My mother always went to sleep on the sofa after Sunday dinner, the meal that I learned to call “lunch” after I left home. She lay flat on her back with a throw pillow under her head and her glasses off, wearing a too-short housedress (changed into immediately after church, to preserve her Sunday clothes) that showed her sturdy white legs, knotted with blue veins. She had already taken off her worn shoes and put them by the sofa, but she was still wearing my father’s old dress socks. She never snored but lay there like a carved Etruscan queen, her mouth closed, her coarse gray hair springing back from her forehead.