“Who is that, Granny?”

“The man.”

“The one who was here yesterday?”

“Him.”

“He’s staying down at the lake,” Eleanor said. “You remember the time Boyd took you down the lake?”

Beatrice made a circling motion with her head, leaving the answer either yes or no, an answer Eleanor had learned to accept, knowing it could mean yes in part, no in part.

“He put you on his back and carried you down the hill. Do you remember that?” Eleanor asked. “You thought it was great fun.”

The old woman stopped the circling of her head, let her body rock.

“The man that helped us out—his name is Noah, like Noah in the Bible—is going to stay in the shack for a few days,” Eleanor explained. She added, “He’s a fisherman.”

Beatrice turned her face to look at Eleanor.

“Yes, that’s what he does,” Eleanor said patiently. “He fishes. I even said I’d buy some fish from him, since he was so good to help us. Maybe you’d like some tonight.”

Beatrice again made the circling motion with her head, deciding the answer; then she said, “I want ice cream.”

“And we’ll get it,” Eleanor replied.

“He know Boyd?” Beatrice asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

A look of sorrow came into the old woman’s face and she sat very still for a long moment, keeping her eyes on the window. Then she said in whisper, “Boyd’s dead.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said.

“He give me that thing when he come home from the war,” the old woman said.

“The tussie mussie?” Eleanor asked, remembering the gift of the small, elaborately enameled tussie mussie that Boyd had presented to his grandmother in a show of drama, of paper torn from the box, of the pulling back of tissue.

“You put flowers in it.”

“Yes ma’am. That’s what it’s for. Sometimes a bride uses one in her wedding.”

“Where’s it at?” the old woman asked in a suddenly strong voice.

“It’s in your room. Do you want me to get it and put some flowers in it?”

Beatrice turned her head, pulled her hands up to her chest as though holding the tussie mussie. “He wrote me a letter one time,” she said. “I still got it.”

“Yes ma’am, I know.”

She thought of her own collection of letters from Boyd. The first ones had been filled with boasting and bravery, with a cocksure notion that the Germans had never seen the likes of an American soldier, and the war would not last beyond a few weeks, and then, later, the letters had become little more than confessions of fear, fear so real that she could close her eyes and see the trembling in his hand as he wrote to her. Each of them had always started with the same line: This may be the last letter you get from me …

And then she had received a letter that began, I can see an end to all of this …

The letter told of the liberation of the concentration camp called Mauthausen in Austria, where he had met a young girl, almost starved, and had taken pity on her. She was Polish. Her name was Roza Solnik. Her family had all been killed by the Germans. He was thinking of bringing her to America, if he could find a way. She had written back that if he wanted to bring Roza to live with them, it would be all right with her, but he had never again mentioned it. Even when he returned home and she asked him about her, he had said nothing beyond, “You don’t know how it was over there.” She had let the subject drop.