My sixty-two-year-old mother was down on her knees on the hot stone patio, a plastic bucket of gray soapy water beside her, a scrub brush in her hand.

She was wearing oversized old clothes that did not belong to her, clothes that hung off a frame gone thinner than I remembered, and both of her hands were red and raw from scrubbing grease off the outdoor kitchen counters.

She did not see me at first.

She was bent to her work, her shoulders moving, a woman doing a hard job she had clearly done many times before.

“Mom,” I said, and my voice came out wrong, cracked and quiet.