“Your mother sold them,” he said.

“Online.”

“She did what?”

“She said they were just old pieces of scrap metal,” he murmured, “and that she needed a little extra spending money for the trip.”

I stood there and could not find a single word.

I had come home braced for the ordinary sorrows of a homecoming to a sick man — the decline, the fatigue, the nearness of an ending I already knew was coming.