Which was true and which had never occurred to me in eight years, because I had never spent nine consecutive seconds thinking about the practical problem of a woman trying to find me.

I said, “Is that all of it?”

And my mother said yes.

And that was the first lie she told me that night, and I want to be fair to her, because I have since concluded that she believed it.

She had two things and she gave me two things.

The third one was not hers.

She went upstairs and she was gone about four minutes and she came back down with a shoebox, and I knew the shoebox — it was from a pair of my father’s dress shoes, and it had lived in her closet my entire life, and it had my baby teeth in it, and my father’s watch, and a lock of my hair from 1980 in a fold of wax paper.

She had put them in with the teeth.

That is what I could not get past that night and still cannot.

She did not hide them somewhere sordid.