My mother said to Freddy: “It’s really time now. I think you know that.” And then she said, “I think we’re all being a little bit melodramatic, don’t you?” And she said, “I guess we might as well get started and go eat something, if that’s what the directions say to do.” And she stood up and led us into the kitchen, her long pink bathrobe trailing out behind her. Freddy and my father and I trailed along in her wake like clouds. “Who wants an English muffin?” she asked. My father said he couldn’t possibly eat anything, and my brother also ate nothing. I had had nothing to eat all day and I was desperately hungry, and though I felt sick, I had a feeling that I would feel sicker later on, and I had an English muffin.

Freddy and I set the table and my mother sat in her place at its far end. We kept up a stream of non-talk: who wanted tea and where had the potholder gone and did everyone have a napkin. Freddy took a box of cookies, left from the previous evening, and put it on the table. My mother looked up at him, a look full of affection and a lifetime’s frustration, lessons still untaught but worth another chance, and she said, “Freddy. For the last time. Please. Would you put the cookies on a plate.”

We all laughed (it seems incredible that we all laughed, but it’s true) and Freddy put the cookies on a plate. “Just for you, Mom,” he said.

My mind was crowded with something ridiculous. I couldn’t decide whether to tell my mother that I had broken a dessert plate the previous weekend in the country. It seemed like such a small matter, the dessert plate; I had intended to buy a replacement and just quietly take it up to the house. She would never have known. Why, then, tell her now? But I suddenly regretted every detail of my life that I had never shared with her, every misdeed, every calculation to which I had not immediately confessed. I have repeated as though it were a mantra that my mother knew me, but at that moment I wanted to tell her everything there was that she didn’t know, to hold on to the absoluteness of her. And I wanted her to forgive me, though that dessert plate was a small matter to forgive. I don’t know what the total is of the things I did that made my mother unhappy. At that moment, she would have forgiven anything. I knew that the dessert plate was so unimportant as not to be worth mentioning, and I never mentioned it; but in my dreams, I can still see that plate shattered on the white marble floor, the fragments high-gloss in their glaze, with dull edges of rough white.