She saw her mother cooking for two, sharp and busy and needed, teaching the design girl to make the biscuits that had come down the family line.

She saw Enid drive herself to the hair appointment and do her own bills and hold court with the neighbors, and she saw, I think, the thing that is hardest for a frightened adult child to see from far away, which is that her mother was not a problem to be solved but a person still living a life, and that the life was good, and that taking it away to make herself feel better about the distance would be its own kind of cruelty dressed up as care.

I felt for Sherry that week, more than I’d expected to.

It is easy, when you are twenty-four and fierce and standing between an old woman you love and the daughter who wants to move her, to cast the daughter as the villain of the thing.