Not the braids or the school plays.

This — being the steady answer to the hardest questions, at the hours when no one is watching and no one will ever applaud.

Chapter 11 — The Quiet Apartment

And then, the way it always goes and always shocks you anyway, they grew up and they left — this time in the good way, the way you spend eighteen years working toward and are still not remotely ready for.

I drove all three of them to college in the same taped-together truck, the four of us and everything they owned crammed in among the toolboxes, and I helped them carry boxes up dormitory stairs, and I hugged them each too long in three separate parking lots, and then I drove back to the apartment above the hardware store alone.

I will not dress up what that was like.