She has not been in that room in thirty-six years.

She stood outside the door for a while, and I let her.

Lorraine looked up when we came in and her whole face opened, and she said, “Sandy.”

Renee didn’t correct her either.

I watched my aunt sit down beside her mother and take the offered cookie in the napkin and say *thank you* and eat it, and afterward, in the car, she put her sunglasses on before we got out of the lot, and neither of us said one word about it for a hundred and forty miles.

Somewhere north of Evansville she said, “Thirty-six years, and she thought I was Sandra.”