I was a bit irritated by this. “I think it should be obvious.” I put down the socks. “You know. You’ve known from the start.”

“What has your mother actually done,” asked Helen, “to warrant—” Her voice trailed off. “To make you want to give up everything else? To freeze you this way.”

Helen was not the first to ask that question, and it was not the first time I had been stymied by it. What had my mother done? In the way of mothers, mine saw to it that I had food to eat, a roof over my head, clothes to wear. She sat at the foot of my bed when I was ill, and gave me soup to comfort me. She was there every day when I came home from school; we would sit in the kitchen and talk for hours, and then over dinner, which she made almost every night, and then over breakfast, which she made without fail every morning. She was obsessively dependable, and was never, in my life experience of her, late for an appointment; she never changed or rearranged or rescheduled or canceled a plan, and she never failed to do anything she had promised. She remembered what I told her better than I did, listened when I wanted to talk, and talked when I was prepared to listen. When I played the piano, she heard every note. She organized trips and parties; she took the time to spin of life’s boring events a thread as rare and fine as any emperor’s silk.