In the last years of his life, my mother found the task of taking care of a four-story house beyond what was left of her strength, and she plotted with one of her sons to move elsewhere. Father resented the move, particularly because she had made the decision, not he. “She don’t talk to me on that subject,” he said. But they sold the old house at a price he thought much too low, gave away most of the furniture, and relocated to a small condo in Rye. He resented what she’d done so intensely that he couldn’t speak to her. “Your mother giving orders around here now,” he said to me bitterly. Becoming delusional and hateful, he began to suspect her, a woman of seventy-three, not in the best health herself, of infidelity. He’d imagine her lover at the other end of the room and point him out to me. “They waiting minute I don’t watch,” Father said, “then tak! They go upstairs.” He’d imagine he heard the noises of their lovemaking coming from her bedroom above. “I can’t hold her anymore,” he confided to me one day. “I only have eight hundred dollars in the bank now.”