And the terrible mercy of what happened to me that afternoon is that the stain turned out to be my mother — that the person I had refused to see was the one person on earth I had spent twenty years grieving.

It broke the blindness in the most violent way imaginable.

But I have wondered, ever since, how many other people I looked straight through in my comfortable life, and never learned their names, and never found out what I had failed to see.

She stepped into the warm water without another word, and almost at once the clear bath clouded to a dark, murky brown, twenty years of the street lifting off her at last.

I took a soft sponge, swallowed my disgust, and made myself begin, and I started with her right shoulder, scrubbing in small reluctant circles, wanting only to be finished and out of that room.