She was always careful to knock, because she would not give Dana Doyle a single reason to call that lawyer in Menomonie and say the grandmother had overstepped. She had walked up the shoveled path with the pie held level against her stomach, sour cherry, lattice top, the same pie she had made for Winnie every birthday from the time Winnie was six. Lucy ate it the same way Winnie had, cherries from the middle first, crust last. Irene had raised her hand to knock and through the glass she had seen the green coat.
For one long, dizzy second she had seen Winnie.
Winnie at twenty-two. The claw clip, the lifted chin, the coat belted loose. The girl in the mirror had Winnie's shoulders, Winnie's long neck, Winnie's way of tilting her head to look at herself as if she were sizing up a stranger. Irene's heart had done something it was not supposed to do at sixty-three, with her blood pressure. Then the girl had turned, and it was Paige, of course it was Paige, and Irene had watched Lucy grab for the belt and miss, and she had watched Dana come out of the kitchen, and she had watched the beige jacket, and she had not knocked.
She stepped inside. Snow came in with her, a little swirl of it, and the cold. Her maroon parka was dusted white across the shoulders. Underneath it she wore a plaid flannel shirt, red and black, that had been her husband's and that she had never stopped wearing in the fourteen years since he died. Her gray hair was pinned up and coming loose. She stood on the mat with the pie box in both hands and looked at the three of them, and she did not say hello.
"Where did you get that?" she said.
She was looking at Paige. Her voice was the one she had used for thirty-one years in a fourth-grade classroom in Bloomer, Wisconsin, the voice that could stop a boy with a fistful of gravel at fifty yards.
Paige's chin came down a quarter inch. "It was just hanging here."
"Grandma." Lucy's voice broke on the word. The tears had come now; there was no stopping them. She was holding the beige jacket against her chest like something she had been handed at a funeral. "She took Mom's coat. She just took it. And Dana said she could."
"Irene," Dana said. "You're early."
"I'm on time. I'm always on time." Irene did not take her eyes off Paige. She set the pie box down on the bench beneath the coat rack, carefully, the way you set down something you mean to come back for. Then she stepped forward and reached out and took hold of the left lapel of the green coat, there on Paige's body, and folded it back.
Paige went still. She did not pull away. Afterward, she would think about that, how she had not pulled away, how something in the old woman's face had told her not to.
The lining of the coat was a darker green, a silky green, worn shiny in places. And there, just below the inside pocket, stitched in green thread so close to the color of the lining that you had to tilt it to the light to see, was a name. Elegant, looping, cursive. The W was large and swooped like a bird.
Winnie.
"She did that herself," Irene said. She was speaking to nobody in particular, or to the coat. "Nineteen years old. Somebody walked off with it from a coat check at a wedding in Menomonie and she spent two hours going through the parking lot until she found the girl who had it on. After that she put her name in everything. Her mittens. Her library card sleeve. She said, Mom, I'm never losing anything again."
Lucy was crying in earnest now, quiet, shaking, the beige jacket crushed in her arms. Irene glanced at her once, a look that said wait, and then turned back to Paige. She did not let go of the lapel.
Paige was looking down at the name. The smugness had gone out of her face, not all at once, but the way water goes out of a sink, a swirl and then less and then less. What was left looked confused, and young, and a little scared, the way she had looked at eight years old when she fell off the monkey bars and couldn't breathe for a minute.