Rose

Rose is the devoted servant who kept the keys, opened the letters, tucked the children into bed, and knew every mistress and every sorrow of the family she served. Cheerful and hopeful even in her hospital bed, planning her return to the garden and asking after the child, she dies within days of a visit that seemed full of life. Her death is a wrench in the household's daily existence—a piece of their life, part of the furniture of the apartment, gone—and it registers the novel's steady attention to the lives of servants as fully felt, fully mourned.