Who was she then, I wondered, as Mrs. Palmer’s children and grandchildren folded my mother into their arms. My mother—who had never hugged us, even when we were little children presenting her with our scrapes and bruises, our wails—accepted the touch of these strangers, who, of course, weren’t strange to her. She spent more of her days with Mrs. Palmer than she had ever spent with us. And so I recognized, for perhaps the first time, that my mother wasn’t mine.
