Minna scoots past the desk and pulls apart the curtains. She must be looking out at the driveway. I no longer know what the driveway looks like. Sandra told me it was paved. But I can still picture the hills—at this time of year, the poplars and the cottonwoods should be blossoming, and the daffodils will be pushing up, and the air will smell sweet as the sap begins to run: a painful smell, which brings back memories of other springs and other cycles, a continuity that exists beyond and apart from us.

“Who is it?” Amy pushes the book off her lap. “Is it Nana? Is she back?”

“It’s not Nana,” Minna says, frowning. “I don’t know who it is.” She sighs. “Stay here with Uncle Trenton, okay, sweetie? Trenton, can you watch her? Don’t touch anything, Amybear.”

Minna goes out into the front hall: a dim place that always smells like old shoes. No one uses the front entrance except for delivery people and the various groups that go door-to-door, petitioning for a clean water act or advocating for Mr. So-and-So for governor.

The man on the front porch is wearing a too-big suit and holding a briefcase that looks like a theatrical prop. He seems vaguely familiar. After he introduces himself as Dennis Carey, Richard Walker’s lawyer, I realize I must have seen him before.

“Well, I guess you better come in,” Minna says, and opens the door wider to admit him.

For a moment I’m swept away by a wedge of light that cuts into us, penetrates the layers of air and dust that have accumulated in the hall. Then Minna closes the door.

“You could have told us you were coming,” she says, sticking her hands in her back pockets so he can’t avoid looking at her br**sts.

“Here comes trouble,” Sandra says, obviously pleased. She loves a good spectator sport.

His eyes tick down and careen back up to her face. “I called,” Dennis says, shifting his briefcase to his left hand. “I spoke to Caroline . . . ?”

Minna laughs. “No wonder I wasn’t expecting you,” she says. “Caroline isn’t here.”

“Not here?” Dennis tugs at his collar. He’s probably in his forties and not completely unattractive, although he has too much stomach and too little hair.

I feel a brief flash of fear. Minna is like a spider, huge and hungry.

“My mom tends to be forgetful,” Minna says, and pushes past Dennis, shouldering too close, so her body brushes against his. “You want something to drink?”

Dennis transforms his nervous cough into a laugh. “Better not,” he says. He’s uncomfortable, as he should be, without knowing why. “I’m still on the clock. I made the appointment with Caroline . . . ”

Minna waves a hand. “Appointments have never stopped my mother from drinking. What do you say? Whiskey? Wine? Vodka? We’re absolutely drowning in vodka . . . ”

“I shouldn’t,” Dennis says, but I can feel him beginning to relent.

“You might as well relax.” Minna takes another step toward him. “Who knows how long we’ll be waiting for the others . . . ” She steps forward again, so they are standing less than a foot apart.

All the threads are pulled tight in that instant. Even I am swept along. The air vibrates like a plucked violin string.

Then Amy bursts out of the study.

“Nana’s back, Mommy!” She barrels down the hall, half sliding on bunched-up socks.

Just like that, the threads are cut. Dennis and Minna instinctively step away from each other.

“Honey, be careful!” Minna reaches out and catches Amy by the shoulders, forcing her to slow down.

“Who are you?” Amy says, looking up at Dennis.

“Don’t be rude, Amy,” Minna says.

Dennis laughs. “I’m Dennis,” he says, leaning down and offering his hand, solemnly, for Amy to shake. Instead she ducks around Minna’s leg, peeking at him from between Minna’s thighs.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Minna says. “Say hi to Mr. Carey, Amy.”

“Hi,” Amy whispers.

Dennis straightens up again. “Is she yours?”

Minna nods. She won’t meet his eyes. I wonder whether she’s embarrassed about the fact that their moment was interrupted, or about the fact that it happened at all.

“She’s very pretty,” Dennis says.

“Say thank you, Amy,” Minna says sharply.

Amy says nothing.

The kitchen door opens.

“In here, Mom,” Minna says, before Caroline can ask.

Caroline comes into the hall a moment later. In her large gray cashmere jumpsuit, she looks like an overgrown dust mite. And yet there—underneath it, underneath her—I can’t help but see another Caroline: thin and beautiful, with the same wide, lost eyes, drifting from room to room. Even then, she was like dust—blown from place to place.

“The service here—” she starts to say, and then, seeing Dennis, stops. “Oh God. You must be Mr. Carey. I’d completely forgotten—”

“It’s no problem,” Dennis says, starting forward. He goes to shake her hand; she extends her hand limply and allows it to be engulfed. “I wasn’t waiting long.”

“You don’t look like a lawyer,” Caroline says, and she laughs as though she has made a joke. “Surely you’re too young.”

“A lawyer?” Trenton has skulked into the hall, too, and stands with his shoulders hunched practically to his ears.

Minna says offhandedly, “I never could stand lawyers.”

Dennis clearly doesn’t know who to address. He again adjusts the collar of his shirt. His neck is thin, and his Adam’s apple prominent, as though he has swallowed a peach pit at some point in his life and it has been lodged there ever since. “I was lucky enough to work with Mr. Walker in the later years of his life,” he says.

Caroline claps her hands. Her eyes are very bright. “I suppose we might as well get started,” she says. “No point in delaying the inevitable.”

“Get started on what?” Trenton asks.

Caroline looks from Trenton to Minna in her old, bewildered way, as though both of them have just materialized from nowhere. “Mr. Carey is here to read your father’s will,” she says. She turns a smile back to Dennis. “Let’s go into the study, shall we? It’s so much cozier in there. I’ll just nip into the kitchen for a glass of wine. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”

SANDRA

In my day, the study was the den. It wasn’t as big then as Richard Walker made it during the Great Renovation of 1994, when we got cracked open like an egg, scrambled and remade, puffed up into a soufflé of useless rooms and spiral staircases and “breakfast nooks” and window seats.