The list on the refrigerator had five items, and when Terry Albright woke up she already knew which four she would check off: Laundry. Bills. Target. Mom. The fifth, The house, she had written down in February, and every Sunday since then she had started a new list and carried it over with the same blue pen, like moving an item to the next quarter.

She slept until nine. She had granted herself the late mornings after the divorce, when she moved into the one-bedroom in Rancho Cucamonga, half an hour from Mom's care home in Rialto, and they were one of the few benefits she never questioned. From the kitchen window she could see the parking lot and a pool nobody swam in after August. She drank her coffee standing at the counter and read the news on her phone, and when she put it down she couldn't remember a single headline.

The voicemail had been sitting there since Friday afternoon. Cedar Mesa, it said, and under that, 1:48. She could guess what it was about. Mrs. Pruitt in the business office at the care home had already written twice about the Medi-Cal application: it couldn't be processed as long as the house in Mom's name was neither sold nor rented, and an asset form was still missing. A minute and forty-eight seconds was a long time for Mrs. Pruitt. Terry turned the phone face down and went to get the laundry basket.

Down in the laundry room Gloria from the apartment below was folding towels. She told Terry about her son-in-law's new boat, which he had bought even though they couldn't afford it, and how the family was taking it out on Lake Havasu in October while she herself planned to stay home, since she got seasick in the bathtub. Terry nodded and sorted out the whites. She liked Gloria, or at least she liked that Gloria never expected answers.

While the machine ran she sat on a plastic chair by the window and thought about the forty claims waiting in the system on Monday, most of them body damage. For twenty-two years she had handled claims for the same insurance company in Ontario. These days the photos came in digitally, taken on customers' phones, and she zoomed in on the screen until she could tell whether a dent in a door came from a shopping cart or a pillar in a parking garage. She was almost always right. She hadn't gone out to inspect a damaged car in fifteen years, and nobody at the office thought she needed to.

When she came back up with the warm laundry in her arms, she had a missed call from Aunt Ruthie, who called every other Sunday after dinner in Ohio to ask how Mom was doing. Terry picked up about half the time. She meant to call back tonight, after the visit. A visit was easier to describe once you had already made it.

At the kitchen table she paid the electric bill, the phone bill, her car insurance with the employee discount, and Mom's homeowner's insurance on a house nobody lived in, and checked two items off the list.

She was supposed to leave a little before five-thirty. The hook in the hall was empty. She dumped out her purse on the kitchen table and went through her jacket. Finally she stood in the middle of the hall rug and went back over the day before in order: the gas station, the store, the parking lot. The keys were in the bathroom, on the shelf over the sink, where she never put them. She held them in her hand for a while before she left.

Target was ten minutes away, in a shopping center with palm trees in concrete planters. She needed three things and ended up spending forty minutes. In the sleepwear aisle she held up two nightgowns that differed only in the print, small blue flowers on one and small purple ones on the other, and read the care labels even though she could see they were the same. Mom wouldn't notice the difference, and in the end it was the blue one.

She took two packs of wet wipes, because the staff on Magnolia tended to run out. She picked up the nutrition shakes without looking, since Mom only drank vanilla. Every Friday of Terry's childhood in Dayton they had eaten at Frisch's, where Mom ordered a vanilla milkshake and always let Terry have the last of it.

She could have taken the freeway but drove Foothill Boulevard through Fontana instead, fifteen minutes longer with all the lights, past car dealerships and tire shops and a church whose parking lot was empty except for a single car. The bag sat on the passenger seat and the AC was on high. She stayed in the right lane the whole way.

At seven-fifteen she walked into Cedar Mesa with the bag in one hand and her car keys in the other. Long ago she had decided that a visit needed twenty minutes to count, and with the keys in her hand it was easier to get up when the twenty minutes were over.

Mom was sitting by the window in the dayroom, and right next to her sat a girl in a maroon polo shirt and a hairnet.

"Hi, Mom."

Mom looked up and smiled politely.

"Hello. Are you from the church?"

Terry's teeth clenched before she had time to think. The church people came on Thursdays, a pastor with a guitar and two ladies who handed out song sheets, and Mom knew all the songs by heart. Terry didn't say anything about it. She set the bag on the table and took out what she had bought: two packs of wet wipes, the nightgown with the blue flowers, and the six-pack of nutrition shakes. The price tag hung from one sleeve, and she let it hang.

She turned to the girl. The shirt and the hairnet were enough to place her.

"You're from the kitchen, right? Thanks for sitting with her."

Mom nodded at the girl. "Ruthie's been telling me all kinds of things."

"Mm."

It was always Ruthie now. Over the past year Aunt Ruthie had gotten younger every month in Mom's stories, and over the summer she had been ten and wanted to borrow Mom's sled. Terry had stopped asking which Ruthie Mom meant. She folded the Target bag in quarters and put it in her purse.

She had seen how Mom looked at the girl, with the face Terry remembered from school pictures and parent-teacher conferences, the one Mom had kept for other people's children. With Terry she was polite these days, as polite as you'd be with a stranger at a bus stop. Something stung under her breastbone. Terry let it be and sat down on the edge of the chair across from her.

"Have you eaten, Mom?"

"A whole chicken."

"That's good."

The clock on the wall said seven-eighteen. When she looked again it said seven-nineteen.

The girl got up and said goodbye to Mom, who answered bye-bye, Ruthie, drive carefully. Terry read the week's menu next to the clock, meatloaf on Monday, chicken stew on Tuesday, spaghetti on Wednesday and so on down to Saturday's soup, and when she looked up the doorway was empty.

For a while they sat without talking. Mom looked out at the parking lot, where dusk had settled over a bed of dead roses, and Terry wondered whether she could leave at seven-thirty without it looking as if she had planned it.

Then Mom turned to her, straight-backed, with the posture that had once quieted a whole classroom without her raising her voice, and took her hand in a hard grip.

"The man is hurting the girl."

Terry waited for the rest. Nothing else came.

"Which girl, Mom?"

"Ruthie." The grip tightened. "He's hurting her. You tell a grown-up."

Terry knew the story the way you know things that were told in low voices in another room. Ruthie's first husband had been a drinker, and one Christmas in the late sixties Ruthie had shown up at Grandma and Grandpa's with a split lip and a suitcase. In the spring she had left him for good. Now she had been married for more than fifty years to a retired mailman named Gene, and they had a pontoon boat on a lake outside Cincinnati.

"Ruthie's fine, Mom. She called today."

"Now." Mom didn't let go. "He's doing it now. I told all my children that."

The brochure Terry had gotten when Mom moved in had a section on sundowning. As the light went, many people with dementia became anxious, it said; they mixed up then and now and could become convinced that something terrible was happening. You weren't supposed to argue. You were supposed to reassure and redirect. Terry felt what she had heard settle into the right slot, like a claim getting its code.

She patted Mom's hand. "Ruthie's fine. She and Gene are taking the boat out."

She took the remote from the table and turned on the TV on the wall, where a game show was just starting. Mom watched it for a long time with her hands around Terry's before the grip loosened.

"She rides her bicycle all that way," Mom told the TV. "In this heat."

Terry pictured a ten-year-old Ruthie on a red bike on a street in Dayton. She took out her phone and typed a note, ask staff about sundowning, meds?, read it over, and saved it.

At seven-thirty she got up and kissed Mom on the forehead, which smelled of soap and something sweet she couldn't place. Mom thanked her for the visit in the same voice she used for the church people.

Out in the hall, at the med cart, stood a nurse with her gray hair in a bun, the phone to her ear and a row of plastic cups in front of her. Terry stopped with her phone in her hand and the note on the screen. The woman held up a finger, one minute, and kept talking about a delivery that hadn't come. Terry waited, then made a gesture that meant it wasn't important and went out through the main entrance into the heat.

Mom's house was five minutes from Cedar Mesa, on a block of low fifties ranch houses where half the lawns had given up. Terry drove past it every Sunday on her way to the freeway and usually didn't look. Tonight she parked on the street out front.

The Taurus was in the driveway where Mom had left it the last time she drove, one afternoon in February when she came home from Albertsons three hours after she'd left and couldn't say where she had been. The blue paint had faded to gray on the roof, and the windshield was dull with dust. From the rearview mirror hung the red felt apple Terry had sewn in Mom's class in Dayton in the spring of 1979, with stitches that were too big and that Mom had never redone.

The house key was on Terry's own ring. Inside, the air was still and warm, because she had turned off the AC in March to save money, and it smelled of paper and Mom's hand cream. The mail lay in a pile on the hall rug, ads and bank statements and window envelopes from the state. Terry picked it up, carried it six feet, and set it on the hall table before she turned on the living room light.

Mom had never thrown out anything that could be used in a classroom. Along the walls stood moving boxes that had never been moved, labeled in her round teacher's handwriting: Reading Gr. 1 1988–89. Easter crafts. Letters (capitals). On the refrigerator, drawings were yellowing under the magnets, houses with smoke coming out of the chimney and suns with faces, made by children who had to be over forty by now. Under a strawberry-shaped magnet was a business card for a real estate agent, Sandy Villanueva. Terry had put it there herself in March.

Once she had tried to work it out, as she would a claim. If every item in the house needed its own decision, keep, sell, donate, or throw away, and there were around four thousand items, which was a low estimate, that made four thousand decisions. So far she had made three.

In a box labeled Classroom misc. was a hand puppet, an owl in brown felt with button eyes, which Mom had used for thirty years to quiet seven-year-olds. Terry pulled it on. The owl had lost an eye. She held it up to the empty room and did the voice, the high, slightly scratchy one she hadn't heard in over forty years.

"Hoo-hoo. Now it's time to read."

The laugh came so suddenly that she jumped. It sounded too loud in the house. She kept going with the owl on her hand until she had to wipe her eyes with her free hand, and then she put it back in the box and closed the lid.

There was a hook by the front door, and on it hung a ring with two keys, for the Taurus and the garage. She took them with her when she left, and the mail from the hall table too, since the envelopes from the state had to come home anyway.

It was warmer in the car than in the house. The driver's seat was pulled all the way forward, where Mom had kept it, and Terry's knees touched the steering wheel, but she didn't move it back. It smelled of old vinyl and the same hand cream. When she turned the key, the engine started on the first try, just as Mom had always said it would.

The radio came on to Mom's station, sixties music and a host who sounded happy about everything. Terry turned it down but didn't turn it off. The clock on the dashboard glowed green, 9:21, and she hadn't meant to stay so long.

She thought about calling Ruthie. In Ohio it was twelve-twenty at night, and Ruthie and Gene had probably been asleep for two hours.

Instead she took out her phone. The voicemail was at the top of the list, and this time she pressed it.

"Hi, this is Carol Pruitt in the business office at Cedar Mesa. I'm trying to reach Theresa Albright." The voice was friendly the way an insurance letter is friendly, and Terry had written enough of those herself to hear the difference. "I'm calling about your mother's application. We still haven't received the asset form, and as long as the property in Rialto is in her name, the state can't move forward. If we don't have something by the thirtieth, I'm afraid we'll need to sit down and talk about your mother's continued placement here, and about what the options would be at that—"

Terry cut it off. The display showed 0:52 of 1:48. She put the phone on the passenger seat, face down.

That was when the line from the dayroom came back, though she hadn't asked for it. Ruthie's been telling me all kinds of things. Mom had nodded at the girl from the kitchen when she said it, the girl in the hairnet who had been sitting so close, whom Mom had looked at with the old face. She rides her bicycle all that way. Something in it was almost within reach, like a name on the tip of your tongue that slips away the moment you try to grab it.

With her hands on the wheel she let the engine run. She would ask the staff next Sunday, she decided, about the sundowning and the medication, and about the girl from the kitchen who sat with Mom in the evenings. She added a line to the note on her phone and then turned off the engine.

When the radio went quiet she could hear the engine ticking as it cooled. Out on the street a man walked by with a dog that stopped at every mailbox, and Terry sat on in Mom's car in the dark for a long time after they had disappeared around the corner.

She locked the Taurus and put the keys in her purse instead of hanging them back on the hook. The freeway was nearly empty, and she drove home with the window down.

It was ten o'clock by the time she set Mom's mail on the kitchen table. The pile slid apart, and three yellow flyers stuck out from between the bank statements and the envelopes from the state, all the same: WE BUY CARS – CASH – WE PICK UP, and under that a phone number in big digits.

She stood there with her purse still on her shoulder and read the top one. It didn't say anything about houses, but whoever picked up cars had something to haul with, and the house was mostly things. The rest followed on its own, and it was so simple she couldn't understand how she had missed it. Nothing in the house needed to be chosen. It could all go at once, the boxes and the drawings and the owl and the car in the driveway, to someone who would haul it away and not ask.

She dialed the number without thinking about it. After four rings an answering machine clicked on, and a man's voice, rough and in no hurry, said to leave a name and number after the tone. In the background of the recording a dog barked, once.

"Hi, my name is Theresa Albright. I'm calling about my mother's house in Rialto, and a car in the driveway, a Ford Taurus. I want the house cleared out. Everything in there, it doesn't need to be sorted. You can take the car too. Call me at this number and we'll set a day."

She read out the address and her number twice, clearly, with a pause between the digits, as she had learned to do for customers who wrote things down in pen. Then she hung up and sat down at the table. The flyer lay in front of her, yellow against the white tabletop, and she looked at it with her hands in her lap. Four thousand decisions, and now they were made, all at once. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this pleased with a Sunday.