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at me again, then disappears inside the church.
    A few minutes pass before a young woman comes down the front steps of the church. The man in the blue suit returns. He says something to her and they both turn to look at me. There is suspicion on his face. He checks the padlock again. We live in crazy times; I suppose someone might break into the glass cupboard and change the letters of the sermon title to spell some obscenity. The young woman at his side is lovely. She has come outside with no coat on and there issomething interesting about her dress. It is pale pink, ruffled, with puffy short sleeves and a big bow in back. A child’s Easter dress and she is spilling out of it.
    She walks down the cement walkway and up to the car. She has a movie-star face with rouged and sculpted cheekbones, wide-set blue eyes, lots of curls. I roll down the window. She wants to know if she can help me. She leans into the car window a little, her breasts resting against the bottom of the window frame. I am already trying to think of what I can say so she won’t try to get me to join her church. I imagine that her stunning beauty once led her down the road to a wayward life, but now she is reformed and always on patrol for others who appear lost.
    I tell her quickly why I am here. That my mother was photographed in her wedding car outside this church in 1949, and a few days after my twin brother and I were born, she was in a hearse parked here. I show her the photograph. She studies the picture, then her eyes open wide.
    â€œWait a second,” she says. “What was your mother’s name?”
    When I tell her, everything falls into place. “Yes,” she says, “the young mother with twin boys. Someone puts flowers on the altar for her every year, the same Sunday every August.”
    â€œShe died in August,” I tell her. She listens to me with a serene and benevolent expression. I am looking into her eyes when the man in the stiff blue suit comes for her. He stops on the cement walkway and calls for her. She smiles and wishes me luck. When she walks away the thought that I will never see her again fills me with an unreasonable sadness.
    â€œThe flowers,” I call to her. “Who gives the flowers for the altar every year?”
    She turns back to tell me she doesn’t know.
    .  .  .
    It is a twenty-minute drive to the town of Sellersville where the ambulance took my mother in the last hours of her life. But coming upon Grandview Hospital, I see that the building is too modern, too new to be the right place.
    The glass doors slide open to a foyer with tall floor-to-ceiling windows, an immaculate room furnished with comfortable chairs and couches. The place is deserted, the information desk unoccupied and the glass-fronted interior offices empty. The men’s room floor has been polished with something that gives off a familiar sweet smell and I stand there until I remember that the bathrooms in my elementary school smelled exactly like this.
    Out in the corridor now I can hear someone typing on a keyboard beyond the silence. She is a pleasant woman with a quick smile. “I’m holding down the fort,” she tells me.
    When I ask her where the old Grandview Hospital is, she walks to a window and points to a square three-story building across a parking lot. “It is a nursing school now,” she tells me.
    Walking toward the building I think of the nursing students filling the rooms. Someone up late at night studying for an exam. Someone far from home looking out the window my mother once looked out.
    Of course, because of the weekend the building is empty and the front doors are locked. I knock anyway, then step back to take it in. The doors are set back, up three steps, just inside an alcove, a rectangle made of rose granite. Cracks have been filled in with blond cement. The windows on all three floors are framed in granite as well. Above the center windows on the second