Prologue PROLOGUE When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I asked my mothers, "Do you ever hear ghosts?" "Ghosts?" repeated Jane. "Hear them?" asked Elizabeth. My mothers were in the midst of their annual winter holiday decorating blitz, which involved equal measures of Midwestern traditions like the Norway pine and spritz cookies, and also kente cloth and a menorah. Jane had gone to an art fair and bought a Guatemalan nativity scene, which--despite being from the wrong country--was supposed to function as a connection to my roots. They knew their quasi-hippie holiday practice was both culturally appropriative and embarrassingly stereotypical for two middle-aged lesbians, but they had wanted to expose their daughter to as many rituals as possible. "Right. People who are gone? Do they ever talk to you?" "I don''t think so." Elizabeth lit a candle in the menorah, and the smoke danced into the highest corners of the twelve-foot Victorian ceilings.

"Like who?" Jane was rearranging the nativity scene on the mantel. "I don''t know." I ran my fingers over the wooden ornaments. Mary, Joseph (whose staff was broken), a cow, a manger, and a donkey. "Just. just people who aren''t around anymore." "Dorrie, honey, do we need to take you to see Scottie?" Elizabeth had asked. Scottie was a New Age therapist to whom my mothers had taken me several times during my childhood.

"Just a tune-up," they would say brightly, and I would sit on his scratchy sofa and insist that I didn''t mind having two moms, that I wasn''t scarred from my unusual origins, and that I would tell someone if I felt like hurting myself. "Never mind." The wooden ass clattered to the floor. Elizabeth extinguished the match in a vintage bubble-glass ashtray and bent to retrieve the figurine. "I was just wondering." Even now, I can still smell the tree--a real one, of course--in my mothers'' Minneapolis house, see the lights twinkling like a miniature solar system. When I first studied the work of Claudius Ptolemy in college, I had been comforted by the geographer''s certainty, by his theory that the arrangement of the stars and planets overhead at the time you were born not only determined everything about you as a human but also situated your place in the world. Destiny set at birth.

But I was born far from here. Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 I extracted the silk-blend black sweater and charcoal skirt from the staticky plastic of the dry-cleaning bag, where they had been since my last loss. Growing up with an abundance of older and elderly relatives, at thirty-five I had been to every kind of memorial service. The moment I laid my funeral outfit on the back of Mama''s green floral sofa, Bojangles leaped up, followed by Django, shedding their long orange hairs all over the V-neck. ( Cats are for barns, not homes , came the unseen voices tutting in their typical, unasked for way.) I ignored them and scratched Bojangles''s ears until he purred. Puffs of fur floated in a beam of morning light and settled on Mama''s sofa. Mama and Mommy--the names I called them until my first family-tree assignment in elementary school.

That''s when I decided those weren''t quite the right terms and switched to their first names. ( Dorrie''s always liked precision , commented a voice in the empty house.) Django kneaded his large paws on the skirt, and more fluffs of hair drifted down onto the sofa. The green had faded over time, turning more mint than kelly, and the pink cabbage roses had yellowed slightly, but no matter how much Mommy and I would tease, Mama never got around to reupholstering the worn fabric. And now it was mine. All mine. The sofa, the two orange tabbies. Even the Victorian itself, which Jane had bought when the interest rates were high but home prices in Minneapolis were low.

It all belonged to me now, and I had no idea what I would do with any of it--the old house, the worn furniture, the cranky cats. My new life. A hiccup started in my chest, and I pounded it and coughed, willing the choked feeling--whatever it was--to go away. I chewed on a pink tablet of Pepto-Bismol, not sure if it would help, but the chalky taste distracted me enough to pull on the pencil skirt and slip into the black pumps, to get on with it already. Get on with it already. That''s what Jane always said. Or had that been Elizabeth''s quip? Did it matter? They were both gone. And now I was the last of the Moores.

Alone. Single. And I was an orphan. Again. "Please join me in prayer," the chaplain said amid the damp sound of noses being blown. Behind him, red and gold light streamed through the vaguely nondenominational stained glass of the college chapel. Alone in the front row, I bowed my head but kept my eyes open. Since Jane passed ten days ago, I hadn''t cried, as if I were some kind of character in a novel, the proof of my mental state evidenced on the page by my lack of tears.

But I didn''t want to be a heroine in a book. I wasn''t a heroine, I had always been a supporting character, the only child in a family of an older generation of academics and Midwestern farmers and do-gooders, the serious analytical one who brought a book to holidays, was used to keeping quiet, listening. Always listening. Lying open on the pew beside me, the program recounted Jane Moore''s biographical history: undergraduate from UCLA, graduate work in women''s studies at the University of Minnesota, two years in London, tenured faculty at the college for twenty-five years, preceded in death by her wife, Elizabeth Pelletier, longtime college library director, survived by her only daughter, Dolores Moore. Mama''s whole life summed up in a paragraph of accolades and achievements. Elizabeth had had a similarly impersonal memorial service last year. ( Dorrie should be paying attention , the voices scolded.) I folded the program and tried to listen to the chaplain.

I heard the first voice when I was in kindergarten, after the first loss. My grandma Virginia Pelletier, Elizabeth''s mother, who spent her entire life on a farm in Iowa, had passed away from congestive heart failure. I remembered sitting solemnly on a dark, hard pew in the Lutheran church, the hymnal heavy in my lap, wearing my first funeral outfit: a navy blue skirt and cardigan with a calico blouse. My feet, in white tights and patent leather shoes that pinched as much as my heels did today, swung above the burgundy carpet, while Mommy sniffled beside me. I knew I was supposed to be sad, but I was having trouble grasping what Mama had told me: that Gigi was gone. "Where did she go?" I kept asking, but no one could give me a satisfactory answer. Gigi''s funeral and reception was a large community affair, and while my mothers, aunts, and bereaved grandpa were occupied with cleaning and company and caterers, I was left to wander the Pelletier house alone, the one child among a forest of adults. I stood on a stool in the upstairs bathroom of my grandparents'' house, now home to Baba only, and smoothed my long black hair and straightened my favorite headband--red-checked with cherries.

I''m so glad I chose the cherries and not the sunflower, I heard a voice say. I turned around, but no one was there. The red goes so much better with Dorrie''s complexion. I climbed down from the stool and checked behind Gigi''s flowered shower curtain. No one was there. And it was on sale too , added the voice. Almost ghostly, the voice wasn''t coming from inside my head and not outside it, either. Even so, I wasn''t frightened; I was pretty sure I knew whose it was.

"Thanks, Gigi?" I whispered timidly. Instead of responding, the voice tutted, She sure needs a haircut. I asked for a trim when we returned home. "Amen," recited the crowd, not quite in unison. "Jane''s family has asked that a poem be read in lieu of a eulogy," said the chaplain. It had been my only request as Jane grew weaker and weaker. At first we blamed the chemo and the third surgery, not quite willing to acknowledge that her frailty was a result of her inevitable mortality. But Jane had insisted we talk about the end.

She and Elizabeth had always structured our lives carefully, everything scheduled and organized in their particular way. "Mama, please don''t make me speak at the funeral," I had pleaded. Jane laughed--or what passed for laughing at that stage--and patted my hand. When speaking at Elizabeth''s funeral, I had been so nervous and distraught and--what was it? Something unnamable--that I stopped midsentence and escaped to the chapel''s unisex bathroom, where I threw up the donuts I had eaten at the funeral parlor. Jane had agreed to my plea. "?''For what is it to die,''?" recited the chair of the theater department, whom I had asked to read because of her deeply resonant voice, "?''but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?''?" I tried bringing my focus back to the echoey chapel and the words of Kahlil Gibran chosen by Jane, but I pictured her in the coffin, riddled with the cancer that had taken two tries to kill her. "And now a reading from Ecclesiastes," said the chaplain. Jane went into remission after the first bout of breast cancer, when she was in her midfifties, and my mothers had celebrated by getting matching tattoos, sideways figure eights inked on the spot between the breasts, or where Jane''s breasts had.