The next night she came downstairs when called and was surprised to find that she was to eat alone. Caroline had already left.

“Where’s my grandmother?” she asked Betty, Rosalinda’s caretaker.

“She likes her supper in the greenhouse,” Betty answered. For the next twelve days before school started, this was how it went: Rose ate alone, her grandmother treated her with general indifference, and no one mentioned her mom. If Rosalinda was bothered by the death of her daughter, she didn’t show it. The one time any mention of Rose’s mother did come up was when Rose came out of the bathroom one evening and ran straight into Betty and Rosalinda.

“Betty,” Rosalinda said, turning to the caretaker, “am I upstairs or downstairs, and who’s this young girl? She looks so much like my daughter.”

“She’s Rosemary’s daughter—your granddaughter, Rose,” Betty answered, giving Rose an apologetic look. She pointed to a picture in a frame on a table. It was the one taken on a beach in Florida. Rose was just five or six at the most. In the photograph, Rose was wearing a bathing suit with mermaids on it and leaning up against her mother. Her mom wore a bathing suit that she called a mom-kini, as it was fairly modest. “She’s almost all grown up now, Mrs. A, but just a little girl in that picture.”

“Oh yes,” Rosalinda answered. Rose looked up hopefully, but only for a moment. “I remember I had a daughter or a granddaughter once. I think I misplaced them.” She giggled as if she were describing a missing remote from a television—oh dear, where did that remote go?

“Misplaced” was the perfect word, Rose thought. It seemed to Rose as if her father must have been misplaced as well. She had learned quickly as a child not to ask about him. Whenever she did, a strange mist that was not quite tears came to her mother’s eyes, and a sadness seemed to cling to the air. Her mother appeared to nearly dissolve into some distant place beyond anything Rose knew.

Rose felt very “misplaced” now as she returned to her grandmother’s after her second day of school. Rosalinda lived in a stucco house that presided over the corner of two tree-lined streets. It was so different from the neighborhood where Rose had lived with her mom. They had lived on Sylvan Lane in a suburb of Philadelphia. Her mom joked that Sylvan as a name was wishful thinking, since it did not have a tree on it. All the houses had been built in the past ten years and were for the most part boxy, brick, one-story ranch-style houses with garages that took up a third of the lot. The lawns were severe squares of green grass with fiercely trimmed shrubs that stood at attention. But Rose liked it. It was home.