Later, when we were calmer, she told me the rest of it — the part about the fire, and the twenty years.

After my father’s death, she had fallen into a depression so deep it frightened her, though she fought to keep working, to keep a roof over my head.

On the night of the fire, I was not home; I was sleeping over at my aunt’s while she worked a late shift at a bakery.

She came home early and found smoke pouring from the kitchen, and instead of running from it she ran into it — for a metal box that held our family’s papers, our photographs, the last small mementos we had of my father.

And then a gas line let go.