Some grackles might possess souls and some grackles might possess intelligence but it was impossible to believe that any one grackle possessed both: not enough room in their brilliantined heads. A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom. One grackle was missing a foot, and Thea blamed him for it. If they had been magpies, she might have counted them up, wondering what they foretold, but grackles were just seagulls in widows’ weeds. They weren’t omens of anything except more grackles.

She was here to buy a present. The world had promised a baby (though the world broke such promises all the time), and Thea planned to become that uninteresting thing, a doting grandmother. What was doting? A sort of avian love, an affectionate pecking. Thea had already referred to the baby as my baby, and Georgia—who lived in Portland, where she’d grown up and nearly died—said, “Mom, don’t be disgusting.”

“Sorry,” Thea had said. “Comes naturally. You’re okay? You’re taking care of yourself?”

“Martine’s taking care of me.”

“She should. But also—”

“I’m fine. I’ve been fine a long time. Hey, you know who I saw? Florence. At the farmers market. In some weird floral dress. Muumuu, I guess. She’s old now. She got old.”

“Well, she would have,” said Thea. “That’s just math.”

She had not thought of Florence in years in the way she had not thought of furniture, or pavement, or the earth.

The vintage store was a cavern built of confiscated things. Immediately Thea’s hatred of castoffery came upon her like an allergy. She wanted to sneeze with depression: all the fingerprinted objects that had made it just this far. Instead of stalactites overhead, a series of old suitcases hanging from hooks (flowered, plaid, their insufficient metal wheels exposed). Instead of stalagmites, the kind of bar stools once favored by kicky grandmothers.

She wouldn’t be a kicky grandmother. If anybody indeed was kicky these days. Her apartment was so spare, people asked her when she had moved in though it had been ten years. Florence—her long-lost friend, lost on purpose, currently muumuued Florence—might be kicky by now, but she couldn’t be a grandmother: her child was dead. That was only one difference between them, the one that counted.

Now Thea closed her eyes and envisioned the particular doll she wanted to buy. Was she trying to divine its presence or magic it into place? She pictured a baby doll amid the shot glasses and quilted skirts. Then she opened her eyes to the great accumulation.