Her eyes grew suddenly wide. “Of course you don’t!” She chuckled to herself, then broke into a spasm of coughing. Peter rose to help her, but she waved him back down. “Go on, sit,” she croaked. “My voice just gets rusty is all it is.” She took a moment to settle herself, clearing her throat with a wet harrumph. “That’s what you have to find out. Everybody got something to find out in they lives, and this is your one thing.”

“Michael says she’s a hundred years old.”

The old woman nodded. “Best look out then. A older woman. Careful this Amy don’t boss you around too much.”

He was getting nowhere. Talking to Auntie was always a challenge, but he’d never seen her quite like this, so weirdly cheerful. She hadn’t even offered him tea.

“Auntie, you said something else the other night,” he pressed. “Something about chance. A chance.”

“Reckon I might have. Sounds like something I’d say.”

“Is she?”

Her pale lips curled into a frown. “I’d say that depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

Before Peter could speak, the woman continued: “Oh, don’t be looking like that, all woebegone like you are. Feeling lost is just a part of it.” She pushed away from the table and rose stiffly to her feet. “Come on with you then. Got something to show you. Might help you make up your mind.”

He followed her down the hall to her bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the space was cluttered but clean, everything in its place. Pushed against the wall was an old four-poster bed, the mattress sagging in a manner that told him the ticking was just loose straw; beside it was a wooden chair bearing a lantern. He saw that the top of the dresser, the room’s only other piece of furniture, was decorated with a collection of apparently random objects: an old glass bottle with the words Coca-Cola written in faded lettering of elaborate script; a metal tin that, when he picked it up, made a sound suggesting pins; the jawbone of some small animal; a pyramidal pile of flat, smooth stones.

“Those my worry things,” said Auntie.

Now that they were standing together in the cramped room, Peter felt her smallness; the crown of her white head reached barely to his shoulder.

“That’s what my mama called them. Keep your worry things nearby, she always said.” She gestured with a crooked finger toward the bureau. “Don’t remember where most of it comes from, excepting the picture, of course. Brought that with me on the train.”