My mother's sewing box was an archive. Beneath the top tray of needles and thimbles lay strata of buttons—horn buttons from my grandfather's overcoat, mother-of-pearl discs from a christening gown, a single brass anchor from a sailor suit no one could remember anyone wearing. When a shirt lost a button, my mother did not simply replace it; she consulted. She would tip the box toward the window, stir the layers with one finger, and narrate: this one came off your aunt's wedding dress, that one from the curtains in the first apartment. I understood, even at nine, that the mending was almost incidental. What she was really doing was taking inventory of everyone we had been. Years later, when the box passed to me, I lifted the tray and found a button from my own school coat, wrapped in a slip of paper with the date written in her handwriting—waiting there, it seemed, to tell me who I had been. I sat with the box open on my knees for a long time that afternoon, turning the little brass anchor over and over, trying to remember a sailor.