Every time she said nothing while Arthur made me the joke, she was not keeping the peace.

She was voting.

And she had voted, silently, against me, at every dinner, for three decades.

I did not say all of that to her.

But I think, from my face, she heard it anyway.

I have had to sit with my mother’s part in all of it more than any other, because it is the most painful and the most complicated, and because I know that she loved me, in her way, the whole time she was failing to protect me.

She was not cruel like my father.