Loretta Tolliver was seventy-one years old and she had been, for the entire forty-two years I had known her, the most composed person in any room she had ever been in.

She had buried a husband at fifty-four and organized the reception herself.

She came out onto that sidewalk and she saw Carmen, and nothing happened in her face at all.

Then she saw the boy.

And my mother’s whole body went, in the way a person goes when they have been hit somewhere internal, and she put a hand out and took hold of the restaurant’s door frame, and her purse went on the concrete.

“Mom?”

“I’m all right.

I stood up too fast.”

She had not stood up too fast.

She had walked eleven feet from a table.