After I’d sat for about half an hour in the waiting room, Clemence came in and told me that my mother was going into surgery. She held my hand. We sat together staring at a picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella. We agreed that we had never really cared for the picture and now we were going to actively hate it, though this was not the picture’s fault.
