“My mother?”

She nodded. She looked genuinely nervous.

I reached into my purse and felt the envelope. I said, “She didn’t know what to think.”

“Back when I knew her, she always knew what to think.”

I pulled out the letter. “This is from her.”

She read it in front of me, standing still. I watched her face. Her expression didn’t change. She handed it back to me. “So that’s that,” she said. “There it is.”

“She can be hard sometimes,” I said. “I know.”

She sighed. She was looking off into the distance. She ran one hand through her long silver-streaked hair. The air was getting cooler. The desert was darkening around us. “You know what I need?” she said. “I need a drink.”

By midnight, we’d ended up back in the park. The courthouse gleamed white like a tooth in the darkness. We were on the grass with a liter of Gordon’s. There were only a few fingers left, glittering like jewelry in the bottle. I was tipsy, but I knew that Tilly had drunk most of it. It was hard to believe an ordinary woman’s body could hold so much liquor.

We lay back on the dirt and looked at the stars. There were probably constellations up there somewhere—a question of perspective, really—but my vision wouldn’t stay in focus long enough for me to see them.

Tilly’s voice was clear and forceful in its drunkenness, thoughts without bodies coming from the nearby darkness. “So what’s your big hope?” she said. “Ten years from now, what do you want?”

I thought about this for a long time. My head felt heavy. It was full of liquid that had turned to gel. Answers were trapped in there like bugs in amber. I said finally, “I’d like to do something that gets me out of myself.”

“Why’s that?”

“I get tired of being stuck inside my own—”

“You’re free,” she said. “You’ve got your whole life left.”

“I hate when people say that.”

She smiled. “I used to hate when people said it to me.”

I knew it wasn’t right, what we’d done. I’d seen her darkness, and now I was part of it. But it felt so much better out here, two women in the open night. It was easier to speak with our faces in the moonlight, my tongue loose and warm. This was a kind of bravery, too.

I asked about her childhood. What about her summers? I’d heard about the Cape. You heard about those? From Lucy, I said. So she talked about the Cape. It seemed to bring her pleasure. I asked her about the bath full of dying sea creatures. Was the story true? Yes, she said. It was. One time Dora pulled the legs off a starfish, and Matilda got angry. You put that star back together! And so they arranged its pieces and glued them together to give it a proper burial in the sand.