Down in the basement the furnace hummed and shut itself off, and the house got so quiet I could hear ice settling in the gutters.

“My sister Doris used to say a quiet house is just a house nobody’s lying in yet,” Helen said.

“How’s Doris?”

“Still wrong about most things.” She drank.

“She called me the family bank for twenty years.

Then she stopped calling.”

I turned the confirmation over and read the back of it, which said nothing at all.

The paper was still warm from her printer.