Chapter 1 — What Are You Hiding

“Mom, what are you hiding from us?

Just tell me, once and for all.

Did you come to my house to help raise my daughter, or to hide a pregnancy?”

It still sickens me to remember those exact words coming out of my mouth.

I have replayed them so many times since that I could recite the whole ugly speech in my sleep, and I have never once gotten through it without wanting to reach back through time and put my hand over my own cruel mouth.

This is the story of the worst thing I ever said to the best person I ever knew, and of what she was actually doing while I said it, and of the four months afterward in which she taught me — while she was dying — the single most important thing I will ever learn.

My mother’s name was Rosa Martinez.

She was fifty-three years old.

She had been a widow for nearly a decade, living in a small town in New Mexico, until the day I called her, crying, and begged her to come to Phoenix and save me.

She came.

She dropped everything and came, the way she had always come, the way I had spent my whole life assuming she always would.

And I was so busy being saved that I never once stopped to ask what it was costing her.

That was my great failure, and it is the reason I am writing this: not to punish myself, because she made me promise not to do that, but because she asked me to learn, and to pass the lesson on.

So here it is.

This is what it cost her.

And this is what she gave me anyway.

I have hesitated over how to tell it, because there is a way of telling a story like this that turns it into a performance of guilt — the daughter flagellating herself in public, inviting everyone to reassure her that she is not so bad after all.