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father to let you?”
    “Look, Mary Rose, he just won’t. It’s no good. He always ends up saying it’s OK with him if it’s OK with her. And it’s never OK with her. So you better come, as usual.”
    “But, Pam, I just have to find that box. I’ve been looking for it all week, and tomorrow I’ll finish in the attic, and if it’s not there I’ll have to look in the basement. If I find it, then I’ll come, but otherwise, I want to keep on looking.”
    “But, Mary Rose, you can’t be looking for it all the time. If you don’t find it tomorrow, take the weekend off, and then start looking again on Monday.”
    “I can’t, Pam. I just can’t wait that long. I have to find it.”
    Pam was quiet.
    “Pam?” I said.
    “I’ve been thinking about you coming all week,” Pam said. “I have a new baby mouse for my Mouse House. I thought we could make some clothes for him, and some baby furniture. And my mother said she would take us swimming at the country club.”
    “Pam, you know I love to be with you. There’s nobody in the whole world I love as much as you. I wish I could live with you all the time, but I just have to find that box.”
    “No,” said Pam, “you don’t love me best in the world. You love somebody who’s been dead thirty years better than me. You love Mary Rose better than me.” And she hung up.
    I thought about what she said, and I thought she was being silly. Maybe I did love Mary Rose, but Mary Rose was dead. The way you feel about somebody who was dead was different from how you feel about somebody who was alive. You could always love somebody who was dead, and you never had to worry about how that person felt about you. That person wasn’t going to get mad at you if you didn’t look for her box over the weekend. But a living person was going to get mad if you didn’t show up.
    I didn’t find Mary Rose’s box on Friday, but I decided to go back with Uncle Stanley on Friday night.
    “I’m glad you changed your mind,” he said, while we were driving back. They live just over the George Washington Bridge, in Tenafly. “Pam will be very happy you’re coming. She sure was mopey last night. Why didn’t you want to come?”
    “I wanted to come, Uncle Stanley,” I said. “I always want to come. There’s nothing I’d rather do than be with Pam. I just wish we could see each other all the time.”
    Just for a second, Uncle Stanley turned to smile at me. “I’m glad the two of you like each other so much. I guess it must run in the family. Your mother and I were very close when we were children. I used to follow her wherever she went. I thought she was the greatest person in the world.”
    “And Mary Rose too?”
    “What?”
    “I mean—I guess you felt that way about Mary Rose too,” I said.
    “I never let her out of my sight,” Uncle Stanley said.
    “Mary Rose?”
    “No, your mother, I mean. She used to get so angry at me. She’d yell and stamp her foot and shake her fist. But she never hit me, and God help anybody who did!”
    “She’s still like that,” I said. “She yells a lot, but she hardly ever hits. But Uncle Stanley, did Pam tell you why I wasn’t going to come this weekend?”
    “No, she didn’t.”
    “Well, it was because I was looking for Mary Rose’s box. You know, the one you carried out of the building the night of the fire.”
    “Oh!” Uncle Stanley said. He didn’t say anything else.
    “Grandma said it was a shoe box full of things Mary Rose collected. She said she thought it was up in the attic or down in the basement, but so far I haven’t been able to find it.”
    Uncle Stanley switched on the radio. For a while we listened to the six o’clock news. After the weather forecast, I said, “Uncle Stanley?”
    “Yes?”
    “Was it a shoe box? I mean, maybe it was another kind of box, and I’m just looking for the wrong kind of box.”
    “I don’t remember what kind of a box it was.”
    “Do you remember what was in it?”
    “No, I