“Oh, Mabel, it’s so good you have so much patience.”

“We just couldn’t do it, honestly.

We don’t know how you manage.”

“You know how Mom is — so stubborn.

Always was.”

And I would smile, because what else is there to do, and see them to the door, and watch the car pull away down the road.

And then I would stand in the sudden quiet of the house and feel it, the thing under the politeness, the small clean cut of it.

Because every one of those sentences was really a way of saying the same thing: this is yours, not ours; we have decided we are the kind of people who cannot, and so you must be the kind of person who does.