My grandmother almost never read aloud to me, but she regularly took me to the library—I read and reread the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and both the Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series—and my grandmother often summarized the grownup books she’d read in tantalizing ways: A well-bred married woman falls in love with a man who is not her husband; after her husband learns of the betrayal, she has no choice but to throw herself in the path of an oncoming train . . .

Such plots infused my grandmother’s bedroom with an atmosphere of intrigue enhanced by her few but carefully chosen belongings, my favorite of which was a bust of Nefertiti that rested on her bureau. The bust had been given to my grandmother by her friend Gladys Wycomb, who lived in Chicago, and it was a replica of the ancient Egyptian one by the sculptor Thutmose. Nefertiti wore a black headdress and a jeweled collar, and she gazed forward with great composure. Her name, my grandmother explained, translated as “the beautiful woman has come.”

Beside the bust were framed pictures: a photograph of my grandmother as a girl in a white dress, standing next to her parents in 1900 (so very long ago!); one of my parents at their wedding in which my father wore his army uniform and my mother wore a double-breasted sheath dress (though the photo was black and white, I knew because I’d asked my mother that her dress was lavender); a photo of my grandmother’s deceased husband, my grandfather, whose name had been Harvey and who was caught here squinting into the sun; and finally, one of me, my class picture from second grade, in which I was smiling a bit frantically, my hair parted in the center and pulled into pigtails.