An hour passes. Margaret inspects each item, strokes it, sniffs it. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t say a word. I think it’s too much for tears, too much for her to comprehend all at once like this. Annie sits with her knees to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs, watching us. At one point she checks her watch and says old Mrs. Thorpe will want her lunch.

“All right,” Margaret says. “I suppose we can come back this afternoon.”

She staggers to her feet, and so do I. The cold and damp have had the same effect on our living flesh as on the leather. For a moment or two, she stands there staring at the bag, the artifacts placed around it. She sets her hands on her hips.

“Coming?” I ask.

She bends down and picks up a bundle of letters and a notebook.

“Coming.”

Old Mrs. Thorpe keeps to her bed, thoroughly senile, next to an array of pill bottles and powder packets. She married young, Margaret explained on the train, but Thorpe’s father arrived only after several years of fruitlessness, like one of those flowers that blooms every century or so. Margaret’s not sure precisely how old she is, but probably ninety-five, God bless her. Now she’s propped against the pillows on what will probably become her deathbed, while Annie spoons soup into her mouth and replies patiently to all her crazy talk. I think of my mother back on Long Island, at the table in the kitchen, drinking her coffee while her chicks fly free.

“Let me do it,” I say.

Annie looks up in surprise. Over by the window, Margaret puts down her cigarette and laughs. “Decent of you, Lulu, but it’s not going to bring him back.”

“It’s not for Thorpe.” I settle on the chair, take the soup from Annie, and peer into Mrs. Thorpe’s hopeful face. Her hair is uniformly white, but something tells me this is the redhead in the family tree. I should mention that she’s chattering away as all this takes place. You can’t really understand the words—aside from the Scotch brogue, she’s got no teeth—but whatever she’s saying, the woman’s got a lot of it to communicate. I wait until she pauses for breath and stick the spoon in the hole. She swallows it down and smiles gummily, like when the twins were babies, and I think it’s maybe just as well I’m getting the practice, isn’t it? How, if we’re lucky to survive the measles and the tree climbing, the wars and the childbirth, disease and famine and Hitler and Tito and the crosstown bus barreling down Fifty-Ninth Street, we come right back to the beginning before heading west into the unknown, to meet our Maker just as we left him, helpless.