“And berries. These dark-red berries. If you crush them, they make this sort of thick viscous dye!”

Now I put down the phone and turned to where my mother’s braid throbbed on the bed. Even I knew it was too damning to keep. I took my orange-handled shearing scissors from the pencil cup on the dresser and walked over to the bed.

In the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet, squatting down so no hair would fly away. I began to slowly slice the braid into bits small enough to flush.

For her colon surgery, they had had to shave what hair was left from her pubic area. Tucking her in at night, I’d think how we had come full circle. “It’s like handling a giant baby,” I said to Natalie. “When she’s too tired to fight, she just collapses onto me, as if we hadn’t been battling each other for half a century.”

Natalie listened to me and asked questions. Her parents were younger than mine by a decade and had moved into an assisted-living community on the edge of a perpetually flooded golf course. Her mother had stopped drinking and become the leader of the community’s pep step class. What will I tell Natalie? I wondered.

At the thought of this, I nicked my finger with the scissors. Blood and hair floated on the surface of the water. When I was done with the braid, I stood and flushed the toilet, waiting for it to resettle and then flushing it again. I made a mental note to squirt in some Soft Scrub later to clean under the rim.

I remembered taking my mother to the doctor. The blankets, the towels, the constant cajoling, and how once she arrived and removed her wrappings, no one knew she was anything but just a little fearful and strange. She might moan and scratch, but when we hit the entrance door, she performed.

I was present at a rectal examination of my mother when, calling back to her long-held notions of hospitality, she tried to distract the young intern from what he was doing by telling him the story of the meticulous restoration of Jefferson’s Monticello, which she had read about in Smithsonian magazine. I sat nearby in the visitor’s chair, helpless. The intern, a West Indian, was too polite to continue the examination while my mother chattered on. The result was that our visit took a very long time.

When I stepped into the walk-in closet, I could hear Jake’s voice coming up through the floorboards, but I couldn’t make the words out. Denied the braid, I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser I kept in the closet and took out the rose-petal-pink slip.

I walked downstairs in my old black sweater and jeans. I had let the slip fall over my hips like a tunic. Since I made my living taking off my clothes, the ones I wore to and from Westmore were barely noticed. And it would be an outfit Sarah might like when she came.

Jake was standing in the kitchen, knocking back shots.

“Well, I’ve told Emily,” he said.

“You what?”

“I didn’t tell her the gruesome details,” he said, “just that her grandmother’s dead. I needed to talk to her. I was supposed to go up there at the beginning of next week.”

“Oh,” I said. I was aware of the shape of my mouth as I said it.

“She won’t be coming out.”

I thought of Leo slipping through my mother’s fingers, tumbling down, and the sound of his soft skull against the edge of the chair. Emily had called me after she’d returned home. “I don’t blame you, Mom, and it’s not just Leo. I can’t be around Grandma anymore.”

“Good for her,” I said, though I couldn’t help but take it as rejection.

Jake began to tell me more. About Emily saying she was sorry for me and that she hoped this would mark a transitional period toward self-empowerment and other of the yin-and-yang-speak that I knew both she and Jake believed in. My eyes drifted over to the empty bird feeder hanging in the dogwood tree above the drained and barren birdbath. I watched it swing slightly in the breeze. It seemed to mock my lack of motherliness, a hollow plastic tube bereft of food.

Emily had been in love with being a mother since the moment her eldest, Jeanine, was conceived. I’d watched her pick her children up and bury her nose in the space between their heads and necks just to breathe in the scent of them.

“Why are you here?” I asked Jake. “Really.”

Jake screwed the cap on the vodka bottle and walked it over to the antique liquor cabinet that my mother had passed on to me after my father’s death.

“Because you are the mother of my children,” he said. His back was to me. He placed the phone on top of the bottles and then grabbed the pillow from the sideboard and put it inside too. I didn’t know if this made me feel less insane or more, Jake being so careful to replace things just the way they were.

“And,” he said, turning, “I hated your mother for how she treated you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Where is her braid?”

“How much vodka did you have?” I asked.

“Enough. The braid?”

“I cut it up and flushed it down the toilet.”

“Good.”

“Did Emily know you were drinking?” I asked.

The first time I’d walked into Emily’s house in Washington, it was a one-two punch. First, I noted that the entire house had wall-to-wall white carpeting and that I was not allowed to wear my shoes past the foyer, and second, when I asked for a drink, I was told that they kept no alcohol.

“She chose to believe me when I told her it was grief,” said Jake.

“Lying?”

“You are having your usual effect on me.”

“Which is?”

“Not good.”

I smiled. Jake had pulled me in the direction of faith in the world, and I had pulled him toward a place where daggers awaited behind every smiling face. At some point we’d snapped apart like a doll made from nothing but opposable parts.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“What’s next?!”

“You seem to be in control,” I said. “Let’s do this your way.”

“We call the police.”

“I thought you didn’t like that choice,” I said.

“I didn’t, but I think you’re right. We say that you found your mother like that last night but waited until I arrived to call them. We should do it now. I’ve already been here half the morning.”

“If we’re doing this,” I said, “I’d like to go back to the house and clean up.”

“You’re worried about housekeeping?”

“I want to see her again,” I said. I winced at his expression of disbelief. It wasn’t as if he were suggesting anything.

“Get your coat. I have a rental car, but you should probably drive.”

Just as we were dressed and ready, Jake caught my hand and squeezed.

Outside on the concrete path leading to the driveway, I pictured driving Jake’s car just beyond Hamish’s house and having him meet me. It was a red Chrysler convertible and very low-tech, but without youth on my side and after perhaps being accused of murder, I could use it to distract him. A bauble.

I drove out the entrance of the subdivision. For a while Jake and I were silent. But when I hit Pickering Pike and started heading toward Phoenixville, I saw Jake begin to take notice of the area.

“God,” he said, “it’s like nothing has changed here. It feels frozen in time.”

I was reviewing my mother’s kitchen in my mind. The scattered plastic containers and the scissors on the floor might, I thought, be seen as elements in a failed robbery.

We drove by the VFW next to the lumberyard. “Wait until you see Natalie’s house,” I said. “She has three en suite bathrooms!”

“What will you tell her?”

“I’d like to be able to tell Natalie the truth,” I said.

“You know you can’t, Helen.”

I didn’t respond. I thought suddenly of the Edgar Allan Poe story in which someone was buried inside a wall, alive.

“I’m the only one, Helen. Me. No one else.”

“Natalie knows how I felt about my mother.”

“Maybe so, but this is different. You’ve gone beyond where most people go. This isn’t something you share.”