Not that I was cruel by nature — I don’t believe I am — but that ordinary, low-grade, busy inattention had quietly turned my own mother, over years, into a role in my mind instead of a person, and that a role in trouble summons suspicion where a person in trouble would have summoned love.

The distance between those two responses is the distance I had traveled from my mother without ever noticing I was moving.

And it is a distance almost anyone can travel, toward almost anyone they have started taking for granted, which is why I tell this part most insistently of all.

Chapter 6 — The Bathroom

It came to a head on a Tuesday evening, when I came home early and found my mother bent double over the toilet, dry-heaving so violently that her whole frail frame shook.

David stood in the hallway, frantic.