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he’d phrased that question. “How old are you?” she countered. “In your ad, you don’t say.”
    “Thirty-nine. Just.”
    There was a pause. She didn’t have any other questions, and she was pretty sure he didn’t either.
    He cleared his throat. “I’ve found it’s better to make a clean, quick break when there seems to be, as they say, no chemistry, so—”
    “Oh, I think that’s best, too,” Caddie broke in, “just get it over with.” The end was coming up fast, and she was not going to be dumped byByron. This was a two-way breakup. “It’s really been nice talking to you, though. Good luck and everything. I hope you find—”
    “Yes, indeed. Bye.”
    She put her head in her lap and moaned quietly for a while. It could’ve been worse, he could’ve been a stalker. He still could be, in theory, and this was how he threw his victims off, by rejecting them. But something told her she was safe from Byron for the rest of her life.
    She went to bed early, but she couldn’t sleep. Nana didn’t snore or mutter or get up and down in the night, so the house shouldn’t have sounded so weirdly, unnaturally quiet. Every random creak made her start. Finney, too. He lay with his head on her shin, blinking at her in the moonlight. “You miss Nana, don’t you? Want to go see her? One of these days?” He scooted up and pushed his head under her arm. “But they have cats. Cats, ” she repeated, to test him, and sure enough, his ears cocked. “I’ll have to call Brenda first to clear the way. They have rules. Rules. ” Nothing.
    Oh God, oh God, she was going to turn into an old lady who talked to her dog. “Go sleep in Nana’s room,” she ordered, edging Finney off the bed with her hip. “Go on. You’re not allowed up here anyway.” He hit the floor with an offended thump, his nails making a skittery sound when he trotted out of the room. A few minutes later he tiptoed back in and hopped up on the foot of the bed so gently she had to open her eyes to make sure he was there.
    She lay still, taking deep, slow breaths, pretending she was asleep. So he wouldn’t think she was a pushover.
    Some first night. She’d done all right on her own, she guessed, indulged herself, altered her personal space, made a few good resolutions for the future. Where she’d fallen down was in the reaching-out-to-others department, the part she couldn’t control. She watched moon shadows creep up the wall, heard the snap of her digital clock when P.M. turned into A.M. “Don’t miss me,” Nana had commanded her. Truthfully, she wasn’t doing too hot in that department, either.

4
    “They’re starting this big memory book,” her grandmother called to say one day after she’d been at Wake House for about two weeks. “Everybody has to write out their life story, tell how it was back in the good old days. ‘We Remember’ or some such thing. They’re going to keep it on the table in the front hall.”
    “I know,” Caddie said, “I was there when Brenda suggested it, don’t you remember?” Cornel, the grumpy old guy, had wanted to call it “We Can’t Remember.”
    “Well, of course I do, I was there, too, wasn’t I? So I want you to type one up for me when you get time. Make me sound important.”
    “Type one up?”
    “It doesn’t have to be long. But not short, either. I’m seventy-nine years old, I’ve got a history.”
    “So just…”
    “When I was born, where I went to school, my accomplishments. Like an obituary, except I’m not dead.”
    “Um, okay, I guess I can do that.”
    “How come you’re not over here by now?”
    “No, remember, I’m coming tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow, that’s right. Well, too late now anyway, never mind.”
    “Too late for what?”
    “Today this preacher comes over, not a real one, a ‘lay preacher,’ callshimself—now I’m thinking why didn’t I do that, become a ‘lay preacher’ when I was young, that’s something I’d’ve been good at, a natural, I