Jerome gives Charlotte his most charming smile. “Hello, Mrs. Gibney. I invited myself along. Hope you don’t mind.”

To this Charlotte simply says, “Come in, I’m freezing out here.” As though it had been their idea for her to come out on the stoop rather than her own.

Number 42, where Charlotte has lived with her brother since her husband died, is overheated and smelling so strongly of potpourri that Holly hopes she won’t begin coughing. Or gagging, which would be even worse. There are four side tables in the little hall, narrowing the passage to the living room enough to make the trip perilous, especially since each table is crammed with the little china figurines that are Charlotte’s passion: elves, gnomes, trolls, angels, clowns, bunnies, ballerinas, doggies, kitties, snowmen, Jack and Jill (with a bucket each), and the pièce de la résistance, a Pillsbury Doughboy.

“Lunch is on the table,” Charlotte says. “Just fruit cup and cold chicken, I’m afraid—but there’s cake for dessert—and . . . and . . .”

Her eyes fill with tears, and when Holly sees them, she feels—in spite of all the work she’s done in therapy—a surge of resentment that’s close to hate. Maybe it is hate. She thinks of all the times she cried in her mother’s presence and was told to go to her room “until you get that out of your system.” She feels an urge to throw those very words in her mother’s face now, but gives Charlotte an awkward hug instead. As she does, she feels how close the bones lie under that thin and flabby flesh, and realizes her mother is old. How can she dislike an old woman who so obviously needs her help? The answer seems to be quite easily.

After a moment Charlotte pushes Holly away with a little grimace, as though she smelled something bad. “Go see your uncle and tell him lunch is ready. You know where he is.”

Indeed Holly does. From the living room comes the sound of professionally excited announcers doing a football pregame show. She and Jerome go single-file, so as not to risk upsetting any members of the china gallery.

“How many of these does she have?” Jerome murmurs.

Holly shakes her head. “I don’t know. She always liked them, but it’s gotten out of hand since my father died.” Then, lifting her voice and making it artificially bright: “Hi, Uncle Henry! All ready for lunch?”

Uncle Henry clearly didn’t make the run to church. He’s slumped in his La-Z-Boy, wearing a Purdue sweatshirt with some of his breakfast egg on it, and a pair of jeans, the kind with the elasticized waist. They are riding low, showing a pair of boxer shorts with tiny blue pennants on them. He looks from the TV to his visitors. For a moment he’s totally blank, then he smiles. “Janey! What are you doing here?”

That goes through Holly like a glass dagger, and her mind flashes momentarily to Chet Ondowsky, with his scratched hands and torn suit coat pocket. And why would it not? Janey was her cousin, bright and vivacious, all the things Holly could never be, and she was Bill Hodges’s girlfriend for awhile, before she died in another explosion, victim of a bomb planted by Brady Hartsfield and meant for Bill himself.

“It’s not Janey, Uncle Henry.” Still with that artificial brightness, the kind usually saved for cocktail parties. “It’s Holly.”

There’s another of those blank pauses as rusty relays go about business they used to do lickety-split. Then he nods. “Sure. It’s my eyes, I guess. From looking at the TV too long.”

His eyes, Holly thinks, are hardly the point. Janey is years in her grave. That’s the point.

“Come here, girl, and give me a hug.”

She does so, as briefly as possible. When she pulls back, he’s staring at Jerome. “Who’s this . . .” For a terrible moment she thinks he’s going to finish by saying this black boy or maybe even this jigaboo, but he doesn’t. “This guy? I thought you were seeing that cop.”

This time she doesn’t bother to correct him about who she is. “It’s Jerome. Jerome Robinson. You’ve met him before.”

“Have I? Mind must be going.” He says it not even as a joke, just as a kind of conversational placeholder, without realizing that’s exactly the case.

Jerome shakes his hand. “How you doing, sir?”

“Not bad for an old fella,” Uncle Henry says, and before he can say more, Charlotte calls—practically shrieks—from the kitchen that lunch is on.

“His master’s voice,” Henry says good-humoredly, and when he stands up, his pants fall down. He doesn’t seem to realize.

Jerome gives Holly a tiny jerk of the head toward the kitchen. She gives him a doubtful look in return, but goes.

“Let me just help you with those,” Jerome says. Uncle Henry doesn’t reply but only stares at the TV with his hands dangling at his sides while Jerome pulls up his pants. “There you go. Ready to eat?”

Uncle Henry looks at Jerome, startled, as if just registering his presence. Which is probably true. “I don’t know about you, son,” he says.

“Don’t know what about me, sir?” Jerome asks, taking Uncle Henry by the shoulder and getting him turned toward the kitchen.

“The cop was too old for Janey, but you look too young.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t know.”

5

They get through lunch, with Charlotte scolding Uncle Henry along and sometimes helping him with his food. Twice she leaves the table and comes back wiping her eyes. Through analysis and therapy, Holly has come to realize that her mother is almost as terrified of life as Holly herself used to be, and that her most unpleasant characteristics—her need to criticize, her need to control situations—arise from that fear. Here is a situation she can’t control.

And she loves him, Holly thinks. That, too. He’s her brother, she loves him, and now he’s leaving. In more ways than one.

When lunch is finished, Charlotte banishes the men to the living room (“Watch your game, boys,” she tells them) while she and Holly do up the few dishes. As soon as they are alone, Charlotte tells Holly to have her friend move her car so they can get Henry’s out of the garage. “His things are in the trunk, all packed and ready to go.” She’s speaking out of the corner of her mouth like an actress in a bad spy movie.

“He thinks I’m Janey,” Holly says.

“Of course he does, Janey was always his favorite,” Charlotte says, and Holly feels another of those glass daggers go in.

6

Charlotte Gibney might not have been pleased to see Holly’s friend turn up with her daughter, but she’s more than willing to allow Jerome to pilot Uncle Henry’s big old boat of a Buick (125,000 miles on the clock) to the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center, where a room has been waiting since the first of December. Charlotte was hoping her brother could remain at home through Christmas, but now he’s begun to wet the bed, which is bad, and to wander the neighborhood, sometimes in his bedroom slippers, which is worse.

When they arrive, Holly doesn’t see a single rolling hill in the vicinity, just a Wawa store and a decrepit bowling alley across the street. A man and a woman in blue Care Center jackets are leading a line of six or eight golden oldies back from the bowling alley, the man holding up his hands to stop traffic until the group is safely across. The inmates (not the right word, but it’s the one that occurs to her) are holding hands, making them look like prematurely aged children on a field trip.