(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)

My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”

Pints.

“He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn’t eat at all. He seemed like he was going to faint. But he’d bought me flowers. Lilies. Isn’t that romantic?”

This story bothers me. It intrudes upon my father, and that’s part of it, but it’s also the way my mother wields those flowers as some false barometer of love.

As if her generation were worthy of blood and mine only backstage corn syrup.

My mother has asked me on every Valentine’s Day since I was fourteen, “Did he buy you flowers?”

“I told him not to,” I say.

“Why would you do that?” she says. “What kind of standards are you setting?”

“I don’t want that kind of relationship,” I say. “I don’t want flowers.”

I want to say: Stop pretending that the point is the lilies and not the blood.

“Have you talked to Goca Igrić? I think she’s who you’re looking for.”

Goca is also a journalist. She is Serb and chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks several pots of Turkish coffee a day and was, at the time, under threat of death from all manner of political and criminal organizations after spending the war years defiantly speaking out against Slobodan Milošević.

I once asked my uncle when he fell in love with Goca.

Though they didn’t start dating till ages later, he said perhaps it was that first time they met, in a café, when he told her what he wanted to do and asked her to be his fixer. He said Goca paused after he’d described his batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea. She exhaled all the smoke from her lungs and said, “I don’t think I can not do this.”

“Maybe that was when I knew,” my uncle said.

It was the first thing my family ever taught me about love that felt as honest as blood. I can’t not do this.

It was years of family stories that hid the ways women knew in their blood what was wrong or right. Hid truth behind the scrim of romance or, worse, fate.

My relationship with Bob lasted a full year longer than it should have because Barack Obama was running for president and had so raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible that we thought perhaps he could save us from the petty, insidious ways we’d been hurting each other. We, too, could change.

Thanks, Obama.

Frank led me downstairs and as he took off my shirt I said, “Wait!”

I’d spotted a giant sepia photograph of two people holding a baby, framed over the fireplace, and I asked who those people were, because they were beautiful.

He said that they were his parents, and that the baby was him, but that when his parents got divorced his parents hated each other so much that neither of them could stand to look at the picture anymore, and were going throw it away, so he took it.

I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?

Frank took my shirt back off, but not unkindly.