I sat in a kitchen in a house on Chestnut Street and looked at my mother’s handwriting on the back of an envelope for a long time.

And the thing I said, eventually, was not clever or furious.

It was the stupidest possible sentence and it is what came out.

“That’s her pen.”

Jessi said, “What?”

“That’s the pen she keeps by the phone in the hall.

It’s got a chewed lid.”

And then I put my hand over my mouth and sat there.