Her health came back; the color returned to her face.

She took to brewing coffee in the afternoons in a battered steel pot, not because anyone made her but because she liked to sit with me while Emrys ran on the grass.

The first time our housekeeper reached to take the pot and serve her, my mother smiled and stopped her hand.

“In this house,” she said, “we help each other.

But nobody commands anybody’s dignity.”

I have kept that sentence.