hard · Act reading

In the years after the war, my grandmother kept a tin box of buttons that no garment in the house could account for. She sorted them on Sunday afternoons by a logic only she understood—not by color or size, but by some private register of weight and history. When I asked what she was looking for, she would say only that a button remembers the coat. I took this for the harmless whimsy of an old woman until, clearing her house after the funeral, I found each button paired in a ledger with a name, a date, and a single line of description. She had not been sorting buttons at all; she had been keeping the dead. The narrator's understanding of the grandmother's activity changes primarily because:

1. the grandmother finally explains the private system she had used to sort the buttons by weight.
2. a discovery after the grandmother's death reveals that the sorting recorded people rather than objects.
3. the narrator realizes the buttons had belonged to coats the family no longer owned.
4. the funeral forces the narrator to admit the grandmother's habits had been harmless all along.

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