Florence knew what she was doing. She was the sort of person, thought Thea, who said a thing aloud when she suspected it wasn’t true. Not lying exactly, but as though she were wrestling with an immense and troublesome and essential emotion, and in telling you, gently, that it was a thing to be venerated, an unusual variety of love, she was handing you the corners so you could help gather. He loved you particularly. You always loved each other.

And then she let go, and Georgia was left holding that unwieldy feeling. It blew back over her, and she was caught.

She was sixteen. Not a prodigy at annihilation, like Orly, but a quick study.

The store on Burnett was not a mineral cave but an animal den, carved out by a creature partial to must and floral sheets and PEZ dispensers. A junk shop, a proper one, like walking into somebody else’s disordered brain, which operated on this lie: it was good to collect ephemera because if things were worth saving—if a volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books with abridgements of Ngaio Marsh could persist—why not all of us?

Thea peered into a display case full of drinking glasses that had once been jelly jars, with pictures of the Flintstones on them, another thing Georgia had begged for, and Thea could taste cloying grape on the crest of her tongue, bad jelly that you had to suffer through so you could drink later. They’d only ever gotten one, which Thea would have jettisoned when she’d left Portland. She had boxed up the board games and the stuffed animals, the decks of cards and bowling trophies, all of it now seemingly, eerily here, mangled and for sale.

The emptied rooms of dead children, she saw now. Or whose parents had given up on them. It wasn’t really a store; it was too dense, too personal for that. A hoarding. Evidence of damage. You hoarded because you lost someone. Lost someone, and decided, never again, not a person, not a thing.

From the back room of the junk shop stepped the proprietress, a shopworn woman in her fifties with long knotted hair. The authoress of the hoarding. She wore gunmetal blue jeans and a plaid cowboy shirt with pearl snaps. Thea realized, with the feeling of a dropped package, that the woman must have been about her own age. It wasn’t that Thea forgot she was fifty-two, only that people who were her own age were also fifty-two.

“Want something, darling?” the woman asked.

“I’m looking for a doll.”

“We got dolls!”

“A particular kind,” said Thea. “It was big in the seventies and eighties.”

The woman covered her mouth, the way already quiet people do to listen, and nodded encouragingly.

“Baby Alive,” said Thea.