Abe set the box on a crate by the door. Winnie spoke to us from the table. She told us how much Tilly had cared about the baby. Too much, she said. There was one time Tilly had barged into the bedroom and knelt to push her ear against the swell of Winnie’s belly. That was one bad night. There were other ones.

Abe said, “Why did she—” Then he stopped. We looked at him. He continued quietly, “Why do you think it happened?”

“We had a real hard night beforehand. She took the baby into her room, and she wouldn’t … she wouldn’t let me in. I kept pounding, and pounding and then she came out and started screaming her filth—I wasn’t the right kind of mother, any kind of mother, and she grabbed my shoulders and I saw my baby stretched out on the bed behind her, screaming and screaming. You could hear it through the whole house. Her little heart was beating so fast when I got my hands on her. Your mother was just a mother, I guess, like an animal. She wouldn’t let my baby go.”

“It doesn’t sound like her,” said Abe. “Not any part of it.”

I wasn’t sure about that.

“She seemed like a very loving person.” Winnie paused. “She seemed—”

“She was a loving person,” I said.

Abe touched my arm. He wanted me to let her talk.

“I don’t know what happened in your family,” she said. “But there wasn’t a day she wasn’t thinking about you. My son’s in San Francisco, she said it so many times I thought it was the lyric to a song.” She turned to me. “She said nobody ever loved a daughter quite like she loved you.”

It was true. I had not been loved, by her, quite like any daughter could have been.

Winnie wasn’t the one who found her in the bathroom. Someone else did. “I guess she didn’t leave a note or anything,” Winnie said. “I guess that was just it.”

I went over to the sink and started washing dishes. Here I was, cleaning, saying, Let me do this one thing in the middle of your terrible life, now that her life was done, a woman who might have left these shreds of tomato and hardened noodles crusted on a glass casserole dish, maybe the last meal she ever ate. Whatever I was giving, I wasn’t giving it to anyone.

The sky was darker now, and I could see my own reflection in the window. The steam brought smells from the plates below, meat and sauce. This dense heat was hers, the smell of everything humid, everything gone to rot, sweating and swearing up at you.

Winnie walked upstairs with her baby. We could hear her voice singing, getting softer as she went.