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Ed’s mission involving Milla makes a special point in the narrative. Typically, society views the elderly as irrelevant, quietly living out their solitary lives, their productivity at an end. The hopes and dreams they once actively pursued are now static memories. But eighty-two-year-old Milla brings her past into the present every day. She has dementia, which has erased her memories of the years after her marriage. Milla never gives up on the return of the love of her life, Jimmy, who died in World War II and was buried in the local cemetery. Milla appears in the novel after readers witness the brutalization of the wife on Edgar Street, and Milla’s loving marriage functions as a contrast and antidote to that evil. In the sixty years since Jimmy’s death, Milla has never stopped longing to say the words that she was never able to say when Jimmy died in Europe. Ed’s willingness to inhabit her imagination as Jimmy empowers Milla to say everything she has been wanting to say and eases her pain.

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