Rossi’s Auto Repair and Full Service Gas had been there for as long as Maureen had been a resident of this New Jersey town. It was the last business along the only thoroughfare. Past it, the street shed its name and was called a highway, even though it was the same street, now lined with residential blocks. On the curb near the gas station was a bench, installed by whom Maureen did not know, and she seemed to be the only beneficiary. A green metal statue of Bruce Springsteen, a tribute by a local artist to one of the greatest New Jerseyans, had been a recent addition, and it stood next to the bench.

Maureen remembered the years before Bruce’s arrival more clearly than the time after. She was eighty-eight, though this she did not advertise. She resented the way the receptionists and the nurses at every medical facility would start a conversation by asking her to confirm her birthday. Saying the date made her feel old, more so if someone marvelled—at how well she looked, or at her self-deprecating humor, which she felt obliged to offer lest sharper words slip out. At her age, being prickly was neither enchanting nor gainful.

Only when she was sitting beside Bruce, who had been sculpted wearing a cloak of seashells and ocean foam, did she allow her feelings to be more candidly expressed—spoken as an internal dialogue, of course, since she did not want to be caught saying things aloud. “Look at that blockhead,” she would observe, directing Bruce’s attention to a jaywalker who had bullied a car into braking abruptly. “Some people can’t even wait to meet their own demise.” Or else, about a man and a woman entering the coffee shop across the street: “Married, but not to each other. A stale situation, and neither of them has any flair.”

Maureen lived in a nearby apartment building that boasted top-rate facilities for which she no longer had any use, but she liked its look of poshness. Not that any apartment in this town would be cheap—God, no—but if one must downsize one should not be stingy. “To live precisely as allowed by one’s means, that requires intelligence,” Maureen said one day to Bruce. To her, people who scrimped and saved and eked out a mean existence were as idiotic as people who got themselves into debt. Overestimating one’s worth or underestimating it, just like having too big or too small an ego, were equal follies.

These thoughts Maureen would never share with anyone else in her life: not with her three nieces and two nephews; or with Flora, who came four times a week to do housework and cook; or Henry, who drove her to medical and hair appointments; or Carl, the doorman who also worked as a handyman when needed. Maureen’s relationships with these people, though amiable, were transactional. Her nieces and nephews might be expecting to get something after her death. Surprise! Maureen thought of the nineteenth-century Russian and English novels she had read a million years ago. The superior dead often had a few tricks up their burial sleeves.

Maureen was savoring this posthumous twist on a cloudless October day when she saw one of the regulars walking toward her. The woman often looked ghastly—not because of her outfits or her makeup but because she carried herself as though she’d forgotten that a woman, the moment she was in public, existed in view of many eyes. Unlike most days, she forgot to cast a greeting look at Bruce.

“You! Don’t let the world take that bounce out of your step,” Maureen said.

It seemed to take a second for the woman to register that she had been spoken to. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”

“I said, ‘Don’t let the world take that bounce out of your step.’ ”

The woman looked at her feet doubtfully. There was a slowness to her that Maureen did not approve of. She extended a hand and said, “Hello, my name is Maureen.”

The woman looked at Maureen’s walker between them, as though assessing the difficulty of a handshake. Maureen patted the space next to her. “Come and sit for a moment,” she said, to which the woman, as a reply, looked at her watch. “It’s ten to eleven,” Maureen said. From where she sat, she could see the clock outside the bank. “I suppose your appointment is at eleven?”

Every Monday, this woman entered a gray building next to the gas station a little before eleven and exited before noon. Therapy. Maureen had noticed that four therapists of different ages worked in that building and had tallied the comings and goings of some of their clients. She had learned a few things from the private eyes she had retained, six of them, in the last forty years. The first one had been engaged to uncover Fred’s affairs (three) and the others, after her divorce from Fred, to monitor his subsequent marriages (two). Fred had died eleven years ago—or was it twelve?

The woman, given no choice, sat down. “My name is Lilian,” she said, shaking Maureen’s hand.

“I know. You’re one of those.”

It was meant to be a complete sentence, but Lilian looked into Maureen’s dark glasses and asked, “One of those . . . what?”

That Monday, Lilian was feeling autumnal. It was not the New Jersey weather, sunny like a late-summer day, that shrouded her with melancholy but a mood carried over from the week before, when she and her husband had been travelling in Germany, practicing what they called geographic distraction. Lilian had often sensed a listlessness since the death of her younger son, Jude, which she had not experienced after the death of her older son, Oscar, several years earlier, and on many days she whiled her time away by studying Google Maps. The last time she had been so engrossed in geography was in the third grade, in Beijing. The parents of a classmate had bought a poster-size map of the world for their daughter. It was a luxury in 1981, and Lilian struck up a friendship with the girl so that she would invite her to see the map. But the friend soon lost interest in geography, and Lilian was less enamored of the girl’s collection of mechanical pencils and scented erasers imported from Japan. The friendship petered out, leaving no trace of hurt or embarrassment.

In retrospect, Lilian thought that they had been exemplary in their unfussiness. Few human relationships dissolve without causing pain, humiliation, rancor. And fewer, once severed, bring a sense of finality. The deaths of children do put the parents in a state of finality—this was not a surprise to Lilian. But what comes after finality? Is anything capable of following it?

The weather in Berlin the week before had been dismal, cold, with gusty wind and whipping rain. When they travelled south to Munich, the temperature was more lenient, though the gloom lingered. One morning, Lilian looked down from the hotel balcony at the courtyard—empty, since it was the off-season for tourism, and wet, since it had been raining—and felt the urge to raise her voice. To say something, or to scream, even. But say what, scream at whom? The problem with an impulse is that, once you ask a few questions, the impulse, not having any sensible answer, becomes a dead end. Lilian listened to the pigeons on the roof cooing, in the same manner that their cousins cooed in Belfast or Bruges or Barcelona. They must have cooed like that for thousands of years, never raising their voices—at least, never raising their voices over other species’ tragedies, or other pigeons’ deaths.

That day, Lilian and her husband had planned to visit Dachau. “Would seeing the place on such a gray day be too painful?” she asked herself, a question she knew did not make sense, as no amount of sunshine could make evil less dark. Lilian, who considered sturdiness her second nature, faltered, confirming a statement by a child in a Rebecca West novel: “The adjectives which really suited grown-ups were ‘lily-livered’ and ‘chicken-hearted.’ ”

Instead, they took a train to Füssen, walked through the town, and hiked in the mountains. The trail was covered with fallen leaves, rain-soaked and plastered onto the slippery ground; still, Lilian and her husband walked at a fast, purposeful pace. The castles and the monasteries near and far, white with rusty-red roofs, and the Lech, jade green and rapidly flowing, were beautiful enough to be diverting. There were not many people around—it was a weekday. And those they met were courteously aloof in a German way. This gave Lilian the solace of walking in a context-free life, unrecognizable. But the solace, she was aware, was provisional. The wish to be context-free often came in the wake of an unresolvable pretext, which was where real life was.

Some distance into the hike, they crossed the border into Austria. Lilian took a picture of a plaque, a vertical line separating two capital letters, “D” and “O.” She remembered the trip she and her husband had taken right after they got married—in a courthouse in Iowa, without flowers and without an elaborate honeymoon, because they had been graduate students on F-1 visas. To celebrate, they had increased their weekly bread budget, upgrading from a bag of white bread at twenty-nine cents to a bag of better white bread at forty-nine cents, and they took a Friday off, to spend a long weekend driving through Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula. In the rural north, where they had not seen another car for miles, they were alarmed when a pickup truck, heading toward them on a two-way country road, came to a sudden stop after passing them. In the rearview mirror, they could see the truck make a U-turn. Lilian remembered her fear as her husband sped their secondhand Nissan Sentra down a winding road through a forest, wet after a rain, gloomy even though it was a sunny day. Were they being chased? Were they in danger?

It was one of those events a person could recount at a dinner party with a fake shudder and a real laugh. Lilian pointed to the woods on both sides of the border and mentioned the memory.

Her husband checked his phone. “You know, it’s our anniversary.”

“Today? How many years?” Lilian said, not wanting to calculate.

“Twenty-six.”

They did not marvel at how long they had been married or at how they could have forgotten the date: to marvel would be a kind of performance or pretense. After the deaths of their children, life had become plainer. Some meanings were reduced to the husks of meanings. Some feelings were shadows of the feelings they had once been. And yet this new plainness, like finality, demanded to be—and could not be—understood. It was easy to taste the difference between the twenty-nine-cent bread and the forty-nine-cent bread; it was impossible to grasp the depth of what had become knowledge to them, now that they were parents without children.

When they returned to Füssen, they went into a shop and bought a straw bag large enough for a week’s worth of food for two from the farmers’ market. It was a random token of celebration of their anniversary, but any other purchase would have been equally accidental. When the middle-aged woman sitting behind the counter entered the sale into a ledger by hand, she asked Lilian where they were from. “America,” Lilian said.