She wiped her hands on the towel over her shoulder.

She got her reading glasses out of the case in her cardigan pocket, which took about eleven seconds, and I stood there and let it take eleven seconds.

She read it.

She read it again.

And then my mother-in-law, who had been born in a town of four hundred people and had never in ten years said a word to me stronger than for heaven’s sake, said something about her own son that I am not going to write down.

She was untying the apron before she’d finished the sentence.