hen Nina finished showering and unpacking, she went downstairs. In the kitchen, she found her mother already seated at the table, where a cut-crystal decanter waited. “I thought we’d have a drink. Vodka,” her mother said.

Nina stared at her. It was one of those moments when you glimpsed something unexpected, like a face in the shadows. In all her thirty-seven years, Nina had never been offered a drink by her mother. She hesitated.

“If you’d rather not...”

“No. I mean yes,” Nina said, watching as her mother poured two shot glasses full of vodka.

She tried to see something in her mother’s beautiful face, a frown, a smile; something. But the blue eyes revealed nothing.

“The kitchen smells of smoke,” Mom said.

“I burned the first dinner. Too bad you never taught me to cook,” Nina said.

“It is reheating, not cooking.”

“Did your mother teach you to cook?”

“The water is boiling. Put in the noodles.”

Nina went to the stove and poured some of her mother’s homemade noodles into the boiling water. Beside them, a saucepan bubbled with stroganoff sauce. “Hey, I’m cooking,” she said, reaching for a wooden spoon. “Danny would laugh his ass off right now. He’d say, Watch it, love. People’re goin’ t’ eat that.” She waited for her mom to ask who Danny was, but all that rebounded was silence, and then a slow tapping.

She looked back, saw her mother tapping a fork on the table.

Nina returned to the table, took a place opposite her mother. “Cheers,” she said, lifting her glass.

Mom lifted the small heavy glass, clinked it against Nina’s, and downed the vodka in a swallow.

Nina did the same. Minutes passed in silence. “So what do we do now?”

“Noodles,” was Mom’s reply.

Nina rushed back to the stove. “They’re floating,” she said.

“They’re done.”

“Another cooking lesson. This is awesome,” Nina said, pouring the noodles and water into a strainer in the sink. Then she dished up two plates, grabbed the salad, and returned to the table, carrying a bottle of wine with her.

“Thank you,” Mom said. She closed her eyes in prayer for a moment and then reached for her fork.

“Have you always done that?” Nina said. “Prayed before dinner?”

“Quit studying me, Nina.”

“Because that’s the kind of thing a parent generally passes on to their children. I don’t remember praying before dinner except at the big holidays.”

Mom began to eat.

Nina wanted to keep questioning her mother, but the savory scent of the stroganoff—rich beef chunks, perfectly browned and then simmered for hours in a sauce of sherry wine, fresh thyme, heavy cream, and mushrooms—wafted up to her, and her stomach growled in anticipation. She practically dived into this meal that so represented her childhood. “Thank God you have enough food in the freezer to feed a starving nation,” she said, pouring them both some wine. When silence answered her, she said, “Thank you, Nina, for saying so.”

Nina tried to concentrate on the food, but the silence got to her. She had never been a patient woman. It was strange; she could sit still for hours waiting for the perfect shot, but without a camera in her hand, she needed something to do. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Enough,” she said so sharply that Mom looked up. “I’m not Meredith.”

“I am aware of that.”

“You were too tough for us when we were girls, and Mere, well, she stuck around and she never changed much. I left. And you know what? You don’t scare me or hurt me so much anymore. I’m here now to take care of you. If Mere has her way, I’ll be here until you move into Senior World, and I’ll be damned if I’ll eat every meal under a cone of silence.”

“A what?”

“We must have talked at dinner when I was a kid. I remember talking. Even laughing.”

“That was the three of you.”

“How come you never really look at me or Meredith?”

“You are imagining things now.” Mom took a drink of wine. “Eat.”

“Okay, I’ll eat. But we are going to talk, and that’s that. Since you are a lemon in the conversation game, I’ll start. My favorite movie is Out of Africa. I love watching giraffes move across the sunset in the Serengeti, and I’m surprised to admit that sometimes I miss the snow.”

Mom took another drink of her wine.

“I could ask about the fairy tales instead,” Nina said. “I could ask about how it is that you know the stories word for word or why you only told them to us with the lights out, or why Dad—”

“My favorite author is Pushkin. Although Anna Akhmatova reads my mind. I miss... the true belye nochi, and my favorite movie is Doctor Zhivago.” Her accent softened on the Russian words, turned them into a kind of music.

“So we have something in common after all,” Nina said, reaching for her wine, watching her mother.

“What is that?”

“We like big love stories with unhappy endings.”

Her mother pushed back from the table suddenly and stood up. “Thank you for dinner. I am tired now. Good night.”

“I’ll ask again, you know,” Nina said as she passed her. “For the fairy tale.”

Mom paused, took a slowed step, and then kept going, around the corner and up the stairs. When her bedroom door thudded closed, Nina stared up at the ceiling. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” she mused aloud. “Of what?”

Bundled up in her old terry-cloth robe, Meredith sat out on her porch, rocking in a wicker chair. The dogs lay beside her feet, tangled together. They appeared to be sleeping, but every now and then one of them whined and looked up. They knew something was wrong. Jeff was gone.

She couldn’t believe he’d done this to her now, in the wake of her father’s death and in the midst of her mother’s meltdown. She wanted to latch on to that anger, but it was ephemeral and hard to hold. She kept imagining one scene, over and over and over.

They would be at the dining room table, she and Jeff and the girls....

Jillian would have her nose buried in a book; Maddy would be tapping her foot, asking when they could go. All of that teenage impatience would disappear when Jeff said, “We’re breaking up.”

Maybe that wasn’t exactly how he would say it, or maybe he’d chicken out and let Meredith say the poisonous words. That had certainly been their parenting pattern. Jeff was the “fun” one; Meredith laid down the law.

Maddy would burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

Jillian’s tears would be the silent, heartbreaking type.

Meredith drew in a deep, shuddering breath. She knew now why unhappily married women stayed in their marriages. It was because of the scene she’d just imagined and the pain of it.

In the distance, she could see the first copper glimmer of dawn. She’d been out here all night. Tightening her robe around her, she went inside, milled throughout the house, picking up objects and putting them down. The crystal award Jeff had won last year for investigative journalism... the reading glasses he’d recently begun to use... the picture of them at Lake Chelan last summer. Before, when she’d looked at that photo, all she’d seen was that she was getting older; now she saw the way he was holding her, the brightness of his smile.

She put the picture down and went upstairs. Though bed beckoned her, she didn’t even go close to it, not to that king-sized mattress where his shape lingered, and his scent. Instead, she put on her running clothes and ran until she couldn’t breathe without pain and her lungs felt like jelly.

At home, she went straight to the shower, where she stayed until the water turned cold.

When she was dressed, she knew that no one would be able to look at her and know that her husband had left her in the night.

She was holding her car keys, standing in her kitchen, when she realized it was Saturday.

The warehouse would be dark and freezing. Closed. Oh, she could go to work anyway, try to lose herself in the minutiae of insect and pruning reports, of crop projections and sales quotas. But she would be alone, in the quiet, with only her own thoughts to distract her.

“No way.”

She went out to the car and started it up, but instead of driving to town, she drove to Belye Nochi and parked.

The living room light was on. A plume of smoke rose from the chimney. Of course Nina was up. She was still running on Africa time.

Meredith felt a wave of self-pity. With all her heart, she wished she could talk to her sister about this, that she could hand her pain off to someone else who might find the words to soften or reshape it.

But Nina was not that person. Neither would Meredith tell her friends. It was humiliating and painful enough without the addition of becoming a bit of town gossip. And besides, she wasn’t the kind of woman who talked about her problems; wasn’t that part of the reason she was alone now?

She yanked open the car door and got out.

Inside the house, she noticed the lingering smell of smoke. Then she saw the dirty dishes piled in the sink and the open decanter of vodka on the counter.

It pissed her off. Suddenly. Sharply. Disproportionately. But it felt good, this anger. She could hold on to it, let it consume her. She attacked the dishes so loudly that pans clanged together as she threw them in the soapy water.

“Whoa,” Nina said, coming into the room. She was wearing a pair of men’s boxer shorts and an old Nirvana T-shirt. Her hair stuck out like a black Chia Pet and her face crinkled in a smile. She looked like Demi Moore in Ghost; almost impossibly pretty. “I didn’t think pot-tossing was your sport.”

“Do you think I have nothing better to do than clean up your messes?”

“It’s a little early for high drama.”

“That’s right. Make a joke. What’s it to you?”

“Meredith, what’s wrong?” Nina said. “Are you okay?”

Meredith almost gave in. The softness of her sister’s voice, the unexpected question... she almost said, Jeff left me.

And then what?

She drew in a deep breath and folded the hand towel in precise thirds before draping it over the oven’s handle. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t act fine.”

“Honestly, Nina, you don’t know me well enough to say that. How was Mom last night? Did she eat?”

“We drank vodka together. And wine. Can you believe it?”

Meredith felt a sharp pang at that; it took her a moment to realize she was jealous. “Vodka?”

“I know. Shocked the shit out of me, too. And I found out her favorite movie is Doctor Zhivago.”

“I don’t think alcohol is her best bet these days, do you? I mean, she doesn’t know where the hell she is half the time.”

“But does she know who she is. That’s what I want to know. If I could just get her to tell us the fairy tales—”

“Screw the fairy tales,” Meredith said, more sharply than she should have. At Nina’s surprised look, she realized she might even have yelled it. “I’m going to start packing her things for the move next month. I think she’ll be more comfortable there if she has her stuff around her.”

“She won’t be comfortable,” Nina said, and now she looked angry. “It doesn’t matter how neat and tidy and organized you are. You’re still putting her away.”

“You going to stay, Nina? Forever? Because if you are, I’ll cancel the reservation.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Yeah. Right. You can criticize but you can’t solve.”

“I’m here now.”

Meredith glanced at the sinkful of soapy water and the now-clean dishes in the strainer. “And what a help you’ve been to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get some boxes from the garage. I’ll start in the kitchen. You’re more than welcome to help.”

“I’m not going to pack her life into boxes, Mere. I want to open her up, not close her away. Don’t you get it? Don’t you care?”

“No,” Meredith said, pushing past her. She left the house and walked over to the garage. While she waited for the automatic door to open, she had trouble breathing. It swelled up in her, whatever the feeling was, until her chest ached and her arm tingled and she thought, I’m having a heart attack.

She doubled over and sucked in air. In and out, in and out, until she was okay. She started into the darkness of the garage, glad that she’d controlled herself and that she hadn’t lost it in front of Nina, but when she turned on the light, there was Dad’s Cadillac. The 1956 convertible that had been his pride and joy.

Frankie’s his name, after Sinatra. I stole my first kiss in Frankie’s front seat....

They’d gone on a dozen family road trips in old Frankie. They’d gone north to British Columbia, east to Idaho, and south to Oregon, always in search of adventure. On those long, dusty drives, with Dad and Nina singing along to John Denver, Meredith had felt all but invisible. She didn’t like exploring roads or making wrong turns or running out of gas. It had always seemed to end up that way, too, with Dad and Nina laughing like pirates at every escapade.

Who needs directions? Dad would say.

Not us, Nina would reply, bouncing in her seat and laughing.

Meredith could have joined in, could have pretended, but she hadn’t. She’d sat in the back, reading her books and trying not to care when a hubcap flipped off or the engine overheated. And whenever they stopped for the night and camp was set up, Dad would always come for her; while he smoked his pipe, he’d say, I thought my best girl would like to take a walk....

Those ten-minute walks were worth a thousand miles of bad road.

She touched the shiny cherry-red hood, felt its smoothness. No one had driven this car in years. “Your best girl would like to take a walk,” she whispered.

He was the one person she would have told about what happened last night....

With a sigh, she went to his workbench and looked around until she found three big cardboard boxes. She carried them back into the kitchen, set them down on the hardwood floor, and opened the cupboard closest to her. She knew it was too early to start packing, but anything was better than being alone in her empty house.

“I heard you and Nina fighting.”

Meredith slowly closed the cupboard and turned around.

Her mother stood in the doorway, dressed in her white nightgown with a black woolen blanket draped like a cape around her shoulders. Light from the entryway shone through the cotton fabric, outlining her thin legs.

“I’m sorry,” Meredith said.

“You and your sister are not close.”

It was a statement rather than a question, as it certainly should be, but Meredith heard something sharp in her mother’s voice, a judgment, perhaps. Her mother wasn’t looking past Meredith for once, or beside her; she was staring right at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

“No, Mom. We’re not close. We hardly ever see each other.”

“You will regret this.”

Thank you, Yoda. “It’s fine, Mom. Can I make you some tea?”

“When I am gone, you will only have each other.”

Meredith walked over to the samovar. That was the last thing she wanted to think about today—her mother’s death. “It will be hot in a moment,” she said without turning around.

After a while, she heard her mother walk away, and Meredith was alone again.

Nina planned to wear her mother down. If Meredith the martyr’s performance in the kitchen had proven anything, it was that time was of the essence. With every rip of newspaper or clang of a pot, Nina knew that another piece of her mother’s life was being wrapped up and put away. If Meredith had her way, there would soon be nothing left.

Dad had wanted something else, though, and now Nina wanted it, too. She wanted to hear the peasant girl and the prince in its entirety; in truth, she couldn’t remember ever wanting anything more.

At breakfast, she’d gone into the kitchen, stepping carefully around her ice-cold sister. Ignoring Meredith, she made Mom a cup of sweetened tea and a piece of toast and carried them upstairs. Inside her mother’s bedroom, she found Mom in bed, her gnarled hands folded primly on the blanket over her stomach, her white hair a bird’s nest that hinted at a restless night. With the door open, they could both hear Meredith packing up the kitchen.

“You could help your sister.”

“I could. If I thought you should move. I don’t.” She handed her mother the tea and toast. “You know what I realized when I made your breakfast?”

Mom sipped tea from the delicate silver-encased glass cup. “I suppose you will tell me.”

“I don’t know if you like honey or jam or cinnamon.”

“All are fine.”

“The point is, I don’t know.”

“Ah. That is the point,” Mom said, sighing.

“You’re not looking at me again.”

Mom said nothing, just took another sip of tea.

“I want to hear the fairy tale. The peasant girl and the prince. All of it. Please.”

Mom set the tea down on the bedside table and got out of bed. Moving past Nina as if she were invisible, she walked out the room, across the hall, and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

At lunch, Nina tried again. This time, Mom picked up her sandwich and carried it outside.

Nina followed her out to the winter garden and sat beside her. “I mean it, Mom.”

“Yes, Nina. I know. Please leave me.”

Nina sat there another ten minutes, just to make her point, then she got up and went inside.

In the kitchen, she found Meredith still packing pots and pans into a box. “She’ll never tell you,” she said at Nina’s entrance.

“Thanks for that,” Nina said, reaching for her camera. “Keep boxing up her life. I know how much you want everything to be neat and labeled. You’re a barrel of laughs. Honest to God, Mere, how can your kids and Jeffstand it?”

Nina came back into the house at just past six. In the last bit of copper-colored evening light, the apple blossoms glowed with a beautiful opalescence that gave the valley an otherworldly look.

The kitchen was empty except for the carefully stacked and labeled cardboard boxes that were tucked neatly into the space between the pantry and fridge.

She glanced out the window and saw that her sister’s car was still here. Meredith must be in another room, knee-deep in boxes and newsprint.

Nina opened the freezer and burrowed through the endless rows of containers. Meatball soup, chicken stew with dumplings, pierogies, lamb and vegetable moussaka, pork chops braised in apple wine, potato pancakes, red pepper paprikash, chicken Kiev, stroganoff, strudels, hamand-cheese rolls, homemade noodles, and dozens of savory breads. Out in the garage, there was another freezer, equally full, and the basement pantry was chock-full of home-canned fruit and vegetables.

Nina chose one of her favorites: a delicious slow-cooked beef pot roast stuffed with bacon and horseradish. She defrosted the roast in the microwave, with all the root vegetables and rich beef broth, then ladled it to a baking dish and put it in the oven. She set the oven for 350 degrees, figuring it couldn’t be too far wrong, and then filled a pot of water for homemade noodles. There were few things on the planet better than her mom’s noodles.

While dinner was in the oven, she set the table for two and then poured herself a glass of wine. With this meal, the aroma would bring Mom to her.

Sure enough, at six forty-five, Mom came down the stairs.

“You made dinner?”

“I reheated it,” Nina said, leading the way into the dining room.

Mom looked around at the ravaged wallpaper, still smeared with streaks of blood that had dried black. “Let us eat at the kitchen table,” she said.

Nina hadn’t even thought about that. “Oh. Sure.” She scooped up the two place settings and put them down on the small oak table tucked into the nook in the kitchen. “There you go, Mom.”

Meredith walked in then; she noticed the two place settings and her face scrunched in irritation. Or maybe relief. With Meredith it was hard to tell.

“Do you want to eat with us?” Nina asked. “I thought you’d need to get home, but there’s plenty. You know Mom. She always cooked for an army.”

Meredith glanced through the window, up in the direction of her house. “Sure,” she finally said. “Jeff won’t be home tonight... until late.”

“Good,” Nina said, watching her sister closely. It was odd that she’d stay for dinner. Usually she all but ran for home when she had the chance. “Great. Here. Sit.” The minute her sister was seated, Nina quickly set another place at the table and then got the crystal decanter. “We start with a shot of vodka.”

“What?” Meredith said, looking up.

Mom took the decanter and poured three shots. “It does no good to argue with her.”

Nina sat down and picked up her glass, holding it up. Mom clinked hers to it. Reluctantly, Meredith did the same. Then they drank.

“We’re Russian,” Nina said suddenly, looking at Meredith. “How come I never thought about that before?”

Meredith shrugged, clearly disinterested. “I’ll serve,” she said, getting to her feet. She was back a few moments later with the plates.

Mom closed her eyes in prayer.

“Do you remember that?” Nina asked Meredith. “Mom praying?”

Meredith rolled her eyes this time and reached for her fork.

“Okay,” Nina said, ignoring the awkward silence at the table. “Meredith, since you’re here, you have to join in a new tradition Mom and I have come up with. It’s revolutionary, really. It’s called dinner conversation.”

“So we’re going to talk, are we?” Meredith said. “About what?”

“I’ll go first so you can see how it goes: My favorite song is ‘Born to be Wild,’ my best childhood memory is the trip to Yellowstone where Dad taught me how to fish.” She looked at her sister. “And I’m sorry if I make my sister’s life harder.”

Mom put down her fork. “My favorite song is ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ my favorite memory is a day I watched children making snow angels in a park, and I’m sorry that you two are not friends.”

“We’re friends,” Nina said.

“This is stupid,” Meredith said.

“No,” Nina said. “Staring at each other in silence is stupid. Go.”

Meredith gave a typically long-suffering sigh. “Fine. My favorite song is ‘Candle in the Wind’—the Princess Di version, not the original; my favorite childhood memory is when Dad took me ice-skating on Miller’s Pond... and I’m sorry I said we weren’t close, Nina. But we aren’t. So maybe I’m sorry for that, too.” She nodded, as if in saying it, she checked something off her To-Do list. “Now, let’s eat. I’m starving.”