She told me that Matilda had dumped cigarette butts everywhere, overturned all the plants and ground their loose soil into the knitted weave. “Just because she could,” she said, shaking her head. Then she really got going. She told me how Matilda had run away with her English teacher during high school. “That was the start,” she said. “The beginning of the end.” My mom had already left for college. She felt guilty for being gone. “Not guilty for Matilda’s sake,” she said. “Guilty for Mother’s.”

She came home during the middle of the term to keep Lucy company, but Lucy said she wanted to be alone—moved onto the daybed and ate toast for breakfast, toast for lunch, toast for dinner. My mom spent her days brushing crumbs off the blankets. Sometimes Lucy didn’t bathe for days. She smelled like old socks. This was a woman who had never worn a dirty sock in her life. Her fingernails got ragged from chewing. She’d always been so proud about presenting herself well, curling her hair and putting out a little bowl of salted nuts for guests. For weeks she didn’t care about anything.

Matilda lived in Berkeley that year, tripping on acid and maybe protesting the war. My mom shrugged. “I don’t know what she was doing. She didn’t call us once. Then she showed up one day, broken by love.”

“Broken by love?”

“Her words, not mine.”

My mother knew those had been hard months at home, the ones after the return, even though she hadn’t seen them herself. Matilda worked part-time catering gigs until she stopped working altogether. She started sleeping twelve hours a day, half her life. She wouldn’t eat. Bottles of liquor went missing from the cabinets—Cristal, Pernod, Cointreau—and Lucy found her lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, drunk and sweaty, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake, mumbling in a way that made it hard to tell if she’d been dreaming or crying.

Mom mentioned Grandma Lucy’s will without a break in her voice. There was a clause that left a little bit of money to Matilda, enough to make it hard for her to fight the fact that there wasn’t more. This clause had been my mother’s idea.

I asked if Matilda was the kind of woman who’d start a fight about money. Was she that kind of person?

My mom pursed her lips. “We don’t know what kind of person she is.”

Our estate lawyer had found her current address, and he was going to send her a letter. The information placed her in a little town called Lovelock, Nevada. Bluff Estates, the address said, a neighborhood with a name.

“What kind of letter is he sending?” I asked my mother.

“Cordial,” my mom said. “But not overly personal.”

It would be a letter telling Matilda about her mother’s death.