In the weeks since she had first discovered Grandma Jo’s letters, Lulu had gradually cleared for herself a little corner among the dust and the spiders of her parents’ attic, in which she had formed a neat, if not elegant, little nook, consisting of the broken armchair, which proved perfectly serviceable once she had replaced its missing leg with a stack of chemistry textbooks; a paint-spattered side table, victim of a brief artistic fling of Emma’s; and a discarded desk lamp, which she had doctored with duct tape and fitted with a new bulb. She still had not mentioned the letters to anyone else in the family, although she knew that she could not keep them a secret forever; one day, she knew, she would have to bring them down from the attic and show them around. This would not be something she would do casually, she had decided: she would find a pretty box to place them in, and pick a time to present them, properly and with the ceremony they deserved, possibly to her mother at Christmas, or to Emma just before her wedding day. To tell the truth, she was in no particular hurry to do this. Once the letters were out in the open, they would become not Lulu’s letters, but the family’s, to be examined and exclaimed on, pored over by Fee and Emma, read dramatically aloud by Sophie, photocopied, no doubt, and sent in a package to Aunt Amy in Boston to do with who knew what and show to who knew whom. But for this time when no one but Lulu knew about them, Grandma Jo, fierce, funny, and awkward, who had struggled against the world and found love at last, was hers alone; and at the moment she felt she rather needed something that was only hers.

Meanwhile, she had set herself the task—under the guise, should anyone ask, of searching for Grandma Cissie’s now long-vanished recipe book—of sorting through the large trunk of family papers, searching for further items of interest. The undertaking was a substantial one, as the papers seemed endless and were stuffed into the trunk in no particular order, letters jostling laundry lists, newspaper clippings tattering between electricity bills, half-used ration books from the war tossed carelessly between sheafs of outdated tax returns. Occasionally, she would come across a treasure—a pile of half-century-old theater programs, which would delight Sophie; Grandma Jojo’s old passport, much battered and crammed with stamps, the photograph showing the same young woman with the cigarette in the photograph on the bookshelf—but most of it was the pedestrian stuff of day-to-day living, domestic accounts from households unnamed, announcements of lectures and concerts given and many years forgotten, receipts for clothing long worn out and food long consumed, bought by who knew whom for who knew what occasion, with what satisfaction they had provided, or failed to provide, unrecorded.

Nevertheless, Lulu was enjoying herself. She was beginning to piece together a family history: Jo March had indeed married a German professor, Professor Bhaer, so that part of the story was true, at least; Cissie Bhaer had married a businessman called Bill Fraser; Jojo Fraser had married a rather dashing young pilot called Robert Chamberlain, whom Lulu remembered faintly from a childhood visit to Boston as a stooped and kindly old man called Grandpa Bob. The family had moved to the city when Grandma Jo’s school had failed during the Depression, and had stayed there ever since, witnessing—since someone in the family had been in the habit of collecting newspaper clippings—school reforms and society weddings, baseball matches, natural disasters and the end of Prohibition, a new bus line through town, a variety of fights for women’s reproductive rights, the Second World War, the death of President Kennedy in Dallas, and a Beatles concert at Boston Garden. They had shared long faces—which Fee and Sophie had inherited, but not Emma or Lulu—political awareness, and an interest in the arts. Lulu thought that, on the whole, they were a rather nice family.