“You don’t know what I’ve seen,” my mother said. She unzipped a woven coin purse, probably knitted by a tribe, and turned it over the woman’s head. Coins skidded off her scalp, her shoulders, and clattered against the pavement. The woman was silent.

My mom grabbed my arm. “Walk away,” she said. “Now we walk away.”

“Where do you think that woman was from?” I said. “What do you think happened to her?”

“It doesn’t matter what happened. You can always make a choice to be a decent person.”

“Maybe she is a decent person,” I said. “That’s what I was getting at.”

My mother glared at me. She said, “I knew what you were getting at.”

I pulled away from her grip and turned around. I saw the woman on her knees gathering coins, reaching under the Dumpster to check if any had rolled beneath.

I looked up Matilda’s address on an Internet map. At first I thought Bluff Estates was a subdivision, but it was a trailer park. I brought up the address and kept clicking closer, scrolling back from the yellow skirt of desert that surrounded her grid of avenues. The trailers were arranged around cul-de-sacs, their neat rectangular roofs like the building blocks of children, leftovers placed in a splayed starburst of residence around the edge of town. Their edges fuzzed.

Did her trailer have a cactus garden? A swamp cooler? Broken windows? A family of mice under the crawl space? I felt my stomach seize up with every click, like a Peeping Tom, as if she’d suddenly appear at one of her windows, shooing me—a stranger—away from her sun-scorched home. Eventually, I got so close that the satellite image gave out, gave up, and offered a row of small blue question marks instead.

My parents got involved in something called Grief Work. My father made it sound like a social justice movement. But really, my mom said, it just meant setting aside time for what they were feeling. “Your father never has much trouble doing that,” she said. “As we all know.” I was surprised she’d agreed to join him. They were making collages every Tuesday in the pool house of a rabbi named Jeri.

“I really like her,” said my dad. “But I’m not at all attracted to her.” He said this like it was a marvelous good deed, something Jeri might have called a mitzvah.

“It’s interesting to see your father impress a woman he doesn’t want to sleep with,” my mom confessed. “It’s quite amusing.”

My father brought back skeptical reports. “Your mother seems to enjoy herself,” he said. “But she hasn’t made a single collage.”