It was a door back into a country only the two of us were still citizens of, and I had spent nine years with my passport in a drawer.

Chapter 5 — Fran Next Door

Fran came over on the second day with a casserole, the way women of a certain generation arrive at grief with a nine-by-thirteen dish, and she hugged me hard and long though I barely knew her, and she said, “Your mother talked about you all the time, honey,” and I did not know what to do with that at all.

Fran had lived next door for thirty years and had been, I gathered over the cup of coffee she stayed for, more of a daily presence in my mother’s last years than I had let myself imagine.