The Crate in the Parking Lot

I have stopped dressing it.

The story worked, incidentally.

That is the uncomfortable part.

For fifteen years my daughters had a mother who left and was simply gone, with no complicating paperwork, no aborted visits, no court-ordered Christmases where she showed up two hours late or not at all, none of the specific torture that a lot of kids I have since met went through.

Ines told me once, at seventeen, that a girl at her school had a mother who “kept coming back,” and that she had thought about it afterward and decided that she was glad ours had not.