January 14, Thursday. The coffee goes cold by the time your hand finds the photograph, which has been in a drawer since your return in December. Paper: matte, small — the kind no one prints anymore. Corner-buckle on the lower-right, new since Denver. The back of the photograph reads: Не забудь. Ne zabud'. Grandmother's hand, 2019, on paper that was already old in 2019. The Cyrillic letters are in pen. The pen has not faded in seven years. Your hand beside your grandmother's hand on the page. You transcribe. You do not know yet what the archive is for. You close the drawer.
January 22, Friday. The envelope catalogued by what it is not. Unopened. Un-read. Un-sent. Paper-buckle still on the long edge — the buckle that began in a Denver drawer through one winter in a heated house, preserved across the drive and the plane and the drawer in East Seventh. This week a faint coffee-stain on the lower-left corner — yours, not his. You take the envelope out. You hold it. Your hand stops at the crease. Your hand does not unstop. You put the envelope in a different drawer now: your own, your labeling, your file. The decision is not to open. The decision is the entry.
February 7, Sunday. Two months after the first Sunday of December, the house on the hill road in Kadıköy. You listen to the voicemail again at dusk on Avenue A. The cousin says canım twice. The cousin says hayırlısı once without meaning to say it. She says the word the way Yelena said it at Kameriye when the knife was close and the melon was round. The word travels from Kameriye in 2026 to a phone in 2027 through three women who did not mean to carry it. You do not call back. You do not erase. You write a letter in your head that you will not send. The streetlight comes on. Your breath is visible.
February 17, Wednesday morning. You drive to Albany. At the Albany Public Library the retired engineer is reading an airline magazine at the reading-room window, as he is every morning, as he has been since before you were born. Your mother is at the reference desk in the blue cardigan she stitched a name into the collar of twenty-eight years ago, for her own mother. You sit at the Slavic-studies shelves at the back. You open a book at random — a short-story collection in English, a woman writer from Kyiv — and the spine cracks a little as you open it, the glue old. You read fifteen minutes. At ten-forty-five your mother brings you a cup of coffee. "It's not as cold as out there." "No." "Stay as long as you want." You stay. She returns to the desk.
March 4, Thursday morning. Avenue B at eight-fifteen. A woman walking ahead of you in a grey coat with the grey-blue lining folded back the way Nina folded hers — your body registers Nina for half a second before your body registers that Nina has been dead since 2026 and never wore that coat and was not walking anywhere in March 2027. The woman turns at Ninth. She is not anyone you know. Your body continues toward the coffee cart. The cashier is the one with fingerless gloves. Honey. You pay. You carry the coffee west on Ninth toward Third where the tree at the corner is budding early this year for reasons no one has named yet.
March 11, Thursday morning. This one is not mine. This one is yours, Mom.
You wake at five-fifty the way you have woken at five-fifty for forty years. You wake before the alarm. The alarm is set to six and has not had to do its work in at least a decade but you leave it set. Setting it is what you do.
The coffee is already ground because you grind it the night before and leave it in the filter. You fill the carafe from the tap that still drips at the handle you have not fixed. You hit the button. The coffee starts.
While the coffee runs you open the pantry. Second shelf from the top, behind the canned pumpkin, there is a jar. The jar has sour cherry preserves in it, half gone. Karen gave it to you at Denver in November — Karen made it, she said, from a tree at a friend's place in Lyons that had more cherries than the friend could use. You took it home in the carry-on wrapped in a sweater. You have been eating from the jar on Sunday mornings only because you are rationing.
Today is not Sunday. You are checking the jar. You like to know it is there.
You close the pantry.
The coffee is ready. You pour. You drink the first cup standing at the window.
The window faces east. The maple in the yard still has the shape of winter. A squirrel that has been the same squirrel for three autumns is at the base of the maple doing whatever squirrels do at six in the morning. The sky is grey. It will rain later but it is not raining yet. Your diaphragm holds since five-fifty.
Your daughter is in New York. Her phone will not be on until eight. The last text from her was Monday — three lines about a Lebanese restaurant on Atlantic Avenue she wanted to tell you about. You have not texted back yet. You will text today after work.
Your mother has been gone eight years in June. You do not think about her in the mornings. You think about her in the evenings sometimes, when the quiet in the house gets the shape of her quiet. Not today. Today is not one of those evenings.
At seven-thirty you leave. The drive to the Albany Public Library is eleven minutes on a good day and thirteen today because the light at the corner of Pine is not working. You arrive. You park.
You go in through the staff door. Jean is at the front desk already; she nods. You nod. Jean has been at this library for three years longer than you have. Her shoulders know the chair she will sit in for the next six hours.
You sit at your desk. You turn on the monitor. The morning's requests are in the queue. A local-history question about a farm that was subdivided in 1947.
You answer the easy ones first. You drink your second cup of coffee at eight. You eat half of the banana you brought.
At nine-ten the retired engineer comes in. He is reading an airline magazine at the reading-room window as he is every morning. He has been there since before your daughter left for New York. He does not look at you and you do not look at him. The nodding you do is a kind of mutual agreement not to acknowledge the nodding.
At ten-twenty the phone rings at the reference desk and it is a kindergarten teacher asking about a book on Iroquois foodways for a class project. You find her three titles and email her the catalog numbers. She thanks you. She calls you Mrs. Ivanova which has not been your name in twenty years but which she has kept from some earlier form you were when her children were small.
You let her.
The morning continues.
Your back at noon has the set it has had every noon for forty years. You stretch once at the desk the way you have learned to stretch at the desk so that no one notices you are stretching. Jean notices. Jean does not say anything. You do not say anything back.
The jar is in the pantry at home. The daughter is in New York. The daughter is in Denver. The squirrel is at the base of the maple. The coffee is done.
The next patron comes in.
You look up.
March 19, Friday. These papers are for the file you do not know is a file. The file stays in a drawer on East Seventh, my drawer, my file, beside the photograph from Port Authority. I do not know the year you find it, or whether you find it at all. The horse has six legs because I counted. My grandmother — the one who died in 2019 — pinched one corner of each pierogi unmade. My mother learned this from her. I watched my mother teach you in Denver in November. The lamp at this desk goes off at eleven-forty. The paper is in the drawer. The horse has six legs.