Isaac had tried to make a go of it in the auto parts business after the grocery store closed, and Rebecca remembered that Esther had spoken a few times about a feud between Isaac and his former partner in the business, Benny Adler, saying that each of them had swindled the other in some way that tied up her father’s meager estate for most of Rebecca’s childhood. In the end, the estate was finally settled the year she entered Stuyvesant High School, and Rebecca inherited nothing. The taxes owed on a garage on Ten Eyck Street had wiped out the modest legacy left over from the bitter litigation and legal fees expended in pointless pursuit through the legal system of the hapless Benny Adler. Esther had placed too much faith in the judgment and legal acumen of Sol Kramer, a slightly shifty union lawyer who handled the matter as a favor to her for very low fees. (“You pay peanuts, you get a monkey,” Esther had concluded when the whole sorry matter was done.) But now Rebecca had something tangible from the auto parts business after all—the screwdriver.

Thinking about her parents now, holding these papers in her lap as the train raced toward Connecticut, Rebecca thought about the way a fire in 1911 had changed everything in her family. If Sam had survived that fire, so much might have been different. And Pauline would have had a life, would have been a sister to Esther all these years. She would probably have married and had her own family. There would be aunts and uncles, cousins. There were so many phantom people who might have been.

Sam would have died by now, of course, but Esther and Pauline would have stuck together through thick and thin. But then, if not for the car accident, Rebecca’s own father might be an old man of ninety, perhaps still going strong, considering Esther’s astonishing longevity. Rebecca might still have a mother—many of her friends had living mothers in their eighties. Rebecca sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, letting the train rock her, trying fruitlessly to imagine her mother as an old lady. She missed Esther.

She could hardly remember her parents at all. Other people have full recall of their early childhoods, but her early memories were few, more like snapshots of some random specific moments than like the hours of home movies everyone else seemed to have in their heads. A night-light in the form of a slowly revolving circus tent, with clowns tumbling all the way around, and her parents coming in to kiss her while she feigned sleep. The cherry and almond smell of her mother’s Jergens lotion. Sometimes Rebecca put Jergens on her arm and then smelled it, just to keep that faint connection. There was a night when she heard them laughing in a secret, different way, when they had come in from having been out for dinner, all dressed up. Playing in a sandbox, with other children around her, digging her feet into the cold sand. A neighbor’s dog lapping at her face while she sat helplessly strapped into her stroller, her mother preoccupied in a conversation with the neighbor. A birthday party with three candles on a cake, her mother helping her blow them out. Riding in the backseat of a car on the way to visit her grandmother, feeling an upsurge of love for the backs of their heads.