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deaths not as tragedies but as foolishness. Both killed in stupid, preventable, ego-fueled accidents of their own making. They hadn’t been taken from her and her mother; they’d abandoned her and her mother. Dix had not. Miranda pulled on a pair of jeans and cinched them over her diminished frame. She went outdoors into the tentative sunshine of spring, knelt beside Dix, and wordlessly got to work. He smiled and made room for her at his side.
    In the following weeks, the energy that had been dormant in Miranda all winter came forth like a bright yellow daffodil from a bulb buried for months in the frozen ground. She found a bucket, filled it with soapy water, and began wiping down surfaces around the house. She stripped the beds, working around her mother when she would not rise, simply pushing her from side to side as she freed the sheets, leaving her sprawled across the bare mattress. She washed windows, threw out rancid food, got her hair trimmed, plucked her eyebrows, and asked Dix to make her a few raised beds where she could grow vegetables. Her head cleared. Her frame filled out. The house sparkled.
    Then, one day, the phone rang. A voice full of cigarettes, whiskey, and the past said her name.
    “Miranda, it’s Richard Stone.”
    She recalled wispy hair, pouchy cheeks, chino pants with boats embroidered on them, and alcohol-scented breath. Her father’s friend from Yale. A lawyer. The man who took care of her father’s affairs. She fought the urge to call him Mr. Stone, as she had when she was a child. She’d seen him briefly at her father’s funeral. She recalled how he had gripped her small hand in both of his large ones as he wept.
    “Hello, Richard,” Miranda said, her voice a question.
    “I’ve been trying to reach your mother,” he said, his voice also a question.
    “Yes, she’s been . . .” Miranda searched for the right word. “Struggling.”
    “Miranda, there are things that need attending to. Things we should discuss. I’m sorry to have to bring these things up with you, but, well, there is no one else.”
    Miranda had never thought about her isolation this way before. But it was true. There was no one else. Both sets of grandparents were long dead. Her father was an only child. Her mother had a brother somewhere in the Midwest, but their only contact was the annual exchange of a formal, impersonal holiday card, invariably signed without even a brief note or family update. Miranda had never wondered at the strangeness of this ritual, had never thought to ask herself why they bothered. She had accepted, unquestioningly, the notion that some things, many things, were just the way things were done. At least among a certain class of people. Her mother’s class of people.
    “Yes,” she acknowledged to the man on the phone. “I suppose that’s true.”
    “I think it best that we do this in person,” Richard Stone said, his voice suffused with warning.
    An image of the Connecticut house swam in front of Miranda’s eyes. Like a picture on one of those Christmas cards, it appeared to her as perfect, stately, and fake. She’d thought to keep the cleaning lady on, asking her to keep an eye on the house. Other than that, she’d forgotten about the place. She realized that she had been quietly, blindly, hoping her mother would rouse herself and return to the house. To life. Soon. Any day. Hoped even that somehow, on the sly, when Miranda was out in the garden or at the store, her mother had gotten to her desk, made a few calls, taken care of some correspondence. Acted like an adult. A parent.
    Miranda now knew, with painful clarity, that she couldn’t wait any longer. For her mother. Or for her own life. The situation was ridiculous and untenable. She made a date to meet the lawyer in New York. She pushed it out two weeks. She didn’t know why. She just knew she wasn’t ready. She felt sure there was something, perhaps many things, she should do to prepare. She started to speak to her