I had summoned my family to my table to hear what I had decided, and the simple fact of having done it had given me back something I had not felt since the morning Lawrence died: the sense that I was still a person things happened by, and not only a person things happened to.

By ten the next morning my three children and Shirley were gathered around my dining room table, and Mr.

Bradley sat calmly at the head of it, beside me.

Shirley had come prepared to take control — she set down, right there on my table, an affidavit signed by Clinton, and beside it a draft petition for court guardianship over my affairs, the papers that would have declared me unfit to run my own life.

“Frances simply cannot manage on her own anymore,” she announced to the room, looking around at my children.