“A what?” I said.

“A tunic,” she said simply. “Like a big shirt, with a drawstring collar, that hung down past his waist.”

“He tucked it in, right?”

“No,” she said. “He just wore it. And I swear Marion hardly even noticed.”

This fascinated me. “What did you say?”

“What could I say? I told him to sit down and gave him a bowl of nuts. I don’t know, Marion’s crazy for him. She wouldn’t care if he showed up butt naked.”

I laughed. “Stop.”

“I’m serious.” She sighed. “Well, at least dinner went well. Cameron kept the conversation going, and I was highly complimented on my potatoes. Not that I could eat them. My back has been killing me and I’ve been feeling nauseous since last week. Something is rotting in the kitchen. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, you did,” I said. “Did they have lumps?”

“What?”

“The potatoes. Did they have lumps?”

“Of course they did,” she said. “They’re only good if they have lumps.”

“I know it,” I said. “Save me a bowl, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, her voice crackling across the line, reassuring as always. “I will.”

I got to know my Grandma Halley a little better that weekend, and it wasn’t through the few short visits I spent by her bedside, holding her hand. She was still in pain from her surgery and a little confused; she called me Julie more than once, and told me stories that trailed off midway, fading out in the quiet. And all the while my mother was there behind me, or beside me, finishing the sentences my grandmother couldn’t, and trying to make everything right again.

In my bedroom at Grandma Halley’s, there was an old cabinet made out of sweet-smelling wood with roses painted across the doors. One night when I was bored I opened it up, and inside were stacks of boxes, photographs, letters, and odds and ends, little things my grandmother, who was an intense pack rat, couldn’t bear to throw away. There were pictures of her as a teenager in fancy dancing dresses posing with gaggles of other girls, all of them smiling. Her hair had been long and dark, and she wore it twisted up over her head, with flowers woven across the crown. There was one box full of dance cards with boys’ names signed in them, each dance numbered off. I found a wedding picture of her and my grandfather bending over a cake, the knife in both their hands. It all fascinated me. I read the letters she wrote to her mother during her first trip abroad, where she spent four pages describing an Indian boy she met in the park, and every word he said, and how blue the sky was. And the later letters about my grandfather, how much she loved him, letters that were returned to her postmarked and neatly tied with string when her own mother died.

I went downstairs and found my mother at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea and sitting in Grandma Halley’s big green chair by the window. She didn’t hear me come in and jumped when I touched her shoulder.

“Hey,” she said. “What are you still doing up?”

“I’ve been reading all this stuff of Grandma Halley’s,” I said, sliding in beside her. “Look at this.” And I showed her the dance card I had tied to my wrist, and the wedding picture of them dancing past the band, and my birth announcement, carefully saved in its own envelope. Hours had passed as I’d sat going through my grandmother’s life, stored in boxes and envelopes, neatly organized as if she’d meant for me to find it there all along.

“Can you believe she was ever so young,” my mother said, holding the wedding picture to the light. “See the necklace she’s wearing? She gave that to me on my wedding day. It was my ‘something borrowed.’”

“She fell in love with an Indian boy the summer she was nineteen,” I told her. “In a park in London. He wrote to her for two years afterwards.”

“No kidding,” she said softly, her fingers idly brushing across my hair. “She never told me.”

“And you know that bell she keeps in the window halfway up the stairs? Grandpa bought her that at a flea market in Spain, when he was in the service.”

“Really?”

“You should read the letters,” I said, looking down at my own name on the birth announcement: Welcome, Halley!

She smiled at me, as if remembering suddenly when moments like this between us were not noticed for the very fact of how rare they were.

“Honey,” she said, gathering up my hair in her hands, “I’m sorry about that night at the restaurant. I know it’s hard to understand why we can’t let you see Macon. But it’s for the best. Someday you’ll understand that.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t.” And then, just as easily as it had closed, the distance opened up between us. I could almost see it.

She sighed, letting my hair drop. She felt it, too. “Well, it’s late. You should get to bed, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” I got up and walked toward the stairs, past the framed front page of the local paper, announcing the comet’s arrival. HALLEY MAKES ANOTHER VISIT, it said.

“I remember when the comet came through,” I said, and she walked up behind me, reading over my shoulder. “I sat in Grandma’s lap and we watched it together.”

“Oh, honey, you were so little,” she said easily. “And it really wasn’t clear at all. You didn’t see anything. I remember.”