She had a key.

She came over on the mornings Terry worked.

She had sat with Bernice through the long strange afternoons of the dementia that took the last two years, when my mother would set the table for a husband nine years dead, or ask where her children were as if we were small and late for supper.

“She wasn’t unhappy, at the end,” Fran told me, patting my hand across the table.

“That’s the mercy of it, sometimes.