Because here was the thing I had never told anyone, the thing I had carried alone for twenty years, folded up so small and pushed so deep that I had almost convinced myself it wasn’t there: that I believed, with a child’s terrible certainty that had never grown up, that my father had died because of me.

I could bathe my mother.

I could bake her cinnamon rolls and play her records and search her face for a recognition that would not come.

But I could not stand in front of that photograph and say out loud the thing I had believed since I was ten — that it was my fault, that I had killed him, that the best man I ever knew was dead because of something I had done.

So I turned his face to the wall, and I changed the subject, and I did not know that within days my mother herself would be the one to lift that weight off me — in the middle of a street, with a truck bearing down on us both.