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And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn’t see her as I did—if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her—that …

[...] I myself had come upstairs unexpectedly on the day in question to find a gym-toned, casually dressed mom who looked like she’d just come from a Pilates class slipping a paperweight in her bag.

“That’s eight hundred and fifty dollars,” I said, and at my voice she froze and looked up in horr…

Abruptly, my father said: “Your mother wasn’t so easy to live with either, you know.” He picked up something that looked like an old math test from my desk, examined it, and then threw it back down. “She played her cards way too close to the vest. You know how she used to do. Clamming up. Freezing …

“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes…

He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a micros…