The Candle Labeled “To Brandon’s Girl”

She was looking at the tag, at those three handwritten words, with the deep still concentration children use when they are trying to decode something the adult world has handed them without explanation.

I sat down beside her on the mattress, and before I could find the right words — there are never right words, for this — she asked me the question I had been dreading since the moment the tag came out of the bag.

“Mom,” she said, not looking up.

“Am I really just Dad’s girl?” And every cruelty of the last three years was in that small sentence, all of it, distilled down into a seven-year-old’s quiet attempt to understand her own place in the world.

I have to tell you that in that moment I wanted to lie down on the floor of Gene’s guest room and howl.