The TV said, "Drop us a postcard stating-female deposits her eggs in-not thirty thirty-nine ninety-five, not twenty twenty-nine ninety-five, but-"

"Stuart does that too," Agatha told Thomas. "Just hand him a remote control and he turns sort of frantic. It must be hormonal."

"Say what?" Stuart asked, snapping his head up.

"Tomorrow afternoon we clean house," Agatha told Daphne.

"All right," Daphne said meekly.

"We'll have a regular, normal, home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner; I bought an eighteen-pound turkey at the grocery store, and I've invited Mrs. Jordan and the foreigners. Then afterward we'll start cleaning and sorting. Discarding. Do you know Grandma's cosmetics are still on her bureau?"

"Maybe Grandpa likes them there," Daphne suggested.

"Her arthritis pills are still in the medicine cabinet."

"Maybe-"

"Past their expiration date!" Agatha said, as if that settled it.

Stuart said, "Aggie, can't we go to bed now?"

"Now?" Agatha said. She checked her watch. "It's not even nine-thirty."

Daphne was so sleepy that the room was misting over, and Thomas had been yawning, but they all settled back obediently and fixed their eyes on the screen.

Thursday afternoon Agatha and Daphne washed all the dishes, even those in the cupboards, and Thomas vacuumed downstairs while Ian tried to reduce the general disorder. Stuart, who turned out to be fairly useless around the house, watched a football game with Doug.

Thursday night at ten they had turkey sandwiches (in California it was seven) and then Agatha dusted the downstairs furniture, Daphne scrubbed the woodwork, and Thomas polished the silver.

Friday Daphne went back to Floral Fantasy, and by the time she got home the upstairs had been vacuumed and dusted as well and the washing machine repaired and all the laundry done. Bee's little walnut desk in the living room stood bare, its cubbyholes dark as missing teeth; and when Daphne opened the drawers below she found only the essentials: a box of envelopes, a photo album whose six filled pages covered the past twenty-two years, and the document transforming those two strangers, Thomas and Agatha "Dulsimore," into Bedloes and tucking them into Ian's safekeeping along with Daphne herself. This last was so familiar she could have quoted it verbatim, but she scanned it yet again and so did Agatha, breathing audibly over Daphne's left shoulder. "What's disturbing," Agatha told her (not for the first time), "is we don't know a thing about our genetic heritage. What if we're prone to diabetes? Or epilepsy?"

Diplomatically, Daphne refrained from pointing out that she herself did know her heritage, at least on her father's side. She shook her head and put the document back in the drawer.

Saturday Ian went to Good Works, but Daphne stayed home to continue with the cleaning. "Grandpa," Agatha said, "today we're sorting through Grandma's belongings. Anything you want to keep, you'd better let us know now."

"Oh," he said, and then he said, "Well, her lipstick, maybe. Her perfume bottles."

"Lipstick? Perfume?"

"I like her bureau to have things on top of it. I don't want to see it all blank."

"Couldn't we just put a vase on top?"

"No, we couldn't," her grandfather said firmly.

"Well, all right."

"And I'd like her robe left hanging in her closet."

"All right, Grandpa."

"But you might ship her jewelry to Claudia. Or at least what jewelry is real."

"Well, you're going to have to tell us which is which," Agatha said, for of course they wouldn't know real from Woolworth's.

But later, when they had packed all Bee's limp, sad, powdery-smelling lingerie into the cartons Thomas brought up from the basement, they called for Doug to advise them on the jewelry and he didn't answer. They'd assumed he was watching TV, but when they checked they found only Stuart, channel-hopping rapidly from golf to cartoons to cooking shows. Daphne said, "I bet he's at the foreigners'."

"Honestly," Agatha said.

"The foreigners have a VCR now, did you know? They own every Rita Hayworth movie ever made."

"Run get him, will you?" Agatha asked Thomas.

But Thomas said, "Maybe we should just let him stay there."

"Well, what'll we do about the jewelry?"

"Send Claudia the whole box, for heaven's sake," Daphne said. She told Thomas, "Wrap the whole box for mailing. You'll find paper and string in the pantry."

"But it isn't just the jewelry," Agatha said. "We need him here to answer other questions, too."

"Agatha, will you drop it? He doesn't want to be around for this."

"Well. Sorry," Agatha said stiffly.

They went back upstairs to their grandparents' bedroom, and while Thomas bore the jewelry box off to the pantry Daphne and Agatha started on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. They had assumed this part would be easy-just sweaters, surely-but underneath lay stacks of moldering photo albums Daphne had never seen before. "Oh, those," Agatha said. "They used to be downstairs in the desk." She picked up a manila envelope and peered inside. Daphne, meanwhile, flipped through the topmost album and found rows of streaky, pale rectangles showing ghostlike human faces with no features but pinhead eyes. "Polaroid, in its earliest days," Agatha explained.

"Well, darn," Daphne said, because the captions were so alluring. Danny at Bethany Beach, 1963. Lucy with the Crains, 8/65 Danny at Bethany Beach, 1963. Lucy with the Crains, 8/65. Her father, whom she knew only from a boringly boyish sports photo hanging in the living room. Her mother, who was nothing but the curve of a cheek above Daphne's own newborn self on page one of her otherwise empty baby book.

She turned to the albums below. The pictures there were more distinct, but they documented less interesting times. Claudia, thinner and darker, married a plucked-looking Macy in a ridiculous white tuxedo. Doug stood at a lectern holding up a plaque. Claudia and Macy had a baby. Then they had another. People seemed to graduate a lot. Some wore long white robes and mortarboards, some wore black and carried their mortarboards under their arms, and one, labeled Cousin Louise Cousin Louise, wore just a dress but you could see this was a graduation because of her ribboned diploma and her relatives pressing around. All those relatives attending all those ceremonies, sitting patiently through all those tedious speeches just so they could raise a cheer at the single mention of a loved one's name. It wasn't fair: by the time of Daphne's own graduation, most of those people had vanished and Claudia and Macy had moved out of state. The family had congealed into smaller knots, wider apart, like soured milk. Their gatherings were puny, their cheers self-conscious and faint.

"Thomas and me with Mama," Agatha said, thrusting a color snapshot at Daphne. "I wonder how that that got here." got here."

She had pulled it from the manila envelope: a slick, bright square that Daphne took hold of reverently. So. Her mother. A very young woman with two small children, standing in front of a trailer. Probably she and Daphne looked alike-same shade of hair, same shape of face-but this woman seemed so long ago, Daphne couldn't feel related to her. Her dress was too short, her makeup too harsh, her surroundings too tinny and garish. Had she ever cried herself to sleep at night? Laughed till her legs could no longer support her? Fallen into such a rage that she'd pounded the wall with her fists?

Daphne used to ask about her mother all the time, in the old days. She had plagued her sister and brother with questions. They never gave very satisfactory answers, though. Agatha said, "Her hair was black. Her eyes were, I don't know, blue or gray or something." Thomas said, "She was nice. You'd have liked her!" in his brightest tone of voice. But when Daphne asked, "What would I have liked about her?" he just said, "Oh, everything!" and looked away from her. He could be so exasperating, at times. At times she imagined him encased in something plastic, something slick and smooth as a raincoat.

Agatha held out her hand for the snapshot, and Daphne said, "I think I'll keep it."

"Keep it?"

"I'll get it framed."

"What for?" Agatha asked, surprised.

"I'm going to hang it in the living room with the other family pictures."

"In the living room! Well, that's just inappropriate," Agatha told her.

Daphne had a special allergy to the word "inappropriate." A number of teachers had used it during her schooldays. She said, "Don't tell me what's appropriate!"

"What are you so prickly about? I only meant-"

"She has just as much right to be on that wall as Great-Aunt Bess with her Hula Hoop."

"Yes, of course she does," Agatha said. "Fine! Go ahead." And she passed Daphne the manila envelope. "Here's all the rest of her things."

Daphne shook the envelope into her lap. Certificates. Receipts. A date on one read 2/7/66. She didn't see any more photos. "Put them away; don't leave them lying around," Agatha said, delving into the chest again. Her voice came back muffled. "We're trying to get organized, remember."

So Daphne took them across the hall to her room. It used to be Thomas's room, and although Thomas had to sleep on the couch now he kept his belongings here during his visits. His toilet articles littered Daphne's bureau and his leather bag spilled clothing onto her floor. Daphne suddenly felt overcome by objects objects. What did she need with these papers, anyhow? Except for the snapshot, they were worthless. And yet she couldn't bear to throw them away.

When she returned to her grandparents' bedroom, she found Agatha looking equally defeated. She was standing in front of Bee's closet, facing a row of heart-breakingly familiar dresses and blouses. Crammed on the shelf overhead were suitcases and hatboxes and a sliding heap of linens-the linens moved last spring from beneath the leaky roof. It showed what this household had descended to that they'd never been moved back, except for those few items in regular use. "What are are these?" Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel. these?" Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel.

"I guess we ought to carry them to the linen closet," Daphne said.

But the linen closet, they discovered, had magically replenished itself. The emptied top shelf now held Doug's shoe-polishing gear and someone's greasy coveralls and the everyday towels not folded but hastily wadded. And the lower shelves, which hadn't been sorted in years, made Agatha say, "Good grief." She gave a listless tug to a crib sheet patterned with ducklings. (How long since they'd needed a crib sheet?) When they heard Thomas on the stairs, she called, "Tom, could you bring up more boxes from the basement?"

She pulled out half a pack of disposable diapers-the old-fashioned kind as stiff and crackly as those paper quilts that line chocolate boxes. From the depths of the closet she drew a baby-sized pillow and said, "Ick," for a rank, moldy smell unfurled from it almost visibly. The leak must have traveled farther than they had suspected. "Throw it out," she told Daphne. Daphne took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it on top of the diapers. Next Agatha brought forth a bedpan with an inch of rusty water in the bottom-"That too," she said-and a damp, cloth-covered box patterned with faded pink roses. "Is this Grandma's?" she asked. "I don't remember this."

Both of them hovered over it hopefully as she set the box on the floor and lifted the lid, but it was only a sewing box, abandoned so long ago that a waterlogged packet of clothing labels inside bore Claudia's maiden name. There were sodden cards of bias tape and ripply, stretched-out elastic; and underneath those, various rusty implements-scissors, a seam ripper, a leather punch-and tiny cardboard boxes falling apart with moisture. Clearly nothing here was of interest, so why did they insist on opening each box? Even Agatha, common-sense Agatha, pried off a disintegrating cardboard lid to stare down at a collection of shirt buttons. Everything swam in brown water. Everything had the dead brown stink of overcooked broccoli. It was amazing how thorough the rust was. It threaded the hooks and eyes, it stippled the needles and straight pins. It choked the revolving wheel of the leather punch and clogged each and every one of its hollow, cylindrical teeth.

Daphne thought of the dress form in the attic storeroom-Bee's figure but with a waist, with a higher bosom. Once their grandma had been a happy woman, she supposed. Back before everything changed.

"Will these be enough?" Thomas asked, arriving with two cartons. But Agatha flapped a hand without looking. "Shall I pack these things on the floor?" he asked.

"Oh, don't bother," Agatha told him, and then she turned and wandered toward the stairs.

"Just leave leave them here?" he asked Daphne. them here?" he asked Daphne.

"Whatever," Daphne said.

In fact they remained there the rest of the day, obstructing the hall till Daphne finally stuffed them back in the closet. She piled everything onto the bottom shelf, and she set the cardboard cartons inside and closed the door.

"I dreamed this high-school boy was proposing to me," Agatha said at breakfast. "He told me to name a date. He said, 'How about Wednesday? Monday is always busy and Tuesday is always rainy.' I said, 'Wait, I'm...wait,' I said. 'I think you ought to know that I'm quite a bit older than you.' Then I woke up, and I laughed out loud. Did you hear me laughing, Stu? I mean, older was the least of it. I should have said, 'Wait, there's another thing, too! It so happens I'm already married.'"

"I dreamed I was going blind," Thomas said. "Everyone said, 'Oh, how awful, we're so sorry for you.' I said, 'Sorry? Why? I've had twenty-six years of perfect vision!' I really meant it, too. I sounded like one of those inspirational stories we used to read in Bible camp."

"I dreamed I was seeing patients," Stuart said. "They all had some kind of rash and I was trying to remember my dermatology. It didn't seem to occur to me to tell them that wasn't my field."

Agatha said, "I'd never go into dermatology."

They were having English muffins and juice-just the four of them, because it was ten-thirty and Doug and Ian had eaten breakfast hours ago. Doug was in the dining room laying out a game of solitaire, the soft flip-flip of his cards providing a kind of background rhythm. Ian was moving around the kitchen wiping off counters. When he passed near Daphne he smiled down at her and said, "What did did you dream, Daphne?" Something about his crinkled eyes and the kindly attentiveness of his expression made her sad, but she smiled back and said, "Oh, nothing." you dream, Daphne?" Something about his crinkled eyes and the kindly attentiveness of his expression made her sad, but she smiled back and said, "Oh, nothing."

"Dermatology's not bad," Stuart was saying. "At least dermatologists don't have night call."

"But it's so superficial," Agatha said.

"You should see Agatha with her patients," Stuart told the others. "She's amazing. She'll say straight out to them, 'What you have can't be cured.' I think they feel relieved to finally hear the truth."

"I say, 'What you have can't be cured at this particular time, at this particular time," Agatha corrected him. "There's a difference."

Daphne couldn't imagine that either version would be as much of a relief as Stuart supposed.

"Speaking of time," Ian said, draping his dishcloth over the faucet, "when exactly does your plane take off, Ag?"

"Somewhere around noon, I think. Why?"

"Well, I'm wondering about church. If I wanted to go to church I'd have to leave right now."

"Go, then," she told him.

"But if your flight's at noon-"

"Go! Grandpa can drive us."

Ian hesitated. Daphne knew what he was thinking. He was weighing Sunday services, which he never missed if he could help it, against the possibility of hurting Agatha's feelings. And Agatha, with her chin raised defiantly and her glasses flashing an opaque white light, would most definitely have hurt feelings. Daphne knew that if Ian did not. Finally Ian said, "Well, if you're sure..." and Agatha snapped, "Absolutely! Go."

He didn't seem to catch her tone. (Or he didn't want to catch it.) He rounded the table to kiss her goodbye. "It's been wonderful having you," he said. She looked away from him. He shook Stuart's hand. "Stuart, I hope you two will come again at Christmas."

"We'll try," Stuart told him, rising. "Thanks for the hospitality."

"You planning on church today, Daphne?"

"I thought I'd ride along to the airport," Daphne said.

"Well, I'll be off, then,"

In the dining room, they heard him speaking to Doug. "Guess I'll let you do the airport run, Dad."

"Oh, well," Doug said. "Seems I'm losing here anyway."

"And another thing," Agatha told Daphne. (But what was the first thing? Daphne wondered.) "This business about you not driving is really dumb, Daph."

"Driving?" Daphne asked.

"Here you are, twenty-two years old, and Grandpa has to drive us to the airport. As far as I know you've never even sat behind a steering wheel."

"How did my driving get into this?"

"It's a symptom of a whole lot of other problems, any fool can see that. Why are you still depending on people to chauffeur you around? Why have you never gone away to college? Why are you still living at home when everyone else has long since left?"

"Maybe I like like living at home, so what's the big deal?" Daphne asked. "This happens to be a perfectly nice place." living at home, so what's the big deal?" Daphne asked. "This happens to be a perfectly nice place."

"Nobody says it isn't," Agatha said, "but that's not the issue. You've simply reached the stage where you should be on your own. Right, Stuart? Right, Thomas?"

Stuart developed an interest in brushing crumbs off his sweater. Thomas gave one of his shrugs and drank the last of his orange juice. Agatha sighed. "You know," she told Daphne, "in many ways, living in a family is like taking a long, long trip with people you're not very well acquainted with. At first they seem just fine, but after you've traveled awhile at close quarters they start grating on your nerves. Their most harmless habits make you want to scream-the way they overuse certain phrases or yawn out loud-and you just have to get away from them. You have to leave home."

"Well, I guess I must not have traveled with them long enough, then," Daphne told her.