She pulled her blue fleece hoodie off the back of the wooden chair and slipped it over her head.

She zipped it up halfway to her collarbone.

She kept her hands out of the sleeves and let her fingers lie flat on the tabletop.

“Look, Mom, no hands and no pain at all,” she said.

She sat down at the little round table in our new apartment kitchen.

The place was small, just two bedrooms on the second floor of a brick fourplex near the high school, but the eight o’clock sun reached all the way across the linoleum to the white refrigerator.

I set the warm plate right in front of her.