She told me Bernice would sometimes get frightened and not know why, and that the thing that calmed her was an old hymn, and that Fran had learned to sing it even though she couldn’t carry a tune, standing in my mother’s kitchen at odd hours, singing badly to a frightened woman who no longer knew her name but knew the song.

And she told me — this is the part I carried out with me — that in the confusion of those last months, when so much was gone, one of the last things to go was my mother’s certainty that she had two children.

“She’d count you,” Fran said.

“On her fingers.

Janet and Terry, she’d say, like she was making sure.

Two.