I felt something closer to a grim understanding of what my mother had been living inside of, a world of people who were present exactly as long as there was something to take.

I thought, watching those guests hurry to their cars, about the two years my mother had spent surrounded by this, and how lonely it must have been, a loneliness worse than being simply alone.

She had been in a full house, a house of parties and laughter and people, and not one of those people had been hers, or would have crossed the room to help her.

They had come for the pool and the free liquor and the easy hospitality of a house they thought belonged to a generous couple, and they had walked past a sixty-two-year-old woman scrubbing the patio and thought nothing of it, or thought her the help, because that is what they had been told and it was convenient to believe.