Nana with Kathryn at 18 months.   (Photo: Courtesy of Colin Harrison)

“This is it,” my wife said when we arrived, pointing to an uninspiring two-story house with stucco siding built into a sliver of hillside. The place had fallen into a kind of sun-baked suburban shabbiness. Nana’s enormous car sat half-parked in the garage, and a quick glance upward showed that the roof was losing its thick cedar shingles at a precarious rate.

Nana met us at the door looking even smaller than when I’d last seen her, at our wedding.

“Oh, at last! At last!” she cried. Stooped and so thin her vertebrae lifted her sweater, she was no more than five feet tall in her heels. Her relief was immediate, and she clung tearfully to Kathy.

There was a deep female logic to this. My home for yours, your baby for me. The equilibrium was complicated, but it made sense.

Inside, my wife showed me the earthquake damage, the wall-to-wall carpeting streaked with dried beef-heart drippings, the nooks and crannies jammed with bills, canceled checks, newspaper coupons, supermarket receipts, and hearing-aid advertisements.

“If I go, we must take my darlings!” Nana announced, and I assumed she meant her three Persians, who now inhabited what had been my wife’s old bedroom, their enormous exercise furniture draped with sub-sanitary clouds of cat hair. But I was wrong. Nana led us out to the kidney-shape swimming pool and pointed at some handmade elfin headstones arrayed in a weedy bed.

“My darlings!” she repeated, and my wife explained that this was the graveyard of innumerable cremated Persians, each tiny tin of ashes carefully labeled and dated before burial. Each tin would have to be disinterred and brought to Brooklyn.

My wife had already said that I didn’t have to go through with it, that I could change my mind. But that was no longer possible, I knew. Kathy was Nana’s blood. I was married to Kathy. The thing was knotted up; it was what it was.

That night, we discussed the plan with Nana.

“I might do it,” she said.

Kathy had brought pictures of the Brooklyn brownstones we were looking at.

Nana held them in her bony hand. “Like London,” she noted.

The next morning, I called a real-estate agency and asked that they send over a representative to talk to us about selling the property. At precisely the appointed hour, a white Mercedes convertible pulled in, and out jumped a statuesque and totally stacked blonde in a white miniskirt and white pumps. She was a perfect L.A. goddess. She offered me her hand, itself a small piece of artwork, draped with diamonds and featuring creamy long nails. Every man has his weaknesses; I could feel stupidity flood my circulatory system.

“My partner will be here in a minute and then we’ll get started,” she breathed.

“Partner?” I said.

A moment later, an identical white Mercedes convertible pulled in behind the first and an identical woman jumped out.

“No, we’re not twins!” they announced brightly. “We just like the way we both look!”

Suddenly I understood that in a pretty hot real-estate market, there was competition among agents for houses and that it didn’t hurt to be pretty hot yourself.

As the two women tottered in their heels over the cracked sidewalk around the pool, I reminded myself that I might be handed the grave responsibility of selling Nana’s house. I couldn’t let these cantilevered buxotics mess with my head. After they left, I called the real-estate office back. “I want someone I can deal with,” I said. “Send over a potbellied middle-aged man.”

Which they did. He arrived that same afternoon. His car was nice, his watch expensive. But I looked into his face and saw a tired guy who’d been beaten around a bit, probably survived a few down markets. “Listen,” I said after he’d met Nana and politely inspected the cat cemetery. “We’re not going to fix this house up. If we sell, it’s as is.”

“Got it,” he said.

“I don’t want super-top dollar. I want superfast dollar.”

He nodded. “I can get you super-top dollar, though.”

“You can? Look at this place.”

He smiled. “It’s perfect.”

“Why?”

“Teardown. Everyone wants one.”

I nodded slowly. Nana had not quite made up her mind. The idea that her house would be demolished by bulldozers the day after she left might spook her, underline the impermanence of things.

“We would, of course, not need to mention this to Mrs. Jacobs,” said the real-estate agent.

That night, perched on the edge of her antique chair, Nana said she had been thinking about the idea of moving to Brooklyn and leaving her “lovely California.”

“I’ll do it on one condition,” she told us. “Only one.”

Kathy and I looked at each other. We thought we had covered all the angles. “What?” she asked.