It is the one thing we got right in time.

The whole reason I acted — the reason I drove over with a recorder, the reason Lowell broke the family open — was a comment.

A hand over a cookie tray.

A remark to a little boy about seconds.

Warning signs, not wounds.

My mother had begun to do to the grandchildren what she had done to us, in the early, testing way she always began, and because Lowell and I finally recognized the opening moves of a game we had lost as children, we ended it before it could reach them.