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keeping it extra warm because she is ill. She is a mass of gray hair on the bed looking exactly the color of one of the white charred logs in the fireplace. I wonder if when you live under these trees for so long you become partly tree. She turns a wrinkled tree bark face to us and then grins. She is missing quite a few key teeth. “NED!” she croaks.
    “Hi, Mary,” says Ned. He looks, all at once, shy. “I wasn’t sure you would recognize me.”
    “I didn’t recognize you. I knew you were coming. You’re changed now. You’re old. Felicity, Hershel, Max, Maya and Jane.” She says our names while looking down the line at us.
    I realize that Jim kept all our names straight when he told her, which impresses me because he only heard them once. I am thinking he is not only brawny but very smart. It startles me that she calls Ned old when she is so ancient herself. But maybe when she saw him he was such a young man. Or maybe she was trying to say old
er
. She talks in a halting way, needing large breaths to complete sentences, straining as if afraid that any second she will lose the ends of words.
    “Whatcha doing here, Ned?” she asks. Then she closes her eyes. As if she needs to rest after sentences too.
    “They said when you were sick you kept calling for me,” says Ned.
    “I don’t remember. I don’t remember the hospital much, Ned. Except the food. Bad food.”
    “Nobody likes hospital food,” says my mother. You can tell she is trying to find consoling thingsto say. I think she would like to say consoling things to Ned too, this is so obviously hard for him. She rests her hand lightly on his upper arm.
    “Are you in pain?” asks Ned. Somehow this seems kind of personal to me. He hasn’t seen her in twenty years.
    Mary shakes her head and then she lies back with her eyes closed and we all glance at each other. Now what?
    “So you don’t remember calling me?” Ned tries again.
    Mary shakes her head.
    “Oh.”
    It is hard to know where to go with this. I look at Maya anxiously. I am afraid she is going to burst out with some explosion about how we came all this way to see a dying person who doesn’t know what we’re doing here. But Maya is just looking cowed by circumstances. The boys are getting fidgety, though.
    “Well, maybe I will take the boys outside,” says my mother, but doesn’t.
    “Uh, I don’t know what to say,” says Ned. “I mean, I came because they said you called me.”
    “How many years has it been, Ned? Since you lived here.”
    “Oh, about twenty, I guess,” says Ned. You can see everyone deflating. It is very hard to know how to feel when you’ve been feeling noble and now it turns out you’ve done a completely unnecessary thing and wasted a lot of gas to do it, not to mention tossed a family out of their nice warm cabin so you could sleep there.
    “Twenty years,” says Mary. “Goes by fast. But Jim told you …” She stops and breathes again loudly with a whispery sound as if her lungs are full of old paper.
    Ned waits. We all wait. It seems the polite thing to do but she doesn’t say anything and we get twitchy. You have no idea how long a few minutes can last until you have stood next to a dying woman politely waiting for her to finish her sentence.
    Finally Ned says, “Jim told me what, Mary?”
    “Jim told you … who … came to us,” she gasps.
    “Someone I know?” prompts Ned.
    Mary nods and then there is another long waitwhile she breathes her rattling breath. I am sorry but at this point I want to shout, What is this? Twenty questions?
    We wait some more. Nobody even moves in case it distracts her.
    “Who came to the camp?” asks Ned when it is clear Mary needs another prompt.
    There is another long wait while she slowly opens her eyes. She shifts herself slightly upward on her pillows and looks into Ned’s eyes for a long time before she says, “Your brother.”

Back on the Road
    W ell, that’s a conversation stopper, as you can imagine.