“This is the one with the busted arm, Mrs. Brewster—not the one with her whatsis in the air, all the way down them attic stairs,” Dottie tried to tell my grandmother.

Dottie had also warned me Nana was “slippin’,” as she put it. “She makes tea all day and night, but she don’t hear the kettle singin’,” Dottie said.

“So she’s losing her hearing?” I asked Dottie.

“She’s losin’ more than her hearin’, Adam. When she takes the kettle off the burner, she leaves them flames burnin’—she’s gonna burn the house down, if she don’t piss herself to death first,” Dottie said.

“She’s incontinent?” I asked Dottie.

“I don’t know about that, Adam, but she’s just standin’ there pissin’, when she don’t know she’s pissin’—them diapers don’t work, you know, if you don’t remember to use ’em, and she won’t let me put ’em on her,” Dottie said. “As for them two aunts of yours, them two will hasten her death,” Dottie added.

When my grandmother was napping, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were “showin’ ” the Front Street house to Realtors. “Them two aunts of yours don’t trouble themselves to introduce visitors to the hired help, but I’d know a Realtor in the dark, Adam—them Realtors smell the same as them morticians,” Dottie assured me.

I already knew from Nora that her mother and Aunt Martha were impatient to inherit the Front Street house—they intended to renovate the house for resale while they waited, if Nana didn’t die in a timely fashion, Nora had said. Uncle Martin had already retired, and Uncle Johan would be retiring soon. Those two old downhillers were looking for property up north, in ski country; my conniving aunts were scheming with Realtors on ways to make a killing on the Front Street house. My beer-drinking uncles were innocent of my aunts’ conspiracies to cheat my mom out of her share of the inheritance, but Nora and I knew Nana was deteriorating; Nana would soon require assisted living, beyond Dottie’s care.

The facility for old folks of means in the Exeter area was not in a safe location for the elderly who wandered off, or had otherwise lost their marbles. On the riverbank at a bend of the Squamscott River, the assisted-living facility overlooked the mudflats (at low tide) or the water (when the tide was in). River Bend, as the old folks’ home was unimaginatively called, was bordered by water or mud, and by the town golf course. The location was equally ill advised for a golf course; errant golf balls would be lost in the river, or the golfers would sink to their knees in the mudflats in a doomed effort to retrieve their badly hit balls. The addled patients at River Bend would wander into the water or get stuck in the mud; if the patients who’d lost their marbles roamed the other way, they risked being bonked by golf balls.