Just a letter that said she was old now, and that she thought about Lucille, and about the grandchildren, and that she did not want to be right anymore as much as she wanted to be in touch, and that the door of the house Lucille grew up in was open if she ever wanted to walk back through it.

We mailed it in July.

Lucille did not write back for two months, and Enid pretended not to check the mail every single day, and then in September a card came, cautious and short, with a school photograph of two children Enid had never seen, and Enid sat down in Albert’s chair — she sat in Albert’s chair, which I had never once seen her do — and she held that photograph and she cried in a way that scared me until I understood it was not grief.

It was nineteen years of a coat finally coming off.