“Well?” Marianne—or “Mary,” as she was called here in America—asked.

“Can we get out of the car?” Ania said, gazing up at the peaked roof.

Mary frowned. It was a demonstrative look, meant to note this example of motherly hardness or wrongness or, at best, ineptitude. The people of today wanted delicate handling, Mary among them. Ania knew this, but she was too stubborn to comply—and anyway, she did not know how.

Ania waited as Mary went around the car to open her door, an unnecessary rule her daughter had established following an incident in the airport parking lot in which, in Mary’s estimation, Ania had nearly been killed. This was not founded in reality: Ania had looked before opening her door and the minivan pulling into the next space had been at least half a meter away, but Mary had an overactive imagination, especially when it came to catastrophe. And Ania appreciated being cared for this way. When her daughter opened her door, she swung her feet out onto the curb and stood with relative ease. She was lucky to be so fit for an eighty-year-old woman.

Ania used Carsten’s cane for support as she stood before the house. This was the place Mary intended to raise her children postdivorce. She had bought it herself. There were three floors, the uppermost under a steeply gabled roof. Tall, elegant black shutters framed the windows, and on the second floor, a cream-colored panel was carved with an overflowing bowl of fruit and above this, less successfully rendered, a flag inscribed with the date 1864.

Ania regarded the clapboards, which were caked with layers of poorly scraped paint. The sill on the third-floor window was brown and rotten where it met the glass.

“So?” Mary prodded. “You haven’t said a word!”

“It is a beautiful house,” Ania said sadly.

“So why the tragedy?”

Ania shook her head. “It is too old.”

Mary laughed. “That’s the best part! They don’t make houses like this anymore. I love its oldness.”

Ania regarded her daughter, the young American she had become in the twenty years she had lived here. Mary honestly believed that you could update the electrical system, rebrick the chimney, brace the foundation, and cover over the past with a fine, clean coat of paint, and instead of a fragile, seam-filled heap of expired goods, you would have a fresh new house. She had become American enough to assign a moral value to the house’s age.

At forty-one, Mary was a beautiful woman, with thick, honey-colored hair and a long, intelligent face. She was aging like an American, though: deep lines between her brows and along the sides of her mouth. Too much smiling. Too much emotion on parade. It was a young country. It mistook the theater of expression for honesty. If Mary had lived like a German, she would look ten years younger.

“You really don’t like it?” Mary asked, growing more wrinkles by the minute, her face contorted into a tableau of surprise.