“Is he using a lot of sign language?” I ask her. At home he only uses a dozen signs or so — mostly the basic ones we were taught years ago when he started school. It occurs to me that this is probably more our failing than Jonah’s. We tried learning and using more signs for a while, but, maybe because we always understood him, we were never as ambitious or consistent as we probably should have been.

“Oh, yes! He does a great job with signing,” Delores says. She turns to Jonah. “What other signs do you know, Jonah? Do you know please?”

Jonah bangs his hand on his chest.

“That’s right, good job,” she says.

Jonah shakes his fist — his sign for bathroom.

“Oh, you need the bathroom?” Delores asks him. She turns to me with a smile. “We’ll be back.” She lays a hand on Jonah’s back, and as they disappear down the hall, Jonah makes a familiar meee sound. I hear Delores say, “Yeah, you’re happy, aren’t you? You get to see your family.”

I stare after them, my eyes welling. She knows his happy sound. Her tenderness with Jonah . . . the way she talks to him . . . I don’t know if everyone here is like that. It seems unlikely. But this already is much better than I had imagined.

It’s a rare sunny day, so we make our way out of the apartment to take Jonah for a stroll on the grounds, which are beautiful — walking trails and benches and even a gazebo. After, we get him a sundae at the ice cream shop, which is an all-windows wing of the café where a number of LLV residents are employed. We’re served by a young guy who I think has Down syndrome. He tells us that he lives in the Johnston apartments. I don’t know what the Johnston apartments are, but he seems very proud of this, boasting that their media center is state of the art. He is cheerful and conscientious, and he asks Jonah if he’d like Halloween sprinkles on his ice cream. When Jonah doesn’t answer, my mom tells the guy, “Thank you, that would be lovely. Just a little,” she adds. I know she’d probably rather skip the extra sugar and mess, and Jonah probably doesn’t care either way, but she wants to be nice.

It occurs to me that I would have done the same thing. In a lot of ways, my mom and I aren’t so different. Is that just because she raised me to be like her? Has all my effort to please my parents molded me into someone different than I would have been with another family? I push the thought away, because like so many others, it nudges and haunts, whispering its inescapable question, Who are you really?