By the seventh, it felt like a warning.
Claire had always been busy. She was thirty-two, a single mother before she remarried, the kind of woman who did everything at once and apologized for not doing more. She worked part-time at a dental office in Carmel, Indiana, kept a color-coded family calendar on the side of her refrigerator, and somehow still managed to make homemade cupcakes for my granddaughter Lily’s school parties.
She answered my calls.
Maybe not right away, but always eventually.
Even when she was mad at me, even when she was tired, even when she wanted space after one of our small mother-daughter disagreements about money or men or whether Lily was watching too much television, she answered.
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