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had any firewood, which she didn’t. So she’d washed in icy water and then dressed, driven down to Dudley Road, bought a jumbo coffee at an upscale café she didn’t recall having been there before and started making telephone calls.
    By ten that morning she had the gas turned on. That meant not only heat for the house, but a working stove and oven and hot water for bathing. The phone company hooked her up, but although the electrical company had promised she’d have power by the evening, she was still in the dark.
    She could survive without electricity. The air in the unheated garage shed was cold enough to keep her milk and fruit from spoiling, and the house could be lit with candles and her mother’s blown-glass oil lamp. In fact, she liked the way the candles and the oil lamp gave the place a mystical ambience, all those flickering golden flames creating tiny spheres of shimmering light.
    After dinner, she sat in her candlelit living room, sipping a glass of wine and contemplating her surroundings. The furniture was massive, well suited to the massive dimensions of the room. The tables and upholstered pieces were old and faded but in generally good condition. She was amazed her mother had thought to cover everything when she’d closed up the house five years ago. Her mother usually didn’t think that far ahead.
    If Filomena had been able to afford it, she would have arranged for a professional service to come in and clean the place. But given the debts she’d inherited, she didn’t want to waste money on that. Once she had electricity, she would find out if the vacuum cleaner in the upstairs closet still worked. If it did, she could clean the floors herself. Dusting and washing windows certainly fell within her range of abilities. The yard was a mess, but in mid-November she wasn’t sure what a landscaper could possibly do to make it look better. Maybe it didn’t matter. By the time she put the house on the market in January, the ground might be covered with snow, and the unkempt grass, scattered leaves and overgrown bushes would be concealed.
    She took another sip of wine, held it on her tongue and then swallowed, feeling it warm her all the way down to her stomach. She’d found a full rack of Bordeaux in the cellar, thickly layered in dust. Twenty-four bottles, none of them less than ten years old. She wondered what they were worth—enough to pay off some of her mother’s debts?
    It didn’t matter. The house sale would cover the debts. She was going to keep the wine for herself. The bottle she’d opened had aged magnificently, and even if she wasn’t quite the connoisseur her father had been, she appreciated a good wine. She could still remember some ofthe things her father had taught her about wines when she’d been a child. He used to explain about color and balance and bouquet, and then he’d let her take a tiny sip from his glass. Wine had tasted peculiar to her then, but she’d felt naughty and very mature drinking it.
    She didn’t feel so mature now. Impractical and abandoned was more like it. She was twenty-seven years old, working on a Ph.D. dissertation for a degree that was never going to land her a job—and she was an orphan. An orphan . God, that sounded strange.
    Actually, it sounded awful.
    Her father had been eighty-three when he’d died. She’d grieved for him but taken comfort in knowing he’d lived a long full life. Her mother had been only fifty-five, though. Way too young.
    â€œYou died happy, at least,” Filomena murmured into the candlelit room. “You died doing what you loved, Mom, didn’t you?”
    She sighed. If she didn’t get electricity soon, if she didn’t get to work scrubbing the house from floor to ceiling, if she didn’t get her CD player plugged in so she could listen to music while she whipped the place into shape, she was going to sink into a maudlin state.