Two years of my life had been standing on it.

And thirty-one years and eight hundred thousand dollars and every second Sunday since 1994, my mother has been driving three hours each way to wash the hair of the woman who starved her, and has never told a living soul, and has never gotten one thing for it.

That does not excuse the fist.

I want to be extremely clear, because this is the exact point where a story like mine usually turns into a story about how everyone is doing their best.

My mother hit me in the stomach at eleven weeks and told a county I fell and offered me *I love you* as a contract term, and none of that moves one inch.

But my geometry was wrong.