My mother was the best and the worst at Go Fish. She was the best because she made the room into an ocean, our cushions a fishing boat—cutting lines of string to hang from the sides as we held our cards high to catch the dim glow of the corner lamp. While we were playing, she would sneakily attach something to one of my strings. “Do you have any fours?” I’d ask. “Sorry, darling. Go fish,” she’d say, and after picking my card, I’d pull at the string to discover some kind of a small toy, a treasure from the depths of the beige carpet-sea, a tiny plastic frog, a crayon. The delight! I won every game we played of Go Fish, and not because she was letting me win, and not because she was a clueless player, but because she simply did not want to take my cards. She liked to give me all her cards. She hoarded her nines and she surely knew I had a nine but she never asked for my nine until I demanded hers and she gave me all three, and then the look on her face, the plainness of the pleasure. Aunt Minn would tell me about this sometimes, about how everyone worried about her sister but that when she could, in the phases of health, my mother tucked Minn into her bed, and sang her made-up melodies, and gathered little treasures she’d found, flowers, pretty rocks, discarded toys at the playground, loose and sparkling beads. This same Go Fish game with treats tied to strings had originated with Minn, in their home in Corvallis, on their living room carpet, which had been, more suitably, blue. She’d been a lousy player then, too. “I always won,” said Minn, tapping at the edge of her glass of wine. There we were again, in the living room, Vicky asleep upstairs, Uncle Stan working at the computer upstairs, my aunt and I at sea on the sofas. Was it coincidence that she too liked to sit at night in a dark living room near the glow of a distant lamp? It was like a small homage we made together, and I sometimes felt a flash of clarity then of how Minn and I shared something highly specific, how perhaps I had been a renewal of her to my mother, or how she had been a practice round for the arrival of me. “You can go to bed if you want to, Francie,” my aunt said, gazing out the living room window, which had turned flat with interior light and impenetrable. “Can I stay?” “Of course. It’s not boring to you, just sitting here?” “No. No.”