She is glad to see you, which is the hard part. She asks your name. You tell her. She nods and says, Oh, how nice, in the voice she uses for neighbors whose children she once knew, before she forgets their parents too.
You tell her you're her daughter.
She says: I know that.
She doesn't know that.
She offers you coffee. You say yes because saying yes is easier than saying what you're thinking. The kitchen is the same. She can't remember where the mugs are and has to look in three cabinets, but the mug she picks is the right one — the white one with the chip, the one she's used for forty years. Muscle memory goes last.
You sit across from her. She tells you about something on television: a wildlife program, she thinks, something about birds. She can't remember which birds. The cadence is right. The syntax is right. She pauses where a pause belongs.
There is a version of this that becomes beautiful. The literature tells you so — the mother who has forgotten her daughter but is still kind, still herself in some elemental way, and the daughter learning to meet her there. That version happens. You're not in it today.
You're at a table with a woman who is glad to see you and does not know she has been missing you for three years. She is not suffering. The loss is only visible from where you're sitting.
You drink the coffee. It's good. She always made good coffee. You tell her and her face opens — not into memory, but into pleasure, and pleasure is something. You stay in it. You stay in the kitchen. You hold the familiar weight of the mug.
On the way home you drive past the road where her old house was. The one before the apartment. You think: she lives on a street she has never walked down, and the man she married is eleven years dead, and her daughter is driving home feeling like she left something behind at the table.
You did leave something behind. You leave the same thing every time.
The birds were probably starlings. She would have known.