My mother looked like a Zoya. One of those old Russian names. Named after her aunt, Big Zoya, from the old country. It set her apart from the Marys and Susans of her time.

She was up early. Sitting at the kitchen table, not moving — moving cost too much, and the payment was due. So she sat. I could see her from the living room, from the couch where I slept. Her breath was heavy.

The kitchen table was actually a dining room table without the leaves. It was teak, from the early 70s. I remember when she bought it, that and the dresser now topped with fifteen or twenty bottles of meds.

But when I came in, she brightened, like there wasn’t a moment to waste. We had breakfast. She didn’t eat much. A can of Ensure, some of the eggs I’d made. There was a drive in her, a kind of steel she wouldn’t let go of.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the car I’d just bought was for her — or rather, to drive her in. Up to Kaiser for her treatment. Grueling. That was the word she used.

After a session we would drive into the hills of Marin. Maybe walk a little. Maybe sit in the car or at a picnic table. Each day, each minute, was alive. She was current with all of it.

She wished she had a boyfriend. The last one had gone many years before. Husbands, many years before that. I was what she had left.

Until the end she taught what there was to teach.

The hills in Rivermill come from these hills.

Lila Markham brought this in herself, and gave permission to share it. — J.D.

The postcard came on a Tuesday afternoon, between a power bill and a flyer for the new chiropractor. Lila Markham, sixty-nine, Alder Lane, brought in the mail with one hand and a bag of green beans with the other. She set the beans on the counter and shuffled the envelopes and stopped.

The postcard was in her own handwriting.

She knew it the way she knew her own face in glass. The slant of the L. The little hook on the y. Her own address on Alder Lane, written by her in blue ballpoint pen.

The postmark said October 1994.

She turned the card over. The image was of the Rivermill Headlands and Highway 1, the way it looked before the county put in the railing. On the back, in her hand, a few words:

Margaret, sorry about the upset. Of course I forgive you. I forgot to say it before I left.

She sat down at the kitchen table. The beans were still in the bag on the counter. She thought about her sister Margaret, who would turn seventy-three in the fall, and was still in the same house in Petaluma.

Then she got up and went to the phone.

Welcome to the Rivermill Mailroom. Mail comes here in its own time, and not always in the order it was sent. There will be more. — J.D.

It’s chipped along the rim in a way that guarantees a slow, inevitable drip down the side if you’re not paying attention.

I keep using it anyway. It’s the only one that feels right in my hand, like it’s already decided I belong here and is just waiting for me to catch up.

There’s a faded line of lipstick on the inside edge that no amount of scrubbing has fully erased.

Not mine. Not yet.