She woke slowly; saw early morning light seeping through the curtains, heard birds twittering faintly outside.

She felt weak but at peace, the way an invalid feels after a long and debilitating illness has passed its crisis. She turned on her side to peer out the gap in the curtains, and when she had absorbed what she could see of the morning, her gaze transferred to the curtains themselves.

They were an olive green to match the bedspread. It dawned on Catherine that she didn’t like them, had never liked them. In fact, she hated olive green.

She would pick out new curtains, drive to Memphis and debate her choice with a saleswoman at an expensive shop.

I’ll buy something light and striped and open-weave. I’ll do it this weekend, she resolved. She swung out of bed and went to the louver-doored closet lining one wall of the bedroom. Her supply of clothes, most dating from her college days, barely filled one side of the vast closet.

And I’ll buy new clothes, too, she thought. Shoes. She eyed her bedroom slippers with disgust. How could she have kept those for so long?

She went down the dim hall to the kitchen, looking forward to her breakfast. It wasn’t until she saw the coffee pot, still dirty from the previous morning, that she remembered.

She sat abruptly on one of the bamboo chairs grouped around the breakfast table. She saw a hand lying in a pool of sunlight. Taking several deep breaths, she focused on the pattern of her robe until the worse had passed. With an immense and grim effort Catherine washed the coffee pot, filled it, and plugged it in. From the pile of library books in the living room, she picked an innocuous biography of an Edwardian lady and sat at the glass-and-bamboo table reading the first paragraphs very carefully until the coffee had perked. After she had poured her first cup, she returned to the book.

She staved off the image of Leona’s hand until she had finished three cups of coffee, two pieces of toast, and fifty pages of the lady’s opulent childhood.