She knew the house. She’d known it since she was a child, running along the creaky corridors, adding scuff marks to the doors, sliding down the rickety banister and fingering the scratches in the plaster walls. For all its flaws it was a far better house than her parents’ ranch-style prefab, where she and Will lived now. She was looking forward to the day when they could move in and start fixing it up. The door to the master bedroom was closed. She knew that the knob was loose, that it wiggled, and its screws were in need of tightening. She knocked, then peeked in. The bed was messy, but no one was there. She hurried down the hallway to the bathroom.
Momoko was perched like a child on the edge of the bathtub, rocking back and forth and talking quietly to herself. Lloyd lay on the floor in front of her, toppled like a giant on the slick tiles in front of the toilet. He had apparently been using it when he fell, because there was dark yellow urine pooled on the tile around him, and his pajama bottoms were wet in front. His toes, normally pale and waxlike, had turned dark, the color of a bruise. The small nub of his penis stuck out from the slit in the damp flannel.
Cass knelt down and put her hand on the side of his neck, then felt for his pulse. The acrid smell of old man’s urine made her gag. She cupped one hand over her nose and the other hand over his mouth. She felt warm breath in the palms of both. She slid open his eye with her thumb.
“When did this happen? When did he fall?”
Momo shrugged her shoulders.
“When did you find him? Was it just now?”
Momoko pointed to her husband’s penis. “O-chin-chin ga dashite iru wa panashi . . .”
There was a phone in the hallway. Cass dialed for an ambulance. If it gets too much, Will had said. Yes, suddenly it was much too much.
From the bathroom, Momoko cried, “Damé! Damé! O-shikko tarashite!”
Cass finished with 911 and ran back to the bathroom. Momoko was squatting down next to Lloyd, slapping his thigh with her tiny, crooked hand.
“Mrs. Fuller! Don’t!”
The old woman looked up at Cass, her silver hair hanging down on either side of her face. She shook her head, sternly.
“Damé! Very bad. He did o-shikko in his pants!”
Then she stood up as straight as she could, which wasn’t very straight at all, brought her hands to her eyes, and let out a low, keening wail. She shuffled backward, two baby steps, just far enough to bump the backs of her knees against the edge of the tub, whereupon she sat abruptly on the tub’s rim, then kept on going, sliding with her behind first into the smooth porcelain depression. She lay there on the bottom, in a small curl, sobbing quietly.
“It’s his heart,” Cass explained for the hundredth time to yet another social worker. “He’s had a couple of heart attacks, plus a bout with colon cancer. He had a colostomy last year and wears a bag, but he can’t change it himself. And she’s pretty senile. They really need services.”
The social worker nodded. “I agree, but it’s just not practical to be sending aides all the way out to the farm several times a day. In a case like this, usually we recommend one of the children or a family member helping out. . . .”
“I’m not a family member,” Cass said quickly. “I just live next door.”
“Don’t they have any children?”
“A daughter. But nobody knows where she is.”
“Have you asked them?”
Cass tried, but she knew there was no point. “Lloyd? Can you hear me?”
Momoko shook her head. “He can hear. He don’t want talking.”
“Wouldn’t you like Yummy to come home and take care of you?”
Lloyd lay perfectly still under the thin sheet.
“He don’t want nobody,” Momoko said.
Cass sighed. “Momoko, do you have any idea where Yummy is?”
“Yumi?” The old lady’s eyes turned inward. “Oh, yes. She is at whatchamacallit.”
“Where?”
“Where you go for studying.”
“You mean, like a school? A college?”
“That’s right,” she nodded. “You know, too. You go to same one. How come you not go today? You sick or something?”
Lloyd shifted his long legs under the sheet. “She doesn’t know anything,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “We haven’t heard from her in years.”
“I know! I know! You playing hooky!” Momoko screeched with laughter.
Will jerked on the sagging screen door to see if he could straighten the hinges.
“Don’t bother,” Cass said. “We’ll have plenty to fix once we take possession.” She looked around the kitchen. The air was close and still, and her voice sounded loud. “I’ll start in here and then go upstairs. You do the living room. Look for bankbooks, too. Maybe they sent her money.”
Will hesitated. “Bankbooks? That’s awfully personal . . .”
“What else can we do? Lloyd said they hadn’t heard from her in years, but that means they heard from her sometime. I want to know when, and where she was living, and—”
“Maybe she phoned.”
Cass tugged at the top drawer. It stuck. “I’ll bet she wrote. She was always writing things down.” She pulled harder, forced it open.
The contents illustrated the virtue of thrift gone mad. Nothing had been taken out in years, just added to, until each drawer was crammed full of rusting twisties, wads of cling wrap that had lost its cling, twists of tinfoil filled with crumbs, crumbling rubber bands. There were miniature shower caps made of grimy vinyl for popping over leftovers. Dingy sandwich bags that smelled of old onion. Stained paper towels folded and stacked for reuse. Cass longed to discard, to disinfect, but she finished the kitchen quickly and went upstairs.
She searched the master bedroom, then continued down the hall to the bedroom that had once been Yummy’s. She remembered the room as it used to be, with shelves of books and a plastic record player and albums in stacks on the floor. Flower Power decals on the walls, the ceiling speckled with constellations that glowed in the dark. The room’s only ornament now sat on top of a white wooden dresser. It was a small framed photograph, in black and white, of a solemn Indian princess standing in front of the screen door of the farmhouse, hand in hand with Lloyd. Noble Pilgrim. The tip of her feather barely reached his hipbone.
Cass opened the dresser drawer, expecting to find the good linens or Lloyd’s spare winter underwear, but it was filled with Yummy’s old clothes. Socks, some underpants, T-shirts and jeans, all neatly folded, but musty. Cass lifted a T-shirt speckled with blue paisleys and held it to her nose. A familiar smell clung to the fibers—a little animal, some sandalwood, a hint of patchouli. A mother would hide things here. Cass dug beneath a pile of underclothes. Sure enough.
It was a small bundle, carefully wrapped in a worn freezer bag and secured with a thick rubber band. Inside, wrapped in yet another plastic bag, was a collection of photographs and letters. Cass set the photos aside and flipped through the envelopes. There weren’t many, maybe two dozen or so, all addressed to Momoko in Yummy’s wild, loopy handwriting. The earliest was on the bottom, dated