“But I’ll tell you the thing I’ve never got past.

It wasn’t Mom telling people he was dead.

People do all sorts of things when they’re humiliated.

“It’s that she let Toni be twenty-six and grieving a man who was alive.

Toni went to a therapist for two years about her dead father.

My mother let her do that.

My mother sat in a car with her outside that office every second Wednesday and let her do that.

“That’s the one, Theo.