I found out what the brochures were in January, when Sherry called on a Wednesday, which was not her day, and Enid took it in the kitchen and I heard her voice change into the careful, defended tone she used with her own children, and after she hung up she sat very still at the table for a while before she told me.

The brochures were for assisted-living facilities.

Sherry and the brothers had been talking, the way scattered adult children talk about an aging parent — over the phone, across time zones, with love and worry and their own busy lives pulling at them, none of them able to be there and all of them frightened by that fact.

They had decided, among themselves, without her, that the house was too much for her, that seventy-four and alone and those stairs was a fall waiting to happen, that it would be safer, and safer is the word families use when they have run out of other ways to love someone from far away.

I have come to hate that word a little, safer, for how much harm it does while meaning so well.