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forgotten what she was crying for. But when she turned her reddened eyes up to me, I saw within them a clarity that I had not seen for years.
    “He’s gone,” she whispered, her fingers like claws as she hooked them into the sweater. Tears fell down withered cheeks but she didn’t blink or take her gaze away from me. She let go of the sweater and grabbed my hands, her fingers cold and brittle. She leaned toward me and very quietly whispered so close to my face that I could feel her puffs of breath. “Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to.”
    My grandmother looked away and let go of my hands, distracted now. She leaned back against her pillows and closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy,” she said, keeping her eyes closed.
    I wasn’t ready for her to go to sleep yet. I leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Who’s Lillian, Grandmother? Who’re Lillian and Josie and Freddie?”
    Her eyes rolled violently under her lids but she didn’t open them. Instead she turned her face away from me, but I saw her hand tighten into a fist before tucking it under her chin.
    “Grandmother?” I whispered.
    She didn’t move. I stayed on the edge of her bed for a long time, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest with a growing sense of unease—the same feeling one gets upon leaving home for a long trip and knowing something has been forgotten.
    Finally, I stood and leaned over to kiss her cheek. I startled when her hand closed around my wrist and her eyes opened. “My box,” she said. “I put it in my box but now I can’t find it.”
    “What box?” I asked, remembering the smell of summer grass and the feel of dark earth in my hands and knowing the answer already.
    But she had closed her eyes again, her breathing settling into the reassuring rhythm of a peaceful sleep. I touched her cheek, vainly seeking a connection with this woman who had raised me, and wishing again that I had never read her letters or discovered the light blue baby’s sweater in the trunk.

    I didn’t even pause to change my clothes or shoes when I returned home. I did stop in the kitchen to gulp down two pain pills, not really bothering to wonder if I was doing so from habit or just from the need to soften the edges of reality for a while. Then I went directly to the gardening shed and pulled out my grandfather’s shovel, then made my way through to the back garden to the spot where I remembered burying my grandmother’s box.
    I considered for a moment calling George, but the thought of his overeager smile and his insistence that I think about my life made me hesitate. If I found that my back and knee wouldn’t allow me to use a shovel, then I’d take another pain pill before calling George for help.
    After swatting at the sand flies that had begun to swarm around my neck and ankles, I lifted the shovel high, stabbing the earth with the tip as I’d seen my grandfather do, and gritting at the wave of pain that grabbed my spine. I wasn’t used to doing more than walking around in my house and leaning over a computer desk at various libraries as I researched, despite the insistence of George, my grandfather, and my physical therapist that I be more active. Using my good leg, I pressed down with the heel of my foot and embedded the entire head of the shovel in the dusty ground of my back garden.
    Starting to feel the light-headedness I associated with my medication, the pain seemed to ebb, its edges soft and bubbly like that of an oncoming wave sliding onto shore. I wiped a bead of sweat that had begun to drip down my forehead, then lifted the shovel with a full load of dirt and dumped it behind me.
    It didn’t take long; the hole had only been as deep as the shallow box required. But by the time the shovel finally hit metal my blouse and pants clung to my skin with sweat and I had begun to see spots before my eyes.
    I knelt in the sparse weeds beside the gaping wound in the earth and reached inside for the tin box, my