He was lying because he needed the lie to be real, and a part of him had already half-believed it, the way people do when believing a thing pays them.

And there was a detail in his lie that cut deeper than the rest, because it was so nearly a compliment. My mother was brilliant once. He said it as a preamble to the decline, a way of making the fall seem tragic and therefore plausible — she was sharp, you see, which is why it’s so sad that she’s slipped.

But I heard the word once, and I understood that my son had needed, in order to do what he was doing, to file me firmly in the past tense.

To take a living, competent woman and speak of her brilliance as a finished thing, a closed account.

It is a violence people do to the old all the time, and usually without malice — the gentle, dismissive she was something in her day. Sheldon was doing it with malice, in a courtroom, for money.

But the mechanism was the same, and it was the mechanism that had let him get this far: the near-universal willingness to believe that a woman of seventy-one is a woman whose real life is behind her.