This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
The room above the vacuum shop had been a dance studio once, and it still kept the shape of that: a maple floor gone soft at the seams, a mirror screwed flat to the far wall, a radiator that knocked twice and then gave up. Iris walked the long side with the dumb end of the tape and called out numbers I already knew.
"Twenty-two feet by sixteen," she said. She knelt and pressed her thumb into a board near the window, testing it. "The upright goes under the mirror. Bench, chair, one bookshelf, and you can still walk around the piano without turning sideways."
"Eleven hundred and fifty a month," I said. "Heat included. Mr. Kessler wants an answer before March, and he wants a deposit with the answer." I wrote the number on the back of a receipt, then wrote it again, larger, because writing it made it feel like something a person could actually arrange.
Iris stayed at the window with her back to me. Below us a man in a Cherry Hill parking lot was loading a crate of belts into a van, and she watched him the way people watch anything instead of answering. "The clinic offered me full time," she said. "Front desk. Benefits after ninety days. They want to know by the first."
Sixteen years I had taught in other people's living rooms. I knew the smells of them, the way a piano sat against a wall with a window over it so the student's hands went cold by November. I had taught in kitchens, in basements, once in a converted garage where the only heat came from a space heater I bought myself and left behind as a gift.
"You'd keep the clinic," I said. "Two evenings, Saturday mornings. We split the rent by however many students each of us brings. It's not charity, Iris, it's arithmetic."
"It's arithmetic until it isn't." She turned around. "You said that about the last thing, too, and then you carried me for four months and never once said so out loud. I'm not going to be your project, Aunt Lenora. If I'm in, I buy in."
That was the moment to be careful, and I felt myself miss it by inches. "Then buy in by June," I said. "I'll front the deposit and the first two months. If we're not filling the room by June, that's on me and it comes out of my own pocket, not yours."
She folded the tape measure and clicked the lock shut, and I could see her deciding something she wasn't going to share yet. "Bring me a number," she said. "A real one. What the room costs and what we can count on. Not a plan and not a hope. A number."
We went down the back stairs together and out into a cold, wet afternoon that smelled of rubber and street salt. She hugged me at her car and said she'd think about it, which from Iris means she has already thought about it and is waiting to see whether I mean what I say.
My mother's house was four streets away, and it was going to be somebody else's house by summer. Caleb had started on it in January, room by room, dropping off what the junk men wouldn't take and stacking what the family might want. That evening I had the back bedroom, which meant books, forty years of them, in boxes that had been packed once already and never opened.
Three shelves in, behind a row of Readers' Digest condensed novels, I found a quilt rolled tight and tied with brown twine. It was heavier than a quilt should be. I carried it to the hallway light, knelt on the carpet, and pulled the twine loose.
Inside was a canvas, unframed, nailed to a thin stretcher. A boy slept against a tree stump, a hoe resting diagonally across him, a dog curled beside him and a straw hat on the ground near his bare feet. I held the canvas under the ceiling bulb. It did not seem like a print. I had handled enough prints in other people's houses to notice a difference, though I could not have said who had painted this or when.
There was a signature lower right, and a date I had to tilt toward the light to read. My mother had never hung it. She had never mentioned it, and I could not tell you whether that meant it was nothing to her or too much, and there was nobody left to ask except Caleb, who would not know either.
On Tuesday I called the number on the card I'd been given at a gallery opening two summers back, a woman named Tessa Brindle who advised people about art and did not, the card said, sell it. Her assistant gave me Wednesday at ten. I wrote it on the receipt with the rent on it, underneath.
Then I called Iris. "I found something in the back bedroom," I said. "A painting. It might be worth something, and if it is, we do this properly — you and me, lease in both names." There was a pause long enough that I heard the radiator in her apartment ticking. "Wednesday," she said. "Tell me Wednesday."