We fought while we walked. In the cold of early evening, in the middle of the state of Connecticut, we fought. We fought about faraway Matilda in her desert—whatever kind of woman she was, not yet grieving for what she didn’t yet know. I told my mother it would be cruel to send the letter, almost unthinkable. I said: I wouldn’t want a stranger to tell me you died. She said Matilda had left, did I understand that? When somebody kept leaving, over and over again, there was nothing to do but let her go. I’d been drinking wine and my face was warm with it; my mom had been drinking fizzy water and her face was smooth and white. Her features stayed perfectly still even when her words suggested she was very upset.

She couldn’t understand how I could sympathize with a stranger more than I sympathized with her, the woman who’d raised me. I said I didn’t—I didn’t know, that was all. I didn’t know what to think. My mom said: Go then. Find her. Be a hero. I said I didn’t want to be a hero. I remembered how she’d used that word when I was a kid, like it was shameful to depend on them. All I wanted was to see if we couldn’t fix this thing at least a little. She said: She’ll make you tired, you’ll see. She’ll hurt you.

I left angry—I left her angry, standing in the parking lot—but anger kept my hands steady enough to get my purse from the condo, to buy a ticket back to the city, to get myself on board and sit, knees together, in a nearly empty rail car. It was only once the train started moving that I grew unsteady, watching the darkened suburbs roll by, thinking, How could a woman die—a good woman, a woman who loved as best she could—and leave this mess of bad blood behind, this terrible nest of angry, angry women?

I breathed on the glass and traced figures. I wrote her name, Matilda, like a girl with a crush. I thought of where she was: Was it cold there? Was she alone? I knew it then. I didn’t have to win the argument with my mother. It didn’t matter if I won my arguments with anybody. I had an address. If I wanted to, I could find her.

TILLY

One winter Dora came home from college with all her nice clothes in garment bags, which was typical, and a pair of red eyes, which wasn’t. She wasn’t a regular weeper or a smoker of anything. Our mother had set the dinner table hours before she arrived. Our father had been gone for years.

Dora snuck into my bedroom after midnight, sat on my bed, and shook my shoulder: “Are you awake?”