They handed me their mother the way you hand someone a coat you no longer want to carry, with a compliment to soften the transfer. So good you have patience. As if patience were a hobby of mine, a personality quirk, and not twelve years of my one and only life.

They all knew I cared for her.

That was the strange part.

They knew, and they said so, and they even seemed grateful in their thin way — and still it never occurred to a single one of them that knowing was not the same as helping, that gratitude offered from a moving car is a very cheap kind of gratitude.

They knew I was there.