Etta Bloch tended her memories. Tended her husband Manny and their son Jake like flowers, though not to grow and blossom—simply to remain fresh and alive in her mind. They were her responsibility, and by her attentions she kept them from wilting, from fading as long as she did.

This was nothing she'd set her mind to at first. How could she not think of her boy, after all—cut off like that at 29, his face cut up so by the glass and the phone pole that the undertakers could hardly make him decent?

For weeks that was all she could see, his face in the hospital (it had only been a formality for the rescue squad to carry him there) and then, stitched along the great flap that had torn loose along the line of his jaw and up round his ear and just under his eye, in the casket that only she and Manny peeked into to say goodbye.