fingers tightened.
“I don’t want to use Mom to make this sound profound,” I said. “She wouldn’t have appreciated being turned into an argument.”
“No,” Elise said softly. “She would have interrupted.”
I laughed, and it hurt.
“She would.”
We sat quietly for a while. Elise knew my mother’s habit of asking the question everyone else was working to avoid. She had been in our kitchen often enough to be offered food before greetings. It struck me that loving her would not begin a separate life so much as ask
