My father left when I was in the sixth grade. In the wake of his departure my mother closed up the house as though we, too, had moved away. She draped furniture with bedsheets and covered windows with blankets. Darkness and dust lay on every surface.
After we’d been living this way for about a year, a girl at school announced to me that my father had a new live-in girlfriend. That evening during dinner, under the bare bulb that hung over our kitchen table, I told my mom what the girl had said. I felt certain she’d deny it was true.
