It is love as pure labor, love with no audience and no reward, an old woman spending herself down to the wick so that the boy she was leaving behind would not be left alone.

I had thought I was the one taking care of her.

I had been so busy watching her breathe that I never once suspected she was, in the quiet, taking care of me right back — planning, even then, even dying, for the day after she was gone.

Chapter 8 — The Same Polite Applause

The ceremony was as hard as I had feared, and in just the way I had feared it.

They called the names alphabetically, hundreds of them, and after each one a particular section of the bleachers would erupt — a family finding its voice, air horns and whooping and somebody’s grandmother crying — a small private storm of love breaking out for each graduate as they crossed.