Show me what to do.”

There was no answer that night, of course.

There is rarely an answer the night you ask.

The answer, it turned out, was already written, and signed, and filed in a lawyer’s office; I simply did not know it yet.

But that night I did not feel like a woman about to inherit a mansion.

I felt like exactly what I was: a frightened grandmother, alone in a small kitchen, with an empty refrigerator and a sleeping child and no idea at all how she was going to keep him.