“I like it,” Ania said.

“Then what is it?”

Ania shrugged. It was a useful gesture with her grown children—a sort of what-do-I-know disclaimer about her general lack of knowledge or understanding of the modern world.

“It’s dead,” Ania said finally. “The things it is made of—they are past their time.”

“Aha,” Mary said, bristling in earnest now. “So now things that aren’t alive can die, too. I see. How wonderful.”

Ania could see her daughter’s vexation, all the layers of it: the history of disappointments her mother had doled out to her, all the ways Ania had rebuked and judged and misunderstood her, all the times her blunt and unromantic nature had quashed the joys of Mary’s young life. And then there were the surface layers of anxiety about the purchase, which was, in Mary’s own words, the biggest financial decision of her life. The sum she had paid struck Ania as exotically expensive, a sign of how discordant her own sense of value was—a language founded on different root words.

Ania took a breath and thought about Jesus, whom she did not believe in but whose teachings, as she understood them from the Bible, seemed in her old age to provide a sound road map for life. She reached out and placed her hand on Mary’s cheek, which was soft and slightly creamy with moisturizer. “Child, it is a beautiful place. I am an old woman—don’t listen to me.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” Mary said crossly, sounding more German now. “You’re only an old woman who happens to be my mother, why would I want your approval?”

Ania looked back at her daughter. Lightness, lightness, she told herself. This was what such moments required. She bucked the urge to sigh, to shake her head, to honestly reflect the vast gulf between them, and laughed instead.

“You have this,” she said. “You will always have my approval.”

Later, when they were back in the car and Mary had found it in herself to speak to her mother again (a product of her talkative nature as well as her obsessive deliberating on the purchase), she began to lay out her plans.

“I don’t have to fix everything at once. I’ll chip away at it, piece by piece. You know that from living on the farm. You and Father did it your whole life.”

In Ania’s mind, she saw Carsten’s farm as it had been when she first arrived. The dark washroom with its always-chilly flagstone floor, the toilet at the end of the hall that dropped refuse down a long pipe into a pit.

“If I could have lived somewhere else, I would have,” Ania said with a sigh. “If we had had the money to tear it down and build a new house, we would have. To me, old things are work. Not romance.”

“Well, they’re not romance to me, either,” Mary said.

Outside the window, American life flew by—the giant cars, the eclectic, colorful signs for gyms and clothing stores and fast-food restaurants, supermarkets and gas stations with inflatable balloon figures bobbing goofily in the wind. As well as the boarded-up concrete bunkers of obsolete supermarket chains, failed Chinese food shops and electronics outlets, left standing like rotten teeth in an otherwise healthy smile. It didn’t matter. There was room for everything. It was a free country. The past was nothing to be ashamed of here.