Then one afternoon after Elaine Carrington fired him, he did not come to my grandmother’s house to collect me. His car was found parked on a bank of the Hudson River, some twenty miles north of Englewood. His wallet and house keys and checkbook were on the front seat. No note. No good-bye. Nothing to indicate he knew how much I needed him. I wonder how much he blamed me for my mother’s death, if he thought that somehow I sucked the life from her. But surely not. I had loved him fiercely, and he always had seemed to love me the same way. A child can tell. His body was never recovered.

I still remember how, when we got home from Maggie’s, he and I would cook dinner together. He would reminisce about my mother. “As you well know, Maggie’s no cook, Kathryn,” he would say, “so your mother opened a cookbook and learned out of sheer desperation. She and I used to try recipes together, and now it’s you and me.”

Then he would talk to me about my mother. “Always remember, she would have given anything to watch you grow up. She kept the bassinet by our bed for a month before you were born. You’ve missed so much by not having her, by not knowing her.”

I still can’t forgive him for not remembering all that when he decided to end his life.

All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I drove from the library to Maggie’s house to tell her the news. She has a beautiful red maple tree on her small lawn. It gives a special air to the whole place. I was sorry to see the last of its leaves blowing away in the wind. Without their protection, the house looked somehow exposed, and a bit shabby. It is a one-story Cape Cod, with an unfinished attic where Maggie stores the accumulated paraphernalia of her eighty-three years. Boxes of pictures she’s never gotten around to putting in photo albums, boxes of letters and treasured Christmas cards she will never live to wade through, the furniture that she replaced with the contents of my parents’ home but couldn’t bear to throw out, clothes that she hasn’t worn in twenty or thirty years.