She had a towel across Lorraine’s shoulders.

There’s a little vanity in that room with a basin, and she was rinsing her mother’s hair with a plastic cup, one cup at a time, testing the water on the inside of her own wrist first the way you do for a baby.

She wasn’t talking.

That’s the part I keep.

My mother, who narrates everything, who has never entered a room without providing a soundtrack for it, worked in complete silence for twenty minutes.

Comb, section, pin.