“Say what?” she said. “Say to my son’s wife, in her beautiful apartment, we have no house and my boy has our money and we are frightened? You’d already looked at us like we were something tracked in on a shoe—”

“I hadn’t. Not before that week.”

“You had.” She said it flatly. “For seven years. Politely. And I gave you a great deal of reason to and I’m not asking you to be sorry about it.”

I sat in that rented living room in Eaton, Ohio, and thought about a woman in her seventies going through my refrigerator on the first day, and screaming about not being cooked for, and staging her husband’s collapse to pull me home from work.

None of it becomes acceptable. I want that written down, because Colton thinks I have gone soft on it and I have not.

But I had spent two years describing her as a woman who wanted to be waited on. And a woman who has just watched her only child sell her house and take the money, and who is now living in the guest room of a daughter-in-law who does not like her, does not scream about a pot roast because she wants a pot roast.