She had a way of making you feel tended to, cared for, the center of her soft attention.

I had known her for sixty-nine years and I had always been a little in awe of that ease of hers, that social grace I never quite possessed myself.

It did not occur to me, watching her bustle warmly around my dying husband’s house with her casseroles and her albums, that the warmth was a tool, and that she had begun, quietly, to use it.

I have thought a great deal, since, about how long Shirley must have been planning.