My clothes were remarked upon, gently, with a little laugh, in a way that made clear they were not the right clothes.

When the family photographs were taken, I was somehow always the one asked to hold the coats, or to step out of frame because the light was better with fewer people, and when the photographs appeared, framed, on the walls of the house I had bought, I was not in a single one of them.

Stephanie did it all with a smile, and never once with a word you could object to, because that was the art of it.

To protest would have been to seem paranoid, grasping, difficult — the oversensitive mother making everything about herself.