Chapter 1 — Five Seconds

My husband slapped my mother twice, and then told me that if I did not put her out of the house that night, our marriage was over.

I did not scream.

I did not cry.

I set the heavy grocery bag on the table, and I counted, in silence, to five.

I had come home to our downtown Milwaukee high-rise that afternoon with good cuts of beef in the bag, planning to cook dinner for the three of us, and I unlocked the door to a sound I will never forget — a sharp flat crack, and then another, and my mother’s small cry, and by the time I was through the door she was stumbling back against the console table in the entry, one hand rising to her cheek, and a little blue vase was wobbling off the edge and shattering on the hardwood.

My husband, Brandon, stood over her with his hand still half-raised and his face dark red, and I heard my own voice come out very far away.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

And instead of shame, what came into his face was fury.

“Ask your thieving mother what she did,” he said.

I looked at my mother, Margaret — seventy-one years old, three months a widow, her hand cupped over a cheek that was already going scarlet — and something in my chest that had been holding on for seven years quietly let go.

So I counted.

One, two, three, four, five.

And in those five seconds I watched seven years of my life go past, and I understood, with a calm that frightened me, that they were already over.

People have asked me since how I stayed so calm, and the truth is that it wasn’t calm, not really.

It was the opposite of calm; it was something so far past panic that it came out the other side looking like stillness.

I have read that in the instant before a crash, time stretches, and the mind, flooded, becomes clear and slow — and that is exactly what those five seconds were.

In them I did not think about the money, or the marriage, or even, in any conscious way, about what I was going to do.