“What parcel?” she said.

Arthur glanced toward my father, who had just come in from the yard, and then he laid out a contract that carried two signatures — my father’s, and, beneath it, my mother’s.

Or something that had been made to look like my mother’s.

My mother picked up the contract and studied it for a long time, longer than it takes to read it, and the kitchen went silent around her, and I watched my father’s face begin to come apart at the edges.

Then my mother set the paper down and said, quietly, in a voice with no tremble in it at all: “That signature is not mine.”

My father dropped the truck keys he was holding.