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floor the words nurses’ home are carved in tall scrolled letters. There is a flat roof above the third floor.
    Around the back of the building just outside a rear door there is a picnic table. Cigarette butts beneath it.
    Peering in through the glass door I see a man walking the corridor pushing a broom. It takes him a while to hear me and when he comes to the door he tells me through the glass that the place is closed until Monday morning.
    â€œMy mother died here almost fifty years ago, and I’ve driven all the way from Maine,” I tell him. My voice is hoarse but loud, as if yelling into a dark tunnel.
    There is that split second of doubt and fear that surrounds all chance encounters with strangers nowadays. But then he lets me in. When I show him the photograph and tell him the story, he raises one finger in the air and tells me to follow him.
    Another old photograph, this one from a desk drawer in a first-floor office. We take it outside and he holds it to match our perspective. I feel a chill run through me. The cedar trees in front of us my mother would have seen as she was carried inside. Her last glimpse of the outside world.
    â€œWait a minute,” the man says cheerfully. “I can do better than this.”
    Inside he makes a telephone call. Then a second call to a woman who used to work here. I am listening to him explaining to the woman why he is calling. “… He says his mother died here in 1950.”
    â€œAugust,” I tell him. “My mother had just given birth to twins.”
    He tells her then pauses suddenly. He turns to me, looks out over the tops of his glasses and says, “Twin boys?”
    The twins whose mother died; the woman remembers at once.
    But we are in the wrong building. The nurses’ home was never a hospital.
    .  .  .
    Back in Hatfield, I stop at a 7-Eleven to ask directions to the cemetery. A teenager with a nose ring and a ponytail says, “The Lutheran cemetery?”
    I’m surprised by this, that a young person would know the religious affiliation of a particular cemetery. “There’s more than one cemetery in town?” I ask.
    â€œDown there,” he tells me. “Hang a right on Penn Street.”
    Coming upon it I can see the grave markers in the distance.
    A flat stretch of pasture behind a dump of old railroad ties and a rusted-out factory that once made something before America began manufacturing only debt. I park at the entrance and walk in a ways. Many of the graves belong to soldiers. Young boys who died in places far from here. Their graves are marked by tiny American flags. The Peterson boy could have read my mother’s name carved in a desk at school. The Schultz boy might have watched her walking through town before he left for the war in France.
    Of all things unexpected, I come upon my father’s name first. Written on the face of a stone buried flat in the ground. RICHARD SNYDER . My father for certain, the boy whose mother gave him no middle name. It comes as a shock to me that they share a stone. The plot is so narrow, he will have to be buried on top of her.
    His name is on the left of the stone and below it, the year of his birth, 1926, and a space awaiting the year of his death. To the right on the same stone, PEGGY L. SNYDER . 1931–1950.
    A line of geese crosses the sky. A low breeze makes the tiny flags tremble.
    I picture my father on the day of the funeral. How he must have wanted never to leave this place, to crawl into the earth with her, his heart set upon going along with her. My twin brother and me at home a few blocks away waiting for him to return. The house on Market Street so close he could have heard us crying during the funeral service.
    I see my father here with his head bowed, his eyes open to the pile of dirt that will cover her.
    I kneel down in the brown grass and the pine cones. I have been returning here all my life. I have returned to a place I’ve