The old woman at Naomi Brooks's front door was trembling so badly that the silver chain at her throat clicked against the buttons of her coat. Snow drifted across the porch behind her, gathering on the shoulders of an elderly man who was trying to hold her upright.
Naomi had just finished a twelve-hour shift caring for people whose families could not always afford to keep them comfortable.
She had been looking forward to a hot shower, a quiet house, and perhaps twenty minutes of sleep before the laundry demanded her attention. Instead, she found two strangers standing in a Wisconsin blizzard, looking as though the cold had followed them all the way into their bones.
"Please," the man said. "My wife needs to sit down." His voice was steady, but his hands were not, and when he glanced toward the dark street, Naomi saw fear in his eyes. The woman's gray hair had escaped its pins, and her lips had almost lost their color. Naomi did not ask why they had come to her house or whether they were lost. She moved aside, held the door wide, and said, "Come inside before one of you falls."
They stepped into the warm little living room, the man still supporting his wife by the elbow. Naomi shut the door against a gust that shook the framed photographs on the entryway shelf. The couple looked painfully out of place among her son's school drawings, the crocheted blankets, and the secondhand furniture she had repaired herself. She guided the woman toward the armchair nearest the lamp and reached for the wool scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. Only then did the stranger raise her head and ask a question that made Naomi's fingers stop moving.
"Did Loretta Brooks live here?"
Naomi looked at her. Most people who came to that address asked for the home-care nurse, or for the boy who sometimes left his basketball in the driveway, or for the woman who made soup for anyone on the block who was sick. Nobody had come asking for Loretta in nearly two years, not since the funeral. Naomi felt the sudden, familiar weight of losing her mother rise behind her ribs. "She was my mother," she answered. "She passed away."
The elderly woman's expression changed with such naked pain that Naomi took an involuntary step closer. The man shut his eyes, as though he had expected the answer but still hoped it would be different. They were silent for several seconds while the furnace rattled and snow hissed against the windows. Then the woman whispered, "Are you Naomi?" Naomi nodded, and the woman pressed one hand against the small silver object beneath her coat. "My name is Evelyn Ward," she said. "I believe we should have met a long, long time ago."
Naomi had heard the name Ward only a few times in childhood. Her mother never spoke it with anger, exactly, but there was a carefulness in the way she pronounced it, as if the word had edges. She remembered being eight years old and asking why the smiling dark-haired man in the photograph above her mother's dresser was not in any of the family albums. Loretta had lifted her onto the bed and explained that he was Naomi's father, Daniel, who died before she was born. When Naomi asked why his parents never visited, her mother had answered, "Sometimes grown people are afraid of what they don't understand, sweetheart. That doesn't tell you anything about your worth."