THE APARTMENT ALREADY had the feel of a place where no one lived. Rose hadn't had much furniture: the sofa where she slept, the dresser where she kept her clothes—where Carrie's masterpiece had languished—an old-fashioned trunk that had served as a coffee table, and two chairs. All of it had been jammed up against the walls to make way for the gurney when the paramedics had come to take Rose to the hospital that last time. Carrie had an impulse to drag the sofa back to its original spot. She could still see the depressions its legs had made in the ancient carpet. Then she looked at the floor more closely. There was something white and shiny hidden in the pile of the rug. She picked it up. And then she had to swallow very hard. She turned to Zoe and held out the object.

“It's Mother's rosary,” she said. “It's the one her grandmother gave her when she made her First Communion. She always kept it in this little gold-plated case with a red velvet lining …” She had to do some more swallowing. “She started using it again when she got so sick.”

Zoe, who had been raised by former hippies, had never gotten the religion thing. “Oh,” she said politely.

“She must have dropped it when they took her to the hospital …” Carrie stopped herself because she was going to start crying again.

“Carrie,” Zoe started to say, but Carrie shook her head. She jammed the rosary in her pocket.

“Mother kept most of her clothes in the closet, and the dresser,” she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. “I'll take care of them. Would you check out the trunk?”

Zoe nodded and headed in silence for the trunk. Equally silent, Carrie opened the closet where Rose's blouses and skirts hung in a neat black-and-white row. Carrie realized with a start that it had been months since she'd seen her mother in her uniform—the vision of Rose at the end, in her hospital nightgown and her old chenille robe, flashed through Carrie's brain—and she had to fight an urge to run. She forced herself to reach into the closet and take a blouse from the hanger. It was easier, she found, once she was actually holding the thing in her hands. It was just a bunch of cloth; it didn't even smell like Rose. If it had, Carrie wasn't sure she could have taken that. She folded the blouse and started taking the rest of the clothes off the hangers.