“What work it must be, to have a daughter. My own mother, I remembered as guarded, anxious, easily distracted. I didn’t want to become her. I wanted to be, as a teacher, and as a woman, some version of Mother Roberta: attentive, wise, beloved. But tough, too, the way she was – full of conviction. The sort of person you’d think about as you fell asleep, comforted to remember that in this world of bad luck and rising sea levels and impossible pain, at least, thank God, there was her.”
