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"You're hungry," she finally said, turning suddenly toward me, as if just then remembering that though my father was gone, I was not. She was right: it was lunchtime, and I was hungry. "I'll cook something," she said, then retreated to the kitchen. I remained in the living room, picking up the things she'd scattered and in general staying out of her way, until I smelled something burning in the kitchen and went to see what it was.

The smell came from open-faced broiled cheese and tomato sandwiches, my favorite thing to eat for lunch. My mother had burned them to something resembling bread-shaped coal. She had rescued the sandwiches from the broiler, but too late, and was waving a towel over the charred mess and laughing, too loud and hysterically, and that also was scary. She was singing over and over, "She loved to cook, but not like this," as if it were a lyric to a song, a popular one I should have known but didn't. I said to my mother, "I don't know that song." Then, for some reason, thinking I'd let her down by not knowing the song, I said, "I'm sorry," and started crying.

This calmed my mother down, other people's hysteria being a well-known cure for your own. She stopped singing, made me another broiled cheese and tomato sandwich, and paid attention and didn't burn it this time. While I ate, my mother told me the first of her stories about the Emily Dickinson House, which, as everyone knows, I accidentally burned, just like my mother accidentally burned that sandwich.

Speaking of that sandwich, by the time I finally got back to Amherst from New Hampshire, it was nine in the morning, and I hadn't eaten anything in almost twenty-four hours. I was so hungry I would even have eaten my mother's by now thirty-year-old burned broiled cheese and tomato sandwich. So I stopped off at my parents' house to have a little breakfast before heading on to my mother's apartment in Belchertown. My father's car was parked in the driveway, and I figured while I was getting something to eat I'd ask him a few questions. The bond analysts had obviously stolen the Robert Frost Place letter from my father, and probably the four letters he couldn't remember, too. But how had they known where to find the letters, or even that they existed? Did my father know the bond analysts? And then there was my mother. How had niy mother known that I was going to the Robert Frost Place? Had my father told her? Why had he done that? Had he told my father-in-law, too? And why had they followed me?

I opened the door and could immediately hear the ping and splash of the shower, meaning, of course, that my father was taking one. I went to the kitchen, intent on eating whatever I found in there, and fast. There were Knickerbocker beer cans scattered around, as usual; on the kitchen table, there was what appeared to be a shopping list that read, "Milk, cereal, beer, wine, flowers, cheese, bread," and so on. There was nothing unusual about that, necessarily, and in my hunger I nearly forgot about it until I considered the handwriting itself: it was absolutely unfamiliar, absolutely nothing like the other notes, nothing like the notes that said, "Drink me," or the note that said, "I think I know you," and, it now occurred to me, also nothing like my father's postcards. I took the note from the night before ― the note my mother had left on my windshield up in New Hampshire ― out of my pocket. The shopping list and the note were clearly written by two different people: one who dotted the i's, the other who didn't; one whose writing was cramped, one whose writing was expansive. These were two different writers. The writer who had written the notes had not written the grocery list. I knew my mother had written the note on my windshield, which meant my father had written the grocery list. But the postcards? Who had written those?

I dropped the grocery list, ran upstairs to my bedroom, pulled a chair over to the closet. I stood up on the chair, and for the second time in two days I took the envelope down from