And that was that.

When it came time for college, the girl insisted on Pomona, a respectable liberal arts college thirty minutes from home, in the middle of the suburban nowhere. She had good enough grades for Berkeley and elsewhere, but she chose this poky school because they’d offered her a full scholarship. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to pay their own way—the inheritance from Daddy had been set aside for this. Mary-Sue was distraught: Had her frugality given Kate the false impression that they were poor? Paul had applied to colleges in New York, to get as far as he could from his parents. If Kate had done something similar, it might have broken Mary-Sue’s heart, but kids were supposed to break their parents’ hearts. Kate couldn’t justify her choice. All she would say was that she liked “the look” of Pomona. Nothing could dissuade her. In her stubbornness, she was Mary-Sue’s daughter after all.

For all her forthrightness, Mary-Sue found it harder and harder to express herself to Kate as she watched their interests diverge. Kate, on the other hand, felt that her mother’s loneliness was unbearable—all the more because Mary-Sue never complained or engaged in any kind of guilt-tripping. Going to college close to home meant that she could always come and keep her aging mother company. Mary-Sue was getting old—in ten years, she would be sixty. Kate knew that Mary-Sue liked her job fine, but how satisfying could it be for a well-read, opinionated woman to spend her days reordering Sharpies and rubber bands and keeping track of who was in or out of some lawyer’s office? She never dated, or did so only on the sly, and as far as Kate could tell, she didn’t have any relatives or close friends.

Kate could never forget watching Mary-Sue put on her bra in the morning the way a TV cop might strap a holster across his torso—a daily ritual against unsettling dangers. Mary-Sue’s body was not like the ones Kate had seen on TV. She wasn’t at all fat, but she had bumps, folds, cellulite (which Kate initially took for surgical stitches, and found terrifying), stains caused by vaccinations and bug bites. It was clear early on that she was indifferent to her body, even ashamed. They never went swimming, for instance.