Unaccustomed Earth

The narrator begins the story by telling us, “After her mother’s death, Ruma’s father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he’d never seen” (3). In so doing, we are introduced to the two main characters in the story: Ruma, and her father, whose name we never learn. Ruma’s mother, whose name also remains unknown, could be said to also be a character within the story, though she is no longer alive.

Ruma’s father, who will now be referred to as “RF,” has visited France, Holland, and Italy most recently. He has done so on package tours. Ruma has kept printouts of his itineraries each time, careful to check for any news of plane crashes on the days he’s scheduled to travel. He occasionally sends postcards during his travels. Each of his correspondences have been terse and impersonal: “Yesterday the Uffizi Gallery. Today a walk to the other side of the Arno. A trip to Siena scheduled tomorrow” (4). He is never in one place for long enough for Ruma to write back. These postcards remind Ruma of the telegrams that her parents would send to their relatives when the family would come home to Pennsylvania after their trips to Calcutta. They are also the only mailed letters that she has ever received from her father during her 38 years of life.

Ruma and her father are Bengali. Ruma, her white husband Adam, and their mixed-race son Akash live in Seattle, where RF is presently visiting, prior to his trip to Prague. Ruma, Adam, and Akash have recently settled into their new home in Seattle, having moved from Brooklyn. They relocated to Seattle for Adam’s job at a hedge fund, which presently has him on a business trip. RF telephoned ahead in order to ask permission to come visit, and Ruma reflects that her mother would not have done so: she simply would have informed Ruma that she was coming: “There had been a time in her life when such presumptuousness would have angered Ruma. She missed it now” (5).

Adam’s business trip will take him away for the entire week and entire duration of Ruma’s father’s visit. This is welcome news to Adam, who asserts that Ruma’s father can help her out while Adam is away. Ruma, though, anticipates no such help from her father, as it was her mother who would naturally pick up household and caretaking duties, and her father who would quietly withdraw into the Times during the visits. Adam has been taking many trips for his job recently, although he promises that the trips will soon subside. Adam never goes anywhere that would be interesting for Akash and Ruma, so they never join him. Too, Adam feels guilty about leaving Ruma “stranded” with Akash so often, especially because Ruma is pregnant again. He has suggested that she hire a babysitter, but Ruma is too spooked by the prospect of “finding someone to care for her child in a strange place” (5). Ruma also feels that she cannot rightfully expend money on an extra caretaker while she is not working and therefore free to care for Akash all day.

During the last stretch of their time in New York, Ruma was working part-time at her law firm. The firm had initially been flexible with this arrangement, but things became difficult when Ruma’s mother died at the same time that an important case was going to trial. Ruma’s mother died of heart failure, after the anesthesia for a routine gallstone surgery sent her into anaphylactic shock. In the wake of her mother’s sudden death, Ruma began to find her job duties absurd, and also wanted to spend every moment with Akash. Therefore, Adam’s new job offer, complete with a large enough salary for Ruma to quit her job, seemed to be heaven-sent.  

RF now lives alone, in a one-bedroom condominium in an area of Pennsylvania that is foreign to Ruma. He has whittled down his belongings and sold the house where Ruma and her younger brother, Romi, grew up. To Ruma, news of the sale had come as a shock, “wiping out her mother’s presence just as the surgeon had” (6).

Ruma knows that her father does not need a caretaker, but also feels vaguely ashamed that he does not live with her: if they were in India, her father would have unquestionably moved in with her. Too, her father has never mentioned it as a possibility, and the small Brooklyn apartment that Ruma and her family were living in at the time of her mother’s death would have been too small to accommodate her father. Now, though, their large home has several rooms to spare. However, Ruma fears the prospect of her father becoming an added obligation, and the end of the family she has created with Adam. While she cannot imagine herself tending to her father’s every need the way her mother did, the possibility of not offering for him to come live with her makes her feel even worse. When the topic is broached with Adam, he reminds her that her father is in good health, and that she will soon have an infant and a small child to care for. On the other hand, Adam also does not oppose the possibility of Ruma’s father coming to live with them. While his lack of opposition is borne out of sincere generosity, it vexes Ruma that Adam can so easily relinquish the life that she and Ruma have built together. The narrator also points out that Ruma senses Adam’s patience waning:

By allowing her to leave her job, splurging on a beautiful house, agreeing to having a second baby, Adam was doing everything in his power to make Ruma happy. But nothing was making her happy; recently, in the course of conversation, he’d pointed that out, too (7).

At this point, the narrator switches to a limited omniscient third-person perspective that delves into RF’s consciousness, whereas before this point, the narrator used a limited omniscient third-person perspective that delved into Ruma’s consciousness. We are told that RF feels very free these days, “with only a single suitcase to check” (7). The only other time he has flown across the country was when his wife had arranged for the family to travel to Calcutta on Royal Thai Airlines by way of Los Angeles. He still remembers that plane ride, during which they sat in the back among the smokers, as interminable. By the time the family arrived at their layover in Bangkok, no one had any energy to go sightseeing, and his wife had even slept through dinner. He remembered the arduousness of packing the entire family up for these thousand-mile trips:

[H]is wife had lived for these journeys, and until both his parents died, a part of him lived for them, too. And so they’d gone in spite of the expense, in spite of the sadness and shame he felt each time he returned to Calcutta, in spite of the fact that the older his children grew, the less they wanted to go (8).

RF looks out the window at endless clouds and feels satisfied at the current state of his life. He reflects that his family’s voyages to India were simply a fact of life—for them and for all of their Indian-American friends—except for Mrs. Bagchi. Mrs. Bagchi is the woman with whom RF has begun a relationship. Mrs. Bagchi had married her girlhood sweetheart in India, but he died in a scooter accident two years into their marriage. She had moved to America at the age of 26, because of her certainty that her parents would attempt to get her married off again. She lives in Long Island alone (a rarity for an Indian woman), holds a PhD in statistics, and has taught at Stony Brook University since the 1970s. The only times she has returned to Calcutta have been for her parents’ funerals. Although her first name, by which RF now addresses her, is Meenakshi, RF still thinks of her as “Mrs. Bagchi” in his mind. They met when they were the only two Bengalis in a tour group. Initially, their connection was merely friendly. But after Italy, RF began to think of her often, and to hotly anticipate her emails. They have currently agreed to only see each other while they are on trips, although RF has looked up directions to her home. He and Mrs. Bagchi will share a room during their upcoming trip to Prague, and they are thinking of taking a cruise to the Gulf of Mexico during winter. Mrs. Bagchi is very explicit about the fact that she intends never to marry again, nor to share her home with a man ever again. This increases her appeal to RF: “Perhaps, because she expected so little, [RF] was generous with her, attentive in a way he’d never been in his marriage” (9).

The perspective shifts back to an omniscient view of Ruma. She has offered to come pick up her father at the airport, but he has been adamant about his decision to rent a car and follow Internet driving instructions to her home. At the moment that she hears him arrive on the driveway, she begins to clean up Akash’s toys. Akash lies still on the floor, watching the television, the “perfect synthesis of Ruma and Adam, his curly hair they’d never cut and his skin a warm gold, the faint hair on his legs gold as well, reminding her of a little lion” (10). Although he is only 3 years old, sometimes she already feels him resisting her in a way that she assumes only adolescents do. She has also observed that he has become increasingly ornery as a result of the move, Ruma’s flagging energy, and Adam’s long absences. These days, he vacillates between tantrums and clinginess.

Ruma is convinced that Akash has figured out that Ruma is pregnant again—and that he feels preemptively replaced. Also, Ruma, unprepared for the workload and isolation of her life, has been less patient lately. Sometimes, she wishes she could simply get out of bed, get dressed, and walk out the door unencumbered, the way Adam does. She is baffled by how her mother handled all of her wifely and motherly duties. Her mother’s role as a traditional housewife in a foreign land had served as a counterexample to Ruma for all her life, but now she finds herself in the exact same role.

Ruma glimpses her father’s rental car. The sight upsets her, as it serves as a reminder that she now lives on the opposite coast from where she grew up—in a place completely alien to her parents, to her roots, to the family’s Bengali community. It has been seven months since she has seen her father.

Ruma goes outside to greet her father. Akash trails behind. Ruma is astonished by how much her father, with his light skin and gray hair, looks like an American: “It [is] her mother who would have stuck out in this wet Northern landscape, in her brightly colored saris, her dime-sized maroon bindi, her jewels” (11).

RF calls out to Akash in English; the narrator notes that Akash has forgotten the scant Bengali that Ruma taught him when he was younger. RF teasingly asks Akash if he is 3 or 300 years old. Instead of answering, Akash tells Ruma that he is thirsty. Ruma notes that her father appears in very good health, especially for a man of seventy years. While Ruma feels and looks exhausted and has begun to put on weight, her father appears well rested. When he mentions that gasoline is expensive in her neighborhood, she feels the familiar sting of his criticism. Akash observes that RF, whom he calls Dadu, takes off his shoes upon entering Ruma’s home. He asks why Dadu does this. Ruma explains to him that Dadu is more comfortable that way, while being dimly reminded that the custom of removing shoes in the home is one of the many habits of her upbringing that she has allowed to fall by the wayside.

Ruma gives her father a tour of the house, which is far larger than the ones she lived in as a child. Her father is silent during this tour, and Ruma notes that her mother would have been offering both praise and criticism. Ruma shows her father his guest room, and Akash announces that the room will be his when he gets older. When Akash begins to walk on the bed in his shoes, RF sternly tells him not to. Ruma tells Akash to get off the bed, calling him by his nickname, Peanut. For a moment, Akash carries on as if he’s not heard anything. Then, he stops, and suspiciously asks his grandfather why. Before Ruma can reply, RF says “Because I will have nightmares” (15). Akash drops his head and, to Ruma’s astonishment, makes his way to the floor—but not before momentarily crawling across the bed like he is a baby again. Ruma then shows her father the room she is most proud of: the kitchen. On the one hand she feels self-conscious, as if she is gloating over her successful life. On the other, she takes her father’s protracted silence as unimpressed rejection, which deeply stings her.

When they survey the backyard garden, RF remarks that the delphiniums need watering. Ruma, ashamed, must ask her father which flowers are the delphiniums. She realizes that her father must miss his passion for gardening. Throughout her childhood, it was his solitary activity. RF insists on watering the delphiniums, claiming that they won’t make it to the next day if he does not. As he carries a kettle of water outside, Ruma picks up on small mannerisms that remind her of his elderliness, of his subtle feebleness.

RF goes downstairs to unpack. He reflects that his wife, who was always upset by Ruma and Adam’s previous apartment, would have liked to stay in Ruma’s new home. He then presents the gifts he has bought for each member of Ruma’s family, although Mrs. Bagchi had selected every one. He has not mentioned Mrs. Bagchi to Ruma at all, and does not plan to, as he sees no reason to upset his pregnant daughter.

In the year before she died, his wife had begun to talk about the fact that she had never once seen the hallmarks of Europe during the many times they had flown over Europe during their voyages to Calcutta. Ruma had therefore booked a trip to Paris for herself and her mother, in honor of her mother’s 64th birthday. RF recalls that Ruma bought his wife tapes to learn French, and that he would sometimes come home and hear her practicing her French in her sewing room as she listened to her Walkman. The trip had been scheduled for six weeks after her surgery, which the doctor had said was plenty of time for recovery. RF ended up taking this trip on his own following his wife’s death on the operating table. In all of their years married, they had never taken a vacation as a sole couple. 

Ruma, Akash, and RF eat dinner early. Ruma reflects on how easy it is to take shortcuts while preparing Indian food for Adam, and the astonishment her mother would express when Ruma would tell her about the meals Ruma prepared, which her mother felt meager compared to the intricate, home-cooked feasts she herself took so much pride in making. When Akash was younger, Ruma had heeded her mother’s advice and accustomed Akash’s palate to Indian food, but she’s since grown lax, feeding Akash macaroni and cheese out of boxes. RF observes this and asks Ruma why she feeds the boy such food, which is full of chemicals. Unlike Ruma, cooking had been one of Ruma’s mother’s talents, and Ruma’s mother had never taken shortcuts. Ruma’s mother ran the household as if she were meeting the demands of a stringent mother-in-law, although they had lived in Pennsylvania, thousands of miles away from both her parents and her husband’s.

Ruma eats dinner with her fingers, as does her father. Akash, having never been taught to eat with his fingers, uses his utensils. They conspicuously do not discuss Ruma’s mother, nor do they talk about Romi, Ruma’s brother, or Ruma’s pregnancy. After dinner, Ruma reads to Akash in bed. RF begins to do the dishes, and then awkwardly interrupts Ruma when Adam calls and he picks up. Ruma, telling her father that he did not need to do the dishes, takes the call. Ruma pictures Adam in his hotel room. She tells him that she cannot imagine her father living in their home, and she and Adam go back and forth about whether she should ask him to come live with them. Adam, “breathing patiently through his nose,” ultimately reminds her that the decision is hers (25). They hang up, and Ruma eyes framed photograph of herself and Adam on their wedding day on the bedside table. She reflects on the gulf that has opened between her and Adam since her mother’s death—a thing that he cannot understand as both of his parents still live, a fact that reminds Ruma that they are, in fact, two different people with their own lives. She guiltily ruminates on the fact that she is beginning to prefer her solitude to having Adam persistently watching her, full of consternation about her mood and state of mind.

Ruma also thinks about how, 10 years ago, her mother had adamantly attempted to persuade Ruma not to marry Adam, believing that he would eventually abandon her for an American girl, and that Ruma’s love for Adam was borne out of self-hatred. Although Adam had not left Ruma as predicted, Ruma was still sometimes stirred by the memory of how boldly she had resisted her mother’s outrage—and also how her father’s passive silence about the matter had stung her even more than her mother’s outspoken resistance. Eventually, Ruma’s mother had warmed to Adam, calling their home to speak just to him, maintaining an online Scrabble game with him, and fixing him Indian treats that he adored.

The narration switches back to privileging RF’s interiority. He finishes the dishes and takes out the trash, and then pauses at Akash’s cracked bedroom door. Although he is jetlagged, he cannot fall right asleep. He peruses the guidebook of Seattle that Ruma has left on his bedside table. He examines the room and remembers the cramped, shady apartment in New Jersey that he, his wife, and children used to live in when their family was young. He recalls the sound of his children’s voices as they ran through that apartment and realizes that the memory of that distinct time in his life is something that he could only ever share with his deceased wife: his children would solely remember the big, suburban house that they later moved into.

Since his wife’s death, he has periodically been asked if he is going to move in with Ruma. Mrs. Bagchi has even mentioned it. His answer is always that he does not expect Ruma, who married an American boy, to fulfill or carry the sense of duty that would make his moving in with her unquestioned. Too, he reflects on the way that he let his siblings in India care for his ailing parents in the last years of their lives—because uprooting his wife and two teenaged children would have been unthinkable at the time. So he, without malice, fully expected Ruma to carry on living the life that she had built for herself. His wife, on the other hand, would not have thought twice about moving in with Ruma, had he been the one to die first.

He suddenly tires. The narrator intimates that RF has given Mrs. Bagchi his daughter’s phone number, with the tacit, mutual knowledge that Mrs. Bagchi is not to use it to reach him. He knows, without a doubt, that Mrs. Bagchi loved her husband of two years more than RF had ever loved his wife of 40 years. Mrs. Bagchi still carried a photograph of her deceased husband around in her wallet. And that didn’t bother RF at all—with Mrs. Bagchi he is not seeking fervent passion, but rather, what decades of marriage had accustomed him to: quiet companionship. He muses on the fact that the thought of his death hovers over him in the wake of his wife’s absence. He recalls the way that Ruma had cried in his arms like a child when his wife died: and the fact that he had stood by his habit of showing strength for her by refusing to cry himself.

The point of view shifts back to Ruma. She wakes up and her father and Akash quickly come to join her in the kitchen. Akash announces that he and his grandfather have gone to the lake and that “Dadu put [him] in a movie” (32). Akash then begins to pester his grandfather, who has begun preparing his tea, to go outside with him. Ruma mentions the Seattle tourist attractions, which she has had scant opportunity to see herself, and which she had in mind for her father’s visit. RF, however, his eyes looking tired behind his glasses, expresses that he was hoping to take a rest from such activities. Ruma, thinking of the statistic that most long-time spouses die within two years of the other, wonders whether there are any nearby friends and neighbors who check in on her father in his condominium. She also wonders if he is keeping something from her—although she intrinsically knows that there is nothing wrong with him. It is this knowledge that actually upsets her: “[H]er mother’s death had lightened him, the opposite of what it had done to her” (33). Then she watches him wipe errant cereal off of Akash’s face and is reminded of the small ways her father had come to her rescue in a similar manner when she was a child.

RF surprises Ruma when he wants to tag along to Akash’s swim lesson in order to film it. On the way there, she notes that while the roads of her neighborhood are growing in familiarity, she feels no connection to anything in her surroundings. She has lost her friendships with the fellow moms in her old Park Slope neighborhood, and also feels that reaching out to strangers for friendship at this point in her life would be too forced.

RF asks her if she has found a new job, and she tells him that she is not yet ready to do so. When he presses the matter, she remarks that she may return to work when the new baby is in kindergarten. RF, alarmed, reminds her that that won’t be for five years—and that now is the time for her to be developing her career. Her rejoinder is that she will soon be doing the work of raising two children, just like her mother did. When RF asks if this will make her happy, she does not answer. He admonishes her, saying that restarting her career after so long away from it will not be simple. Ruma muses about the fact that she has never felt comfortable openly confronting her father, as she feels that their bond is too frail to sustain open conflict—in contrast, she could always fight openly and passionately with her mother. She also knows that she disappointed him by getting rejections from all the Ivy League schools she’d applied to: even though Romi now lives shiftlessly, her father respected him more because Romi had graduated from Princeton and earned a Fulbright scholarship.

Later that day, after dinner, RF plays some of his vacation videos, as well as those of Akash, for Ruma. Suddenly, Mrs. Bagchi appears, flickering, in his footage. When Ruma asks who she is, RF is glad that Mrs. Bagchi has vanished from the frame and that the room is unlit. Instead of taking the opportunity to tell his daughter about the woman, RF merely says that, in his travels, he has realized that Indians are everywhere. He feels that—unlike Romi, who probably would have taken the news of a new female companion in his life as a relief—Ruma, who had always been allied with his wife and his wife’s condemnations of him, would not take the news well.

Akash wakes Ruma the next morning at 7:45am, announcing that her father has gone away. She rouses and finds that her father and his rental car are indeed gone. As he does not carry a cell phone, he is also unreachable. She is about to call Adam to ask him what to do when RF returns. Having left a note on the downstairs bureau that has escaped detection, he went to a nearby nursery to get plants for Ruma’s backyard. Finding it closed, he returned only with goods from a nearby bakery. Ruma feels flattered by his desire to beautify her home.

When the nursery opens, RF ventures back out, with Akash in tow. Ruma realizes that it is the first time she has left Akash solely in the care of his grandfather. An hour later, her son and father return with gardening tools, bags of soil, and new flowers to plant. With Akash happily playing by his side, RF spends the next two days gardening until dusk. On the second day, he purchases an inflatable kiddie pool, which Akash joyfully splashes in. With Akash occupied, Ruma has time to catch up on her household chores.

While Ruma begins removing items from an old bookcase in Akash’s room that she has been meaning to paint for a decade, Akash walks in. He announces that he is gathering items for planting. Outside, Ruma discovers that her father has created a small garden plot with small holes for Akash. As Akash begins burying a red plastic dinosaur into his plot, RF gently reminds him not to bury it too deep: he should still be able to touch it. Then he asks Akash to tell him—in Bengali—what color the dinosaur is. “Lal”, Akash exclaims, before pointing to the sky and shouting “neel!.”

Later, when Ruma and her father are enjoying tea on the porch, RF remarks that, if he lived there, he would sleep on the porch in the summers. When her father brings up their former family home, tears fill Ruma’s eyes. Ruma feels herself wanting to ask her father if he has ever cried for her mother—information that he has never offered freely to her. Ruma reflects on the sense of awe that she gleans from Akash’s presence in the world, and is reminded of her mother’s words upon his birth: “He is made of your flesh and bone” (46). This statement had enabled her to recognize “the supernatural in everyday life”—although she understands that death, too, has this power (46).

That night, Ruma speaks with Adam, telling him that her father has begun to plant a garden in their backyard. Adam’s frustration mounts when she informs him that she still has not yet broached the topic of him coming to live with them. Ruma also recounts that Akash has begun expecting his grandfather to read him a bedtime story every night. She recalls the first time she found her father reading to Akash. The sound of her father’s awkward, carefully enunciated words of Green Eggs and Ham had moved her and, presently seeing him asleep in Akash’s bed, she realizes that “for the first time in his life her father had fallen in love” (48).

The narrative switches back to Ruma’s father’s point-of-view. While the garden is progressing nicely, he is aware that it will fall into disrepair in his absence, unless Ruma and Adam decide to hire someone for its upkeep. However, he is unable to stop himself from planting many things, including tomatoes, marigolds, and impatiens. He reflects on the fact that gardening is the only thing that makes him miss his wife acutely, as he recalls the way that she loyally made use of everything he grew in his garden back in their old home.

RF, deciding that a postcard is the more prudent option for reaching Mrs. Bagchi than sending an email from Ruma’s computer, composes a letter to Mrs. Bagchi on the back of a postcard he procured at the hardware store. In Bengali, which he trusts to be inscrutable to Ruma, he writes: “I am planting Ruma a garden…Akash has grown and is learning to swim. The weather is pleasant, no rain here in summer. I am looking forward to Prague” (50). He fills out the card with Mrs. Bagchi’s address, which, along with those of his son and daughter, he has begun to carry around in his wallet on a small strip of paper. He then hides the postcard between the pages of the Seattle guidebook that Ruma had left in his room.

When RF turns to regard Akash’s sleeping face, a bolt of sadness hits him when he realizes that he will not be alive to witness the boy’s middle and old age. Simultaneously, he feels the weight of his own abandonment of his parents, which occurred when he chose to leave them for America.

The next morning, he instructs Ruma about the upkeep of the garden. He also informs her that hydrangea, which he has just planted, were her mother’s favorite flower—in America, at least—when she was alive: a fact that Ruma had never known. Ruma finally finds the nerve to bring up the topic of her father coming to live in her home: she tells him that he can resume upkeep of the garden after his planned trip to Prague. He replies, “It is a good place, Ruma. But this is your home, not mine” (52). Ruma assures him that he would be able to come and go as he pleased should he come to live there, and even solicits Akash’s approval of the proposition of his grandfather coming to live with them, which Akash enthusiastically gives. When RF asserts that he does not wish to burden Ruma, she assures him that he will not, and makes him promise to at least consider the prospect of moving in, to which he agrees.

RF abruptly becomes desperate to depart. He consoles himself by reminding himself that his flight will leave within 24 hours, and that, two weeks after that, he will reunite with Mrs. Bagchi. He feels angered by Ruma’s sudden need for him, which she has never expressed or had before. And while he feels obligated to accept Ruma’s invitation, he also firmly knows that “he [does] not want to be part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it” (53). Akash, who, although mixed race and missing a Bengali surname, has become the only family member with whom he feels he shares a connection unmitigated by the manner in which age and culture had ultimately separated him from his own children.

RF departs the following morning, without awakening Akash. He steadfastly refuses Ruma’s offer to accompany him to the airport. When he ascertains that Adam will be returning later that night, he assures Ruma that things will soon return to normal for her. She cannot bring herself to tell her father that things had already felt normal. RF also tells Ruma that he has treasured every day he has spent at her home, and that while he will not be of as much assistance as her mother would have been, he can come to visit when she gives birth to her second child. However, he also firmly asserts that he is too old to make the change that coming to live with her would entail, and that he prefers to stay on his own. His words sting her, as they communicate to her that he had not needed any time to reconsider her offer.

RF then asks Ruma for a stamp, fabricating a story about a bill that he needs to send off. Ruma tells him where she keeps the stamps, and RF soon departs in his rental car, leaving Ruma to wonder about when she will next see him.

When Akash awakens and asks after his grandfather, Ruma finds that she is just as disappointed by his absence as Akash is. Even the reminder of the return of his father does not console Akash, who goes out to forlornly tend to his pretend garden plot. It is then that Ruma discovers her father’s postcard to Mrs. Bagchi, which Akash has placed in the ground. When Akash admits that his grandfather did not give him the postcard, Ruma is hit with the realization about “the woman in the video, the reason for her father’s trips, the reason for his good spirits, the reason he did not want to live in Seattle”; it’s because “her father had fallen in love” (58).

RF, for his part, does not realize his error until he is in an airport bookstore and he cannot find the postcard. The realization fills him with dread.  

Once Akash recovers, Ruma fixes him breakfast. She realizes that the sentences printed on the postcard, which she cannot read, nonetheless prove, “with more force than the funeral, more force than all the days since then, that her mother no longer [exists]” (59). She eyes the hydrangea, which, for all of its thoughtfulness, does not prove that his father ever loved nor longed for her mother. Yet, she also understands it as a gesture of honor for her mother, which her father undertook before turning his heart toward another. She then affixes a stamp to the postcard.