It was all pretty much exactly what she had anticipated. Canceled insurance policies, ILGWU membership documents, Women’s Trade Union League documents, a gold WTUL pin for Esther’s twenty-five years of membership, Workmen’s Circle documents, including the deed to the cemetery plot that would have made life simpler back in September if Rebecca had had it in hand at the time. In the end they had succeeded in burying her grandmother in the grave she had reserved for herself there, between her sister and Sam Gottesfeld, one row away from Rebecca’s mother and father, whose graves were obtained with the intervention of the union back in 1961, on the grounds that Isaac Gottesfeld was a Triangle fire survivor guaranteed a burial plot by the Workmen’s Circle. The day they buried Esther, George had commented to Rebecca later that night that the sight of her parents’ headstones one row away had made him think about how when you go to a crowded movie theater, the group can’t all sit together.

Here was a tiny screwdriver, perhaps two inches long, with a tiny red wooden handle on which was printed GOTTESFELD AUTO SUPPLY. In a cracked leather eyeglass case, there was a flimsy pair of silver wire spectacles with thick, cloudy lenses. Rebecca held them up to her face and tried to look through them at the passing landscape, but the effect was a complete blur that made her dizzy. Who was the last person to look through these lenses? She folded them tenderly and slid them back into the leather case. There were three coins wrapped in a scrap of newsprint, stuck together by something brownish and gummy. When Rebecca unwrapped and separated them, she found an Indian-head penny from 1907, an unfamiliar coin from 1910 with a female head on one side and a V on the other, which she realized must be a nickel, and a small, thin silver coin which she at first took to be a dime, until closer inspection revealed that it was a foreign coin from 1909, with a numeral 10 on one side over some Cyrillic letters that might signify kopecks.

The real prize seemed to be the tarnished nickel pocket watch that was wrapped in creased brown paper and tied with a ribbon on which the words “Grossberger Bakery” repeated in green script. Gingerly, Rebecca had unrolled the bundle, not knowing what to expect, and at first she didn’t understand the significance of the object in her hand, but then she did. As she held Sam’s watch, almost the way one would cradle a wounded baby bird, she could feel something loose sliding around inside the case. When she prized open the smooth metal lid that concealed the face, she saw that the watch crystal was badly shattered, with pieces of the glass missing. The hands stood at seven minutes past five. There were no markings on the watch case, which was attached at the loop over the winding stem to a worn, braided black cord.