She forgot the sad parts before she forgot the happy ones.

She’d talk about you kids little — you and Terry, running through the sprinkler, that summer Duane built the treehouse.”

I did not want to hear it, and I made myself hear it, because I understood even then that Fran was handing me something I would need later.

She told me about the last two years in the plain, unsparing, unsentimental way that only the people who were actually there can, the people who did the real work and so have earned the right not to prettify it.

She told me my mother had, toward the end, lost the thread of time entirely — had lived in a kind of permanent, gentle 1974, when we were small and her husband was alive and the worst thing in her life was a treehouse that wasn’t level.