I have thought many times about what would have happened if Denise had not been standing at that window.

Chapter 10 — The Smudge on the Glass

I found my mother in a garden center forty miles north, on a Tuesday, working the register.

The divorce was in 2013. Thomas left about eighteen months after the election, which I learned from a public court file and not from any human being. Karen kept a car and no house.

She is sixty-three. She was wearing a green apron with her name on a plastic tag and she had gotten small, and when she looked up and saw me her hands went completely still on the scanner.

We sat outside at a metal table between the shrub racks. It was cold. Neither of us suggested going somewhere warm, because neither of us wanted this to last long enough to require it.

I had rehearsed eleven versions of what I was going to say and I opened with none of them.