She was carrying a canvas tote with a towel and a bottle of shampoo standing up in it.

My mother has worn a full face to take out the recycling for as long as I have been alive.

I have never seen her leave a house un-lacquered.

Not once in twenty-nine years.

She walked in without looking around, the way you walk into a place you’ve been eight hundred times.

I gave her twenty minutes and then I went in and signed the book and walked down to the memory care wing, and I stood outside the doorway of my grandmother’s room, out of the sightline, and I watched through the gap by the hinge like a coward.