“You had years.”

“I always meant to,” she said. “I just didn’t.”

I waited.

“I knew you’d think I was terrible.”

“For what?” I said. “I don’t even know what happened.”

“You want to know what happened?” she said. “Matilda left us. She left first. She came back, but she never really came back. She never tried.”

“She ran away?”

“It was complicated.”

“It’s been so many years…I mean, Christ, my whole life. You never wanted me to know?”

“We agreed we wouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “It was easier for Lucy.”

“It was. It’s different now.”

“What did she say?” my mom asked. “About Matilda? How did she sound?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was she angry?”

“Not angry, so much. Just sad.”

“How did she bring it up?”

“I don’t know, Mom. She was lying in the tub and rambling. She fell and maybe hit her head, and she was hurting and being honest. She missed her daughter.” I paused again. “That’s how she brought it up.”

My mother was quiet.

“I wish you could explain it,” I said. “How it got—”

“It happens, okay? When something happens like this in a family,” she said, “it doesn’t do any good to try to figure it out.”

Her voice sounded like a bronze bell, hard-struck and twanging across the miles, so sharp it was difficult to believe it wouldn’t leave a humming aftertone. Happens. Like earthquakes or cancer. Like the steady clock-ticking of an old woman falling apart. My mother wouldn’t understand what was happening to her mother’s body until she saw it for herself.

“You don’t know anything about her?” I said. “Nothing at all?”

“We know she lives in the desert,” she said. “God knows where in Nevada. Or maybe she doesn’t anymore. It’s been years since we’ve heard.”

A moment earlier, there had been some part of my mother open—some part I’d never heard. Now she was blistered and brittle in a way I recognized, ready to take offense. It was the way she talked about her father when she spoke about him at all.

My mother claimed to have disavowed his clan—nothing but a big nest of WASPs, she said—but her voice betrayed stray notes of pride. They’d been the movers and shakers behind our nation’s early history. I imagined skeletal, bespectacled men who levied sugar taxes and traded fur pelts, paid the boys who cleaned up tea from the harbor. As a child I’d loved thinking about the Boston Tea Party. What if someone had founded an entire city on soil made from hard-packed tea, Darjeeling or English breakfast? Would the heat of summer make the air smell like it was steeping?

“It’s history,” I told my mom. “And our family was part of it.”

“It stopped being your family when he left,” she snapped. “It stopped being your family before you were even born.”