You were thirty-seven with six kids and she’d been gone three years.

I have a son who won’t speak to me and if he showed up tomorrow I don’t know what I’d say either.”

He looked down the corridor.

“The fourth thing is the only one I actually came over here for.

“She is not going to survive today.

I don’t mean that dramatically.

I mean that whatever is planned — and I know something’s planned, because the fifteen-year-old told her and she told me in April and we came anyway — whatever it is, she has decided she is going to sit there and take it, and she thinks that’s the price of admission.

“And I have spent thirteen years watching a woman construct an entire personality around not thinking about something, and I would tell you that it’s working, and it isn’t.