And when I asked her, carefully, whether she remembered how she had enforced it with us, whether she remembered the belt, she waved her hand as though I had brought up an old family recipe and said, “A few licks never hurt a child who needed them.

Your generation is frightened of everything.” She was not ashamed.

That is the thing I need you to understand.

She was not confessing.

In her own mind she was defending good work against an ungrateful daughter, and she said all of it — the control, the punishment, the belt, the pride in having done it — in the daylight, in her own kitchen, into a phone she did not know was on.

I sat at that table and I watched her, and the thing that chilled me was not the cruelty.