The other children did visit, now and then.

I want to be fair about that.

They were not monsters; they were something more ordinary and, in its way, sadder.

They would appear every so often — a Sunday afternoon, the edge of a holiday — and stay for a handful of minutes, and ask how Mom was doing without quite waiting for the answer, and set down a small basket of fruit on the counter as though the fruit were a kind of receipt.

And then, before they left, each of them would say some version of the same thing, the words so worn from use they had gone smooth.