Helen and her husband had bought the small, white house on Farmington Road only four months before a heart attack took him, quickly and quietly in the garden. He was 59. Helen had found him in the yard of their old house on Maple Street, lying at the edge of the garden by the raspberry bushes, an impenetrable mass of leaves, small thorns, and hard pink berries that wouldn’t be ready to pick for another month. It was only June, and the raspberries needed until at least the Fourth of July to ripen properly.

She remembered having nearly fainted at the sight of him. She’d tripped awkwardly through the neat rows of carrots, beets, and cabbage till she reached the post of the garden gate. Here she propped herself up in frozen panic, catching her breath before she could shout for help and rush over to where her husband lay. He was warm. She’d heard her daughter running through the yard. The dog burst into the garden, ran over to Helen’s husband, and stared with confusion at what looked and smelled like his master but was missing something. He turned away and began to root beneath the raspberry bushes for mice. Helen heard the ambulance’s wail from down the road.

Eight years after his death, she was still living in Pittsford in the house they’d bought, filling in her husband’s empty spaces with her 10-year-old granddaughter, Faye, who had come to stay after her mother, Helen’s daughter, needed some time alone to get back on her feet after a second—and quite unexpected—divorce. Faye had dutifully shown up at her grandmother’s door one afternoon in late summer, behaving as though it were just a weekend visit, apparently unfazed when it stretched on for several months while her mother was busy finding herself somewhere in northern California.

Helen cried out in sleep for her dead husband, a soft wailing that often woke Faye, who would grow up believing that this was an entirely normal thing to hear in the middle of the night. Faye would stir softly, maybe readjust her pillow or tug her blankets up higher around her shoulders, then fall back into dreams.

For years Helen lived in complete ignorance of what was on average a twice-weekly occurrence. Not until Faye was a teenager, long since having moved back in with her mother, would she ever mention any of this to Helen. This delayed discussion wasn’t due to any well-meaning attempt to spare Helen the soft pang of humiliation that comes with the recognition of one’s fallibility in the eyes of a younger family member. Rather, it had simply never occurred to Faye that this was anything worth mentioning, anything out of the ordinary. To her, it was simply one square in the patchwork of night sounds at her grandmother’s house: the wind through the trees, the cracking boom of thunder, the name of a man she’d never known sent through the wall in plaintive tones.

Helen’s husband had been distant, almost passively unkind, but she mourned his absence nonetheless. He’d defined her, and without him all of her insecurities and fears rose quickly to the surface. In old family films, silent and wobbly, the camera was fixed on him as he strolled handsomely down the driveway or worked in his garden. Helen (most often it was she who held the camera) filmed her husband laboring elegantly among the rows, pant legs tucked into stiff black Wellingtons, often wearing a dress shirt, and always standing up. Rarely did he crouch down to the earth. It was a very removed, clinical sort of gardening, but successful nonetheless.

At times the camera fell into other hands, and Helen herself was occasionally caught on film, made shy and apparently uncomfortable by the attention. She smiled and covered her mouth, hiding teeth that she’d always thought were too big. She never believed herself beautiful, and in later years would worry that she’d never done enough to help her children believe that they were beautiful either. In truth, it had never occurred to her at the time that this was one of the responsibilities of being a parent.

On occasion Helen had dinner with a man named Bill Boone, an old friend of her husband’s from Princeton. He would pick her up early on a Saturday evening, moving with little variation through the formalities of kissing her dryly on the cheek in greeting, opening the car door for her. They would head to Valvano’s, an Italian restaurant in the next town, an easy 15-minute drive past sprawling horse farms, old stone houses and small white churches with tall steeples. Once in a while they’d head north to have dinner at the country club to which Helen and her husband had belonged. She felt uncomfortable showing up there with Bill, though, worried that other members might think she’d replaced her husband too quickly, having no way to communicate that this man by her side was merely a companion, a stand-in for his old friend. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to have been pulling out Helen’s chair for her, placing her dinner order with the waiter, smiling at her across the white tablecloth. It was never supposed to be like this.

As the years went on, Bill’s eyesight began to wane, and his daughter would do the driving while Bill sat next to Helen in the back seat of the daughter’s small sedan. It was an arrangement that Helen found humiliating for everyone involved. She felt like a child, like some kind of useless passenger, somehow not proper enough.

The dinners with Bill always followed a certain pattern: talking about the menu; talking about old friends who had died, moved away, or gotten sick; talking about changes in the town. Helen would have a small glass of sherry with her meal. Every so often Bill would order a second Tom Collins, halfway through which he would lean in closer to Helen, suggesting with a smile that they might want to arrange to spend a longer evening together at some point. “Of course, I couldn’t do much,” he’d say shyly, “but it would be nice to just lie there with you.”

Helen, who found the whole prospect extraordinarily unsettling, would fuss with her napkin, affect her most accommodating smile, and direct the conversation elsewhere. She’d never had to know the shame of bedroom failure with her husband and had no interest in being introduced to it by this stooped, white-haired man who couldn’t even drive a car at night. On nights following such a proposal, Bill would invariably place his cold, gouty hand on Helen’s knee as his daughter drove them home.

Helen found Faye to be a surprisingly easy and pleasant charge. Each night, she would fix Faye dinner: macaroni and cheese, corned beef hash, sometimes a hamburger, and the two of them would sit quietly in front of the television in the living room, their meals on a small matching trays. Faye sat through programs that Helen thought oddly mature for a girl her age: heavy period dramas on PBS, or old black-and-white sitcoms the humor of which, to Helen’s mind, couldn’t possibly resonate with her young granddaughter. Faye was transfixed, though, lifting forkfuls of macaroni to her lips as canned laughter or Cockney accents drifted through the house.

Faye would sometimes spend afternoons with Helen in her bedroom, looking through her grandmother’s costume jewelry and trying on the long, dangly clip-on earrings that Helen had long since abandoned wearing. Often Faye wound all of Helen’s music boxes at once, producing a bright, tinkling confusion that might have sounded discordant to the unfamiliar ear. To Helen, though, who was able to recognize and isolate the various strains of Schubert, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the sound proved a delightful pastiche of music she had loved, an auditory scrapbook of her younger days.

The child had a delicate and respectful touch, and Helen never feared for the well-being of the objects with which she played. Only once, when Faye was much younger and visiting with her mother, had she attempted to take the clothing off of a small stuffed dog that Helen’s husband had brought back from a trip to Germany. It wore a tiny pair of lederhosen that Faye had managed to remove but couldn’t quite put back on correctly.

Helen had found her in tears, vainly yanking the dog’s pants on backwards, one leg through the tail hole, practically collapsed in penitential frustration. Helen was only mildly troubled by the dog’s undressing, more fixated as she was on her granddaughter’s reaction. It seemed to her maudlin, exaggerated, as though someone had told Faye how best to comport herself in order to elicit pity and not anger in her grandmother. As Helen correctly clothed the doll, accompanied by sounds of sniffling and whimpering, she thought about how silly she’d been to assign such calculations to the small child.

Helen’s husband had been an avid stamp collector, and she’d often wondered if his innumerable trips to philately meetings were more about philandering, a way to connect with a lover in the safety of a mid-range hotel in some anonymous Midwestern city. She typically shrugged off such suspicion, reminding herself of the times that he’d invited her to come along to Buffalo for the statewide convention, or on a drive down South to pick up a rare stamp from a collector outside of Atlanta. He was handsome, there was no doubt, but she’d never been given sufficient cause to doubt his loyalty.

His invitations to come along notwithstanding, Helen resented these pastimes that so often took her husband from her. Theirs had been a time and place in which a man’s worth was measured not merely by his success at a noteworthy occupation, but in the quality of his leisure time as well. Her husband collected stamps, played golf, went big game hunting in Canada with Bill Boone and other old college friends. She’d wanted so badly to be included all those years, to drive across the state next to her handsome husband, humming along with the songs that played on the radio as they passed through small coastal towns, stopping for picnics along the way. She’d wanted to come along to Canada, as Bill Boone’s exuberant tomboy of a wife once had, and spend her days in front of the fire at the lodge, reading, maybe even snowshoeing along the trails that skirted the great dark forest where the men hid with guns.

There was something in Helen that held her back, though, gripping her as though with cords drawn tightly across her chest and bound to the front porch of the house. She always wanted so badly to be asked, to be included in her husband’s overseas junkets and weekend trips upstate, but no matter how firmly she’d set her mind to eagerly joining him the next time he asked, she would always hear the same words come out of her mouth as if from some other, disappointingly unenthusiastic woman: “Not this time, dear, but thank you for thinking of me.” Eventually, he stopped asking.

Now, her husband gone, Helen was left with the souvenirs and relics of 30 years of travel in tireless pursuit of business and diversion. She had photo albums of her husband and his friends holding long shotguns in front of white-roofed hunting lodges; she had soft, wool sweaters in many colors, emblazoned with the crests of St. Andrews and Gleneagles; she had a Russian lacquered box, the stuffed dog from Germany, and a Japanese netsuke of dull green jade—a small cat curled tightly into a ball, its head tucked beneath its tail as though hiding.

On the bottom shelf of her bookcase she kept his stamp collection, painstakingly organized by her husband into seven heavy leather volumes. This hobby was his most solitary and the one from which she felt most excluded. It seemed to take him away from her more and more in the later years, the years during which he no longer made any overtures toward an invitation to join him. It was during his last year at a Northeast regional collectors’ meeting that Helen had called what she’d been certain had been his hotel room number, only to hear a woman’s voice answer on the other end, gaily inquiring, “Hello? Hello? Who is this, please?”

Faye wasn’t allowed to play with the stamps herself, but occasionally Helen would pull a volume off the shelf and she and her granddaughter would sit quietly at the desk, Helen slowly turning the pages while Faye looked but didn’t touch. Lacking any apparent genetic predisposition for the hobby, Faye’s interest would wane and she would ask her grandmother permission to look at her charm bracelets, or to play with the wooden cigarette box that played “Easter Parade” when its lid was opened. On the lid was a small and faded painting of a woman in a towering flowered hat. For Faye, the sweet smell of unlit cigarettes would become inextricably connected with this song. At a friend’s wedding years later, she would hear the first few notes and for one brief moment the unmistakable honey-sweet smell of tobacco would permeate the air of the musty old ballroom that had been rented out for the occasion. In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, you’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter Parade.

On a gray fall afternoon, after rinsing out her teacup in the sink, Helen tightened her shawl around her shoulders and headed into her sitting room, where she’d laid out her bills the night before. She opened a volume marked “Domestic 1935–1945” and gently lifted a faded green airplane from its onionskin pocket. The adhesive on the stamp had long since dried up, so she dabbed a bit of mucilage on the envelope of her October phone bill, squeezing a single, golden drop from the crusty rubber top of the bottle.

Helen held the antique stamp above the envelope. In that moment of hesitation she felt a powerful stillness, a present quality unlike any she could remember feeling. In this moment, the tiny square of paper held aloft above the phone bill, Helen felt a kind of control, as though life weren’t constantly just out of her grasp, taunting her with its various and enticing impossibilities. She brought the stamp close to her face and inspected the plane’s details. Twenty cents. Air Mail. She admired the careful detail of the image, the subtle coloring, wondering if she, too, might have been interested in stamp collecting if she’d taken a moment to consider its appeal. She thought of all the journeys that she might have taken, to American cities and to destinations requiring Air Mail postage, of plane rides and foreign men asking intriguing questions. If not for that voice inside of her that whispered: Stay. Stay right here where it’s warm and constant.

Helen slipped the old airplane stamp back into its pocket and began to rummage through her desk for current postage. The rates seemed to increase with each passing year. Shaking her head, she poked through a small box of paper clips, return address labels, and stamps of odd denominations until she found what she needed.

With a creak of the front door She stepped out onto the porch and down the cement steps to the mailbox. Soon she would have to call someone to come by and switch out the screens with storm windows. It was something her husband had always done in order to shield Helen from the Eastern winters, a tangible way in which he demonstrated his protectiveness. Or maybe, Helen thought as she slipped the envelope into the mailbox and lifted the flag, maybe it was only to keep her comfortably quiet, to create the illusion that all was well in the home, to make it a place she’d want to stay. Or perhaps it was as simple as keeping the heating bills down.

She walked back up into the house and peered down the street before closing the screen door behind her. Faye’s bus would be coming soon, and Helen thought she might try to engage her granddaughter in something besides costume jewelry and music boxes. Faye was getting old enough, Helen thought, that she might like to look through some of the old photo albums, to see the pictures of the places that her grandfather had visited, her mother as an infant, and the old house on Maple Street. She leaned down and straightened the doormat, pushing it flush against the house where its faded letters called out a faint welcome.

That afternoon they read nearly 20 pages of Sara Crewe, and afterwards Helen joined Faye in a game of the girl’s choosing. She’d failed in nearly ever attempt to turn Faye on to backgammon or cribbage and generally resisted playing the games that Faye’s mother had sent out for her: boxes bearing images of happy families, with foolish titles and complex rules. Faye chose a game from the shelf and set it out on the table in Helen’s sitting room.

The board was bright and stiff from lack of use, covered with numbers and words, and some kind of woodland theme. Faye reached immediately for a red squirrel and placed it firmly in the corner of the board labeled “Start.” Helen picked up a yellow bird, sighing as she compared its weight to the satisfying heft of the backgammon pieces that lay in their case just yards away. Her initial disinclination melted softly as she watched her granddaughter move the small, plastic pieces across the board. Here, Helen realized, was a girl wrapped up in nothing but childhood. Faye, lips pursed and eyes narrowed, rolled a die and surveyed her options, her strategy unfolding.