My hands grew callused and clumsy. My arms and legs grew strong. I ate the big vegetables, and the plain rice, and the boring barley soup. I shed the soft layers of myself.

I did not want another winter.

One day in September, I went to town to pick up a shipment of our supplies. We have a little lab at home, and Sara’s very handy, but you can’t make everything from scratch. Luckily, you can get almost anything over the Internet.

I was standing in line at the post office when Debbie spotted me. “Melissa! Oh my gosh, I didn’t recognize you!”

She was doing okay, she said, working in a doctor’s office as an office manager. Bit of a pay cut, but when you added in the severance, not too bad a year.

“And you look great, Melissa! You lost so much weight! What are you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Lot of gardening,” I said.

“You working?” She eyed the slip in my hand, maybe hoping the carrier couldn’t drop off packages because I had a new job. Truth was, we just didn’t answer the door.

“No, I’m on unemployment. Good until almost Thanksgiving, as long as I keep looking.”

I did look, but there wasn’t much for middle-aged women with excellent skills in medical transcription, skin care, and poisons.

Autumn was a brief, brown season. Years ago, when we still went to Mass in town on Sundays, we used to drive a special route in the fall. There were blocks and blocks lined with birch trees, their white trunks striped with black and their branches arcing pale-gold overhead. It was like driving through a cathedral. I was always sorry that Abuelita didn’t get to see it.

Bronze birch borers took all the trees a while back. By then, we weren’t going to Mass anymore, so it took us a few years to notice.

“Abuelita’s not doing good,” said Tío Gaspar to me over lunch one day of that last October.

Sara was at work, and Abuelita would be at her rosary. We could hear the compressors chugging along through one of the last warm lunchtimes in a season tinged with cold at the edges of the day. Grandpa Estéban would not come out into the unchilled part of the house in this heat.

“You mean the way she’s slowing down?” I said cautiously.

“Uh-huh. It’s been a long time coming and I think she’s ready.” He locked eyes with me. “You know, she never wanted to live the way we do. She thinks it’s a sin.”

After me, Abuelita spent more time with Tío Gaspar than anybody. And his Spanish was better. I nodded and spooned up some more potato soup.

“I think it’ll be a relief for her. I’m more worried about Sara,” he said. “She’s still young. She has better things to do with her life than take care of old people and living corpses.”

“I don’t plan to be a living corpse any time soon,” I told him firmly.

Tío Gaspar gave me a sweet, almost chummy, smile. “Me, neither.”

Once, years ago, I had gotten Grandpa Estéban to tell me about New York. Sara was thinking about medical school at Columbia and he wanted me to tell her she couldn’t go.

“I can’t talk her out of it if you don’t tell me why you’re asking.”

“It’s not a good place for us.”

“You haven’t lived there in must-be eighty years. Everybody who knew you and Abuelita will be dead.”

“Eighty-five. And they won’t remember me, but Mamá and I remember New York.” His forehead furrowed. “You know my father died when I was young.”

“Abuelita said you were eight years old. The flu, she said.”

“They called it the Spanish Influenza. That made it even worse for a young widow and her son. There was no more school for me after that.” Although he didn’t need to breathe, Grandpa Estéban still sighed when he wanted to. He drew a breath then just to let it out.

“But Mamá was strong. She and I were the only ones in the family who survived. And she worked hard. We had an old house and she let rooms in it. Mostly to other Spaniards, who knew we hadn’t brought the influenza. One was a doctor. Doctor Muñoz.”

His usual raspy whisper dropped to a softer, more affectionate sound. “I brought him his meals and whatever he needed delivered … supplies, medicines, some of the same things we use today. He was kind to me, like a new father. But Mamá ….” His mouth twisted in disgust. “Mamá said his work was unholy. After a while, she wouldn’t let me visit him, anymore. No one ever took good care of him again. He passed too soon to learn one of the chants we sing to this day, one that might have prolonged his life.

“When Doctor Muñoz passed, I stole some of his notes. Some of his books. His work is the foundation of this family, of our life everlasting.”

I worked my numb fingers inside my mittens. I had never heard this story before. “That still doesn’t tell me why Sara shouldn’t go to Columbia if she wants to.”

“Your bisabuelita was fluent in English.”

“What?”

“She had a heavy accent, but she was fluent. But the day Doctor Muñoz passed from our home, she stopped speaking it completely. The shock.”

He gripped my hand in his, bone-cold even with a mitten between us. “She’s the reason we’ll never go back to New York. It would kill her.”

I told Sara I would mail her application to Columbia, but I threw it in the trash, instead. I have since come to regret that, not just because of the betrayal, but because of the reason behind it.

The unemployment payments on my ReliaCard ran dry in November and sure enough, I didn’t have another job. I’ll be fair: I was picky. I didn’t want to work someplace chatty and I didn’t want to work far from home. Abuelita was slurring her words and having trouble following conversations. She ran her fingers over the velvet of the jewelry roll until she dropped it from weak fingers.

It was hard to be sure, since she’d been blind and bald for years, but I think it was the lead in the paint that was doing the trick.

I added frankincense to Abuelita’s skin oil to welcome the season and sweeten the scent. She rubbed it into her skin carefully, reverently. I helped apply it to her legs and feet, since she couldn’t bend to reach them.

She still knew the touch of my hand, even through gloves. Abuelita and I were always close in a way that Grandpa Estéban and I never were. Whatever it was that made him want to live forever, we didn’t have it.

“Tu regalo,” she whispered. Your gift.

With unemployment over and years to go before I was eligible for retirement, it seemed like all I had to give anyone.

I ran into Debbie at the post office again just after Thanksgiving. Always the over-achiever, she was mailing out Christmas packages. She turned as if she were going to say something, then closed her mouth and looked away. She couldn’t tell me I looked great, because I didn’t. I was gaunt and graying.

I didn’t mind. It was a relief, one more connection severed from the world.

Abuelita died on December 23rd. I tiptoed in to check on her in her tiny, cold room and took off a glove so I could hold her hand as she passed. She didn’t breathe, and her hand was already cold, but it went slack — more limp than it did in sleep — and a foul smell crept in under the scent of frankincense and myrrh.

I was sorry she didn’t get another Christmas Eve. Although she hadn’t been to Mass in decades, she always listened to Midnight Mass on the radio. She loved the hymns.

“Vaya con dios,” I whispered. For the first time in years, I dared to kiss her on the cheek. It was tissue-soft and very, very cold.

Immediately after Abuelita’s passing, I trudged through the blowing snow out to the old barn. We used it for storage, mostly, but it was also our garage for the RV and the truck. I started the truck in the dark and let it warm up, keeping an eye out for lights in the house. No one stirred.

Careful in the snow, I drove the truck further out into the country, out to the property of a self-described gentleman farmer who spent his winters in Phoenix. I ran the truck into a ditch. Then I made sure the windows were secure, turned up the heat, and peacefully breathed in the fumes as the snow gradually covered the windshield.

I woke to the smells of frankincense and myrrh and old woman.

Abuelita was gone and I was in her bed. The jewelry roll was sitting on the dresser, all rolled up as if it actually had jewelry in it. Sara was sitting in my old place, the chair beside the bed.

“Welcome back, Mom,” she said. She looked exhausted. “You’re just in time for the New Year.”

I tried to speak, but it came out in a whisper. “What ….”

“You really did a number on yourself.” Sara gave me a sharp look through her tears. “Mom, couldn’t you have told me? I could have mixed something for you. Something safer. They kept you in a locker at the morgue for a day. I was afraid they’d do an autopsy on you, just like on Tía Rosa, and you’d never be right again.”

“Where’s Abuelita?”

“She died. You knew that, didn’t you? You wouldn’t leave her.” Tears spilled down Sara’s face. “We took you home and said we’d bury you, and we buried her in the grave Gaspar made in the barn a while back. We’re hoping nobody ever exhumes it, but if they do, maybe they’ll think it’s you.”

“I wanted to die,” I murmured. “Really die.”

“I won’t let you, Mom,” said Sara. She took my hand. I felt the pressure, but not the warmth. “I’m an Herrero at heart and we always take care of our mothers.”

We loaded everything we needed into the RV and the truck over the next five days. They packed me into a chest freezer for the journey.

“Are you comfortable?” Tío Gaspar asked. “I could get you a blanket for padding. You’re not giving off heat.”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “I don’t really feel anything.” It was just barely nightfall and the temperature was already dropping. I was outside after dark without a parka, without gloves, for the first time in months.

Tío Gaspar nodded. He looked back at the house, where Sara was fussing with the last things to pack. Grandpa Estéban was testing the vapor-absorption systems for the freezer and the RV. I could smell ammonia.

Gaspar leaned in. “I know why you did it,” he whispered. “I would do it, too, if Papá died, or if he wanted to. But you know how he is.”

Grandpa Estéban started singing to himself. His voice was cracked and tiny, but I could make out “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”

“You have relatives in other places,” I whispered back. “Omaha. St. Paul. Maybe even New York, for all I know. Or you could go somewhere new.”

He shook his head. “I’m going to Portland with you. It’s what Papá wants and where he goes, I go.”

“Westward leading, still proceeding …,” sang Grandpa Estéban.

“I don’t have to agree,” said Gaspar. “I’ll always stay with my family, no matter what we are.”

He closed the freezer lid gently. I heard some stumbling as he helped Grandpa Estéban in. The whole RV would be cold. Since Grandpa Estéban had never gotten a death certificate, he could have the run of the cabin.

“No matter what we are,” I repeated in my forceless murmur.

“King and God and Sacrifice,” sang Grandpa Estéban, barely audible through the freezer walls.

I heard the RV’s motor start, smelled the ammonia anew. I buried my face in my hands. Without breathing, I took in the scents of frankincense and myrrh: the oils I had blended, the scent of our stone-cold tomb.