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would have thought I’d get so excited about that?”
    She smiled, “Good for the soul.” She bustled about, taking the batter she mixed the night before from the fridge and placing it in paper-lined muffin tins. I had known better than to do this for her. She has precise ideas about how much dough makes the perfect muffin.
    “I meant to ask you last night if you knew how sick Mrs. Riordan is. I’m wondering what to expect when I get there.”
    She didn’t answer right away, and I looked up. She was holding a spoon with dough poised over the muffin tin. “Aunt Madge?”
    “Oh, yes. Ruth’s not too bad, yet. I mean,” she took a little dough out of one muffin cup and put it in another, “it’s terminal, unfortunately, but she was in church Sunday looking quite good. She’s taking chemo, but she’s on a break.”
    “Why’s she taking chemo if she’s not going to make it?”
    Aunt Madge shot me what novelists call a withering look. “It could buy her considerable time, months or a year, not weeks.”
    “Of course,” I said, appropriately chastened. I always wondered what I would do in that situation. Would I be willing to feel horrible for weeks at a time so that I would live longer, even if I knew I’d eventually kick the bucket? I guess it would depend on what was going on in my life. Mrs. Riordan must like her life at the moment, or at least she didn’t want to let go.
    “You know her pretty well, right?”
    “Yes. We’ve known each other through church, of course. Since she and her husband divorced we’ve done quite a bit together outside of church.” She smiled at me. “We’ve even gone to bingo at St. Anthony’s a couple of times.”
    “Did you win?”
    “Good heavens, no. It’s just money down the drain, but it’s kind of fun.” She smiled at me but her smile faded as my face must have shown I knew all about money going down the drain.
    To change the subject, I took her electric kettle to the sink and dumped out yesterday’s leftover water and began to fill it. “Is this what you use to fill the hot water thermos in the dining room?”
    She gestured toward the stove. “You can fill the tea kettle on the stove for that. And don’t ask me why I do it that way, I don’t know.” Miss Piggy ambled into the room from Aunt Madge’s bedroom and sniffed. “Not for you, dear,” Aunt Madge addressed her. “Would you let her out, Jolie? Mister Rogers is already out there somewhere.”
    I opened the door and Miss Piggy went out, still sniffing. In a moment she had spotted Mister Rogers and leaped down the steps. From the amount of nose-to-brick sniffing going on out there, I figured the rabbits had been out the night before. “I saw Mrs. Riordan’s son on the boardwalk and talked to him for a minute a couple days ago. He seemed a bit…distracted.”
    Aunt Madge glanced at me as she put the muffins in the oven. “I hear he has a lot on his mind.”
    “OK, it’s not gossip unless you embellish it,” I said, wanting to know more.
    “Well, in addition to Ruth dying, his wife left him a few weeks ago, and I hear he’s had a falling-out with some business partners.”
    “Wow.” That is a lot.
    “I suppose the up-side of it is that he’s able to spend some time with his mother. Ruth was forty when she got pregnant; she was more than a bit surprised, I can tell you. Anyway, since Ruth and Larry divorced several years ago, she’s really wanted to spend more time with Michael.”
    She set the timer for twenty minutes and continued. “Ruth also has a lot to talk to him about, and I think she wanted to do it in person.”
    “About her illness?” I asked.
    “About the house.” She took jars of jam from the fridge and began spooning some into small bowls. “Ruth isn’t going to sell the house, she…”
    “Why am I doing an appraisal then?” Aunt Madge’s look was enough to silence me and I made a zipping gesture across my lips.
    “She wants to give it to the local Arts Council to