He has to look at her for a long time before he trusts himself to speak. Who is this girl? His daughter Codi, but which Codi? He thinks.

“You look surprised.”

“You startled me. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” He was doing Mr. Garrison’s lab work, waiting for the centrifuge to spin down Mr. Garrison’s blood cells, and when he looked up she was standing in the doorway. He detests surprises.

“Pop, I called five minutes ago, to see if you were here. I told you I was coming. I came straight here. I spent the day up at the graveyard.”

She is leaning against the doorsill holding a bouquet of rabbitbrush and roadside weeds, showering the air with pollen like an old feather duster. She has on purple cowboy boots, which even now are damaging her arches.

“And now you are here,” he says carefully.

“I found a surprise in the graveyard, a headstone with a name on it you might recognize. Yours. Almost yours.”

“Perhaps I am dead.”

She stares. “Do we have relatives from here?”

Uda Dell gave those to her, to both girls, for Christmas: the boots and straw cowboy hats and holsters with cap guns, so that they could run like banshees around the house pretending to fill each other with imaginary bullet holes. He took the guns away, for the preservation of their souls, and the boots on account of their arches. He let them keep the hats.

The minute hand on the wall clock jumps and the centrifuge slows to a stop, clicking suggestively, like the wheel of fortune. Without its mechanical whine the lab is very quiet. He looks up again and she is still there in her stocking feet and red straw cowboy hat, its dark cord knotted under her chin. She understands about the guns, but she wants the boots back. She has come on behalf of herself and her sister, she says. Her left foot in its white sock curls under. Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves? Tears stream from her eyes.

He can’t relinquish either the guns or the boots. He wishes he could do all these things differently, but he can’t. He says, “I don’t think we need to discuss this any further.”

“Oh, come on, just tell me. Would it kill you to tell me?”

Startled, he looks again: she isn’t in stockinged feet, she has boots on. She is much too tall. He is confused and becomes angry. He has a glass vial of blood in his hands. This is his office. She didn’t need to sneak down here and startle him in his own doorway.

“I’m doing Mr. Garrison’s hematocrit,” he says. “I have a good bit more work to do.”

She sighs loudly. She must be fourteen. In a year she will be sullen and furtively pregnant. Or has that passed too? He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.

At the first sign of winter the trees began to die. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there.

I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree. I didn’t push the subject of the Nolinas, but I did ask people about my mother, whose leavings were scant. I’d grown up with only one sentence, repeated like a mantra: “It wasn’t childbirth she died of, it was organ failure.” I know this was meant to protect Hallie and me from guilt, but “organ failure,” in its way, was equally unhelpful: a pronouncement that reminded me of those doubtfully groomed children in school whose report cards bore failing marks through every season, perennial as grass. “Organ failure” sounded like something our mother ought to be ashamed of, and us after her, for her, in death.

Viola dispensed with the organ-failure myth as easily as snapping a wishbone: “No, it was childbirth,” she told me.

“But Hallie was born in June,” I said. “She didn’t die till later in the summer.”

“It was a few weeks,” Viola conceded. “Hallie gave her a real good round. She lost a lot of blood and after the birth she never got up again.”

I was stunned by this news, and we walked in silence for a while. We were on our way to a special meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. To my surprise, I’d been invited as a guest scientist to talk about the pH of the river; needlework was not on the agenda.

Viola had on a brown cloth coat and what must have been her dead husband’s hunting cap, earflaps down, the whole thing cocked forward to accommodate her thick, coiled bun. She stopped to pick up two stray peacock feathers, which she tucked into her coat pocket. One was perfect, with an iridescent blue eye bobbing at its tip. The other one had no eye.

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“Like you. Exactly like you, only smaller. She had real little hands and feet.”

I looked down at my size 9’s, defensively. “Not like Hallie?”

“Hallie always favored Doc more,” Viola said.

I pondered this but couldn’t see it-Hallie was so vital and Doc Homer looked drawn. But then what I saw really was their interiors, not their façades. Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

“Well, I know she was pretty,” I said. “Everybody says that. With a name like Alice how could you not be pretty?”

Viola made an odd sound, like unconsummated laughter.

“What?”

“He was the only one that ever called her Alice. Everybody else called her Althea. It means ‘the truth.’”

“Althea? What, she was an honorary member of the Doña Althea family?”

Viola said nothing. I never knew what to make of her dark hints, but this one was wildly improbable. My impression was that she’d stayed an outsider, like the rest of us. Doc Homer had married my mother and come out here from Illinois after World War II, after he’d served in the army and finished his internship. Her maiden name was something like Carlisle. We never pressed him for more; when it came to our mother, Doc Homer seemed to be in an extended mourning period that lasted for our whole lives to date.

It made me curious, though. I had visions of trying again, of pinning his fragile shoulder blades against the wall of his basement office and forcing him to tell the whole truth about our family. As if Doc Homer’s tongue could be forced.

Abruptly, Viola and I reached the American Legion hall. We walked into a noisy room bright with artificial light and I felt disoriented as to the decade. Women wearing cable-knit cardigans over thin housedresses crowded the hall with their talk, their large purses and imposing bosoms. When they saw Viola and me they began to come to some kind of order. Chairs were dragged, with much metallic howling, from conversational circles back into crooked rows. Many faces were familiar to me now from some encounter, such as old Mrs. Nuñez, who’d been so chatty when I took the boys to her house trick-or-treating, and others like Uda Dell I knew specifically. Doña Althea presided from an overstuffed chair at the front of the hall, but did not speak. Her face was as finely lined as the grain in maple wood, and about the same color. Her pale blue eyes blazed in the direction of the air over our heads. You could have taken her for a blind woman if you didn’t know the truth, which was that Doña Althea’s vision was sharp as a hawk’s.

Norma Galvez, whose shellacked white hair was crowned with a navy bow that coordinated with her Steelworkers T-shirt, brought the meeting to order. It was a packed house. It took a while to achieve perfect quiet. Viola ushered me to a chair at the front table, hurried over to say hello to Doña Althea, and deposited the two feathers in a grocery bag of kindred feathers at the Doña’s feet. Then she scurried back and took her seat by me.