In “Motherless Child,” Olive comes to terms with her responsibility for his behavior. Some of our sympathy for Olive has always derived from her shoddy treatment by her son, Christopher, now a middle-aged podiatrist in New York. Olive confesses her “pretty awful” treatment of her late husband and declares that she has become “a tiny - tiny - bit better as a person.” The story’s title refers to the February light, “how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised.”
In “Light,” after a chance grocery store encounter, Olive starts visiting a needy former student, Cindy Coombs, a librarian being treated for cancer.
But her conversations with Bernie soothe and empower her, “as though huge windows above her had been smashed,” making “the whole wide world … available to her once again.” Suzanne’s mother has dementia her brother, Doyle, is serving a life term for murder her father has just died in a house fire, and she’s on the verge of telling her husband about an affair with her therapist. “Helped” also involves an unconventional bond, between Suzanne Larkin and her late father’s (married) lawyer, Bernie Green.
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