You know how they are. He had been saying that for years.

It was his whole method — the phrase that turned every cruelty into a quirk you were unreasonable for minding, the phrase that let him stand next to his wife’s humiliation and do nothing while sounding almost gentle about it.

I had heard it so many times I could have said it along with him.

When his mother rearranged my kitchen cabinets on her second visit and informed me my system was inefficient — you know how she is. When Sorrel opened my mail because she was “just curious” — you know how she is. When Wilhelmina told a table of relatives, in front of me, that Ansel had “married down but made the best of it” — don’t take it personally, you know how she is. It took me years to understand what that phrase actually did, because on its surface it sounds like peacemaking, a husband gently asking his wife not to sweat the small stuff.

What it actually did was move the entire burden of every insult off the person who gave it and onto the person who received it.

His mother was never asked to be kinder.