“Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother’s Englishness, that ability to equalize problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were born with aplomb.”
