about the arrangement. When Carrie was a little kid, the sight of her mother opening the bed every night and stashing her clothes in the coat closet had made her feel guilty. But by the time she reached her self-centered adolescence she'd been glad her mother had a martyr complex. After Carrie left home she was sure—although she hadn't asked—that her mother never had moved into the bedroom. When Rose was sick she'd insisted that her hospital bed be crammed into the living room next to the sofa.

Carrie began climbing up the six steps of the front stoop. It was clean, she noticed. The building had been sold to the tenants as a co-op in the eighties, and since that time maintenance of the place had vastly improved. When Carrie was a kid the stoop had been crusted with the dirt of the city—and other more disgusting deposits left by sick junkies. Rose had come out every morning with a mop and a pail of water to wash away the worst of the crud.