I saw the twisting gears of epic grinding into motion behind his eyes. Destiny is in the telling, not the doing, he liked to say. Now he saw his chance. Mom was raw-nerved from loss and open to wonder. She might have a vision that could change her forever. He wanted to be part of it.

In the meantime, she came east to help me pack Grandma Lucy’s possessions. “Couldn’t trust you to do it by yourself,” she said. “You’d save everything.” There was honesty in her voice, a rueful knowing, that I appreciated. It felt good to be seen through.

She arrived like the last time, icy-fingered and determined. It was during a cold snap in the middle of May. We weren’t done with winter yet. She had a plan that involved three boxes of garbage bags. “We’re going to give away a lot of stuff,” she said. “And we’re going to throw away a lot of stuff.”

In Grandma Lucy’s closet, we saw a row of beer bottles filled with dirt. Each one was labeled—Maryland, Zurich, Rio de Janeiro. The columns of soil were colored dark rum, brown sugar, reddish clay. The Osaka dirt was jaundiced yellow, like a sick man’s urine.

My mother examined one jar in her palm. “I can’t believe he sent these,” she said. After a moment: “Let’s throw them off the balcony.”

My mother was not always a fun person, but this—the throwing of a bastard’s trophies from the balcony of his deceased and deserted wife—this was definitely fun. We watched the glass jars shatter on the asphalt below. We watched bachelor bankers emerge from their apartments and crane their faces up to the sky.

Later that night, I couldn’t stop myself from sneaking outside and collecting some of the dirt that remained. I had to crawl under a black Mercedes to find it crushed into the pebbled driveway. I’d been a part of my mother’s oldest anger, and now I was part of an even older remembering. I could be every face of this grieving all at once. I funneled the dirt into a single beer bottle and made a new label: Osaka? It said. Maryland + Zurich + Rio de Janeiro?

I waited until the last night of my mother’s visit before I brought up the question of Matilda. I asked if the letter had been sent. My mother said it hadn’t. They were still figuring out the details of the will. What did this mean? I asked. My mother assured me it was complicated. Legal stuff, she said. Legal stuff aside, I said, I really thought Matilda deserved—I had to pause. What did she deserve? I could not say exactly; something other than this.

My mother closed her eyes and rubbed her temples with her fingers. “Let’s take a walk,” she said. “I need to get out of this condo.”