Then, "Did you and your mother talk about your dad much?"

Didn't you and your mother talk about such things?

"I was just wondering if your mother talks about her patients at home like when you're sitting around the dinner table?"

He had never heard his mother talk about his father this way.

"I can't think of anything worse if you were a young woman," she said, "than having your mother talk about your personal life."

"Your mother talks to them," Carter told her as they walked back to the house.

Their mother talks to her sons in New York by phone every week.

"That's all my mother talks about is college," he said.

In all her life, she had never heard her mother talk with anything other than love, affection, and concern.

The way a mother talks to an infant, that kind of thing.