When she said, of her scattered children, that they were “busy, they have their lives, I don’t expect anything,” she meant something so much lonelier that I could hardly stand to hear the shape of it under the words.

She had three of them, I pieced together — a son in Arizona, a son in Germany with the military, and a daughter, Sherry, two states away, who called every Sunday like a duty and visited twice a year like a chore, and who had begun, Enid mentioned once and then wished she hadn’t, “sending brochures.” I didn’t know what that meant yet.

But I saw the pride of her, the enormous effort it cost this woman to need nothing and admit nothing, to sit alone in a house sized for a family and insist to everyone including herself that she was fine, and I recognized it, because it was my pride too, the exact same coat in a different size.

It is a strange thing to meet your own worst quality in a person sixty years older than you, wearing it after a whole life instead of at the start of one.