When I see the furious self-pity vanish from her face I allow my own to evaporate. If in the middle of a provocative exchange she says, “Well, that’s the mother you got, it would have been better with another one, too damned bad this is the one you got,” and I nod, “You can say that again,” we both start laughing at the same time. Neither one of us, it seems, wishes to remain belligerent one sentence longer than the other. We are, I think, equally amazed that we have lived long enough to be responsive for whole minutes at a time simply to being in the world together, rather than concentrating
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