His mother, innocent, admired the first glass case, which was filled with salt and pepper shakers. Two Scottish terriers, black and white. One Scottish terrier (salt) lifting its leg in front of a red fire hydrant (pepper). The next glass case was also filled with salt and pepper shakers. There was a density to the collection that felt like a headache, or the physical manifestation of dementia, where the simplest items had to be labeled for meaning: china Eiffel Towers marked PARIS, cheap metal London Bridges marked LONDON. It had clearly been somebody’s private collection, a problematic Dane’s hoard. Surely all the salt and pepper shakers had been made in one vast factory in Japan or China, then stamped with geographic locations and shipped off.

“After this,” she said, “we’ll go to the Viking village. Your grandfather would have hated this place. What’s the matter?”

I don’t want to see, he thought, but also he did.

He was stepping into Forbidden Souvenirs. It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at: coral, ivory, alligator shoes, exotic game of all sorts, pillaged antiquities.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said.

A faceless mannequin wore a leopard jacket over nothing, its skinny white featureless body obscene. “Grandma had a mink stole,” Joanna said. “I can’t remember what we did with it.”

Some of the objects flaunted the original animal: the head of an alligator biting shut a pocketbook, the dangling back paws of a white fox on a stole. Was that better or worse than the elephant carved out of an elephant tusk, the tortoise incised into the tortoise shell?

“I thought there would be ears,” said Leo. “From the enemy.”

“What enemy?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo helplessly. “The enemy dead.”

“No ears,” said Joanna in an improbably cheery voice. She gestured at the glass case. “Nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. But he had been, the worry was in him, the fear of seeing something he shouldn’t have, human, severed. The feeling was traumatic and precious.

“Anyhow,” she said.

“Do they pretend there?” he asked.

“Do they what where?”

“Pretend at the Viking village. Dress up and say they’re Vikings.”

“Oh. Not sure. Why?”

“The Renaissance Faire,” he said darkly.

They’d gone to a Ren Faire when Leo was four. He’d gotten lost in an iron maze built of child-sized cages and began to sob—she had a picture of him that she’d taken before she’d noticed the tears—and a man dressed as an executioner had to talk him out, gesturing with his plastic ax. Leo liked to bring it up from time to time, evidence of Joanna’s bad judgment. He liked history. He did not like grown-ups in fancy dress.

She said, “It’ll be great.”

“That’s what you said about Legoland.”

Had she? “Leo—”

“I said I didn’t want to go.”

“No, you—”