Five years passed like nothing. She was recognized in the neighborhood as the monument she was, constructed to memorialize a tragedy but with the plaque long since dropped off. She was Leonora. Her name had survived, because the bakery workers remembered it, but that was all. Nobody imagined that she was a mother. She was (anyone who saw her presumed) a person who had always been exactly thus, poisoned, padded, eyes sunk into her face. She existed only at the table, eating bread in her finicking way. She spoke to the people behind the counter. That was all. Some of them were patient, and some of them weren’t.

Then one day a man came into the bakery, caught her eye, and smiled.

Poor Alan, she thought reflexively, but then she remembered Poor Alan was dead, though he’d remembered her in his will and set up a trust to take care of her. This man wore a green wool hat like a bucket. The hat looked expensive, imported. He pulled it from his head and revealed a mop of white hair. No, he never was Poor Alan, who’d lost his hair long before it faded. But she did know the man. He sat down across from her. The tabletop was Formica, the green of trolleys.

“Mike Wooster,” he said.

“Hello, Mike Wooster,” said Leonora. She could smell her own vile breath. She slept in a bed and washed herself, but she did not always remember to brush her teeth. Why would she? She scarcely used them.

He bounced the hat around on his fists. Then he set it in front of him. She had a sense he wanted to drop it over the remains of the day’s bread: Dolly this time. He said, “I’m Madeline’s father.”

She heard the present tense of the sentence.

Everything about him was rich and lulled. “I heard you came here,” he said. “That bread good?”

She tore off a brown curve. A cheek, a clenched hand. She sniffed at it before she pushed it in her mouth.

He cleared his throat. “We’re having a memorial service. And my wife and I and our kids—well, we thought of you.” He picked the hat back up, brushed some flakes of challah from the brim. “I’ve thought of you.” He said that to the hat, then got hold of himself. “Every single day I’ve thought of you. You know,” he said, “they turned my daughter into a monster, too.”

The alcohol, the coat, the ice. Everyone said that if one of those things hadn’t been true, they never would have crashed. “Too?” she said.