“I didn’t say you should be.”

My mother, Margaret, had always been harder to understand than my father.

He gave orders.

She apologized for them.

She could make a terrible decision seem like an unavoidable inconvenience, like rain on the day of a picnic.

I had spent thirty-one years wondering whether she had genuinely forgotten what happened at the hospital or simply chosen not to remember.

Now I had a question only she could answer.