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Miranda and her mother stared straight ahead and waited. Before long, there was the crunch of truck tires on gravel. They relaxed. Soon enough, they knew the door would open and the men would come in, stamping off the rain and discussing the next day’s projects. Which would now include cutting up the fallen tree or branch or whatever it was that had broken free. Her father would insist Dix stay for a cup of coffee. Dix would politely decline, saying he had to get over to some other house, some other project, some other problem. But his presence, however brief, would restore her father’s mood; he was not fond of the company of women.

They both counted the minutes. In fewer than expected, the door swung open, banging rudely against the wall. Stamp, stamp. Two boots. No voices. Miranda stood. Dix strode into the room and met her eyes.

“Call 911,” he said.

It seemed that Dix never left after that day. Of course he had, Miranda knew it, looking back over the year that followed her father’s sudden and instant death as he’d stood, looking up, blinded by sheets of rain, deafened by thunder, into an ancient tree full of invisible interior decay that allowed a waterlogged branch to split from the trunk and fall onto his head. Dix had other clients, other homes, that needed attending. He went home to shower, to eat. When the season came, he went hunting. But he found some reason to show up at least a few times a week. Mow the lawn. Put equipment away for the fall. Repair a stuck door. Take down the window screens. Miranda frequently offered him coffee. As her father would have done. He always demurred. Then, once, he accepted. They sat at the kitchen table together and said nothing. There was no tension or discomfort in the silence. When his cup was empty, he stood, squeezed her shoulder, and let himself out.

Miranda’s mother’s depression thickened into a cloak she pulled tighter and tighter around herself. Miranda found herself spending a large part of every day urging her mother to eat, to get outdoors, to call a friend. Eventually she even had to urge her to brush her teeth, take a shower, get out of bed. Her mother resisted with almost unyielding stubbornness. Sometimes she sighed. She often wept. For several months after her husband’s death, she’d rouse herself once in a while, take two hours to shower, dress, dry her hair, carefully apply lipstick, and drive off to replenish her stock of gin. That errand took her a while. Sometimes hours. As she came back into the house one day, carrying a bag with two half-gallons of cheap gin instead of her usual top-shelf brand, Miranda asked her where she’d gone. Her mother had shrugged, grunted out the phrase, “For a drive.” Miranda suspected she had started going several towns away, maybe as far as Plattsburgh, to buy booze. She probably didn’t want anyone in town to know how much she drank. In spite of everything, she was still trying to keep up appearances. But as the snows came on in earnest and driving got hazardous, Miranda’s mother dropped that pretense. The bags she carried into the house, bottles clinking against one another, bore the name of the nearest liquor store. Eventually, she didn’t even bother going out at all. She began working her way through everything else in the well-stocked liquor cabinet. Then she went through the cases of wine in the cellar. Then the cases of beer. Her husband’s stash in the shop. When all that was gone, she stopped drinking altogether. That was when Miranda got really worried.

Miranda had nothing to do with her own worry, sadness, and discomfort. It hung around her like a smell she could not locate or disperse. She did the small tasks of life—making coffee and toast, doing a load of laundry, washing a few dishes, sweeping the floor. She wandered slowly from room to room, only to find herself sitting on the sofa, staring out the window, not knowing how or when the scene outside had moved from the brilliant sunshine of the day to the inky darkness of night. When she heard her mother rouse herself from bed to use the toilet, she was always startled, forgetting that she was not alone. The days shortened. The gloom of winter outdoors matched the dark mood inside.

Miranda stared out the windows and found herself wanting to trudge through the snow, even if only on some fabricated errand to the barn, just to get away from the oppressive atmosphere of the house. But it was bitter out there. The deep cold in those mountains was the sort that immediately announced its ability to kill you. No matter how Miranda layered herself in scarves and hats, gloves and coats, which collected in the mudroom, the air seared her cheeks and assaulted her nose. The evergreens that rimmed the property and staggered up the steep hillsides all around—the trees she had always loved—began to resemble sinister beings to her, their feathery branches waving in the wind like malevolent arms trying to reach out and grab her. Miranda gave up on her attempted forays and stayed indoors, sipping cup after cup of tea and staring out at the endlessly swirling storms of white flakes and the mounds of snow that Dix piled high when he plowed the almost-never-used driveway. She spent hours in her brother’s room, fingering the clothes that still hung in his closet, slowly turning the pages of his high school yearbooks and photo albums, drowning herself in deep pools of the past. She carried one of her father’s pipes in her pocket, pulling it out from time to time and inhaling the fading aroma. When she ate, she consoled herself with chicken noodle soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, and chocolate pudding. The foods of her childhood.

Dix’s arrivals and departures were the only break in the spell of her dazed mood, the only reminder that there was a world beyond the thick walls of logs that surrounded her. Seeing his truck come up the drive, spraying snow in front of it, seeing him make purposeful movements around the house as he beat back the accumulations of winter gave her a vague sort of hope. Then suddenly the snows stopped and were replaced by mud and muck and dark puddles. There was nothing more to plow. It was just wet and cold, the threat of winter still in the air. The lonely month of March passed. Then April, with its teasingly warm days and cautiously cool nights.

May arrived and, with it, the sound of truck tires on the gravel again. He was back. She watched as he dropped the tailgate and came around to the front of the house with a flat of annuals balanced on one arm and a bag of soil clenched in the other fist. This was once a task her mother had loved. The visit to the local nursery, where she’d wander among the bright flowers under the first hint of warm sun moderated by a still-cool breeze. Then back home, where she’d sift through the airy, salt-and-pepper potting soil, tuck in the plant pods, step back and admire how the pink, purple, and yellow blooms filling the various planters around the house stood out against the ruddy logs.

For the first time, Dix was doing what was not his to do.

Seeing Dix on his knees in front of the green planters with black dirt and bright annuals arrayed around him broke something loose in Miranda. She stood and shook herself as if she were a wet dog. She went into the bathroom, splashed water on her face, slapped color into her cheeks, and dragged a brush through her hair. She thought of her father and brother, and for the first time, instead of a blurry sadness, she was filled with the clarity of anger. She saw their 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 mother about it several times. But faced with her mother’s blank stare, the words Miranda might have said became marbles in her mouth. Finally she did the only thing she knew how to do when confronted by a problem she didn’t understand. The only thing that had ever resulted in a solution that worked. She called Dix.

“I have to go back home, Dix,” she said. “I mean, back to Connecticut. I have to check up on things. Talk to my dad’s lawyer. Take care of . . . of . . . of stuff.”

“Yes,” he said. “I imagine a lot of that has piled up down there by now.”

His voice, his steadiness, was such a comfort to her. Something she felt she could actually lean into.

“I don’t know how long it will all take. I’m worried about . . .”

He broke in, relieving her of the need to finish. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll come by the house every few days. I’ll check up on your mom.”

“Oh, Dix,” she breathed, relief that he had answered the question she didn’t even know how to ask flooding her voice. “Thank you so much.”

Miranda started crying then. She didn’t know how to end the tears or the conversation, but Dix didn’t seem to mind. He just stayed on the phone with her. She listened to his strong, steady breaths in her ear and slowed her own breathing until it matched his. Only then did she feel ready to face what was ahead.