On the last night, Fran would not hear of us eating takeout in an empty house, and she brought us across the driveway to her kitchen, which was warm and cluttered and smelled of a real dinner, and she fed us pot roast at the table where she had sat with our mother a thousand mornings.

It was the first meal Terry and I had eaten together, just family, in nine years, except that the family now included a seventy-six-year-old neighbor who had loved our mother better than we had managed to from a distance.

Fran told us stories all night — Bernice this, Bernice that, the time our mother backed the car through the garage door, the church rummage sales, the feud with the Hendersons over a property line that lasted three decades and was never once mentioned to us.

We were meeting our own mother, at that table, as a person — not as our mother, with all the freight that word carries, but as Bernice, Fran’s friend, a woman with a whole life we’d only ever seen the edge of.