I walked out of her office into a gray October afternoon and stood on the sidewalk for a moment before I knew what to do next.
## Calling Mom
Our mother had been out of our father’s life for seventeen years. They had divorced when I was eighteen and Vanessa was twenty-two, in the way that divorces happen after long marriages — not dramatically but thoroughly, with a decisiveness that surprised everyone except possibly them. She had remarried and moved to Florida. She called us at holidays and on our birthdays and existed in our lives at a civil distance that everyone was comfortable with.
I called her from the parking lot outside Mara Chen’s office.
“Hannah,” she said, when she picked up. “How are you doing? How was the service?”
I told her it was fine. I told her the service was fine. Then I said: “Mom, I need to ask you something and I need you to just answer it without asking me why I’m asking.”
“Okay,” she said, in the voice of a woman who knew her daughters.
“When you and Dad divorced, did Vanessa know things about the process before you did?”
There was a silence.
“This is about something that’s happening right now,” she said.
“Yes.”
Another silence. Then: “Your sister has always needed to be the one who manages things. Even when she was little. She used to organize the other kids at school — not because she was helpful, exactly, but because it made her feel safe to be the one who knew.”