“You know I’m not like that. Never on the first date.” I stop, my shoulders flinching. It’s such an obvious barb, a victim-blaming dismissal, just how I was portrayed in the press. But Mom doesn’t even realize what she’s said; that’s how self-involved she is. Her own world, her own sense of self, always comes first.

She wasn’t always like this. I mean, she has always been self-obsessed, maybe more vain or preoccupied with her own goings-on than most moms. I remember getting an A in physics, or making the winning goal at a soccer match, and her response would always be to praise herself for how good a parent she was.

But at least back then she was involved, more willing to sit with me and let me cry, tell her mundane things about school, my friends, my teachers and extracurriculars without interjecting. She attended all of our shows and games and exhibits. She pulled out all the stops for our birthdays, always knew exactly what we wanted for Christmas. She was present.

Since the affair and the divorce, though, she’s shifted. Her charmingly eccentric obsession with tarot and ghosts and mediums that peppered my childhood turned into a cliché; another white woman trying to find purpose by changing her diet, investing in crystals, energy testing and ancient medicines, the last of which are either quackery or else completely appropriated from Indigenous cultures. It’s like when she left my dad, she left behind any semblance of self-awareness.

The affair, thankfully, had taken place when I was already out of the house, in my last year of college. It was with my dad’s best friend, Mike, whom I’d grown up knowing. A tall, portly guy who lived nearby in Westchester and worked in contracts law. My brothers and I don’t know many details. We each received a call from my dad on the day he was moving out and then a few months later he was living in Seattle full-time, as far away from his ex-wife and ex-best friend as he could get. As far away from me, too, and that made me ache until it didn’t.

I gulp down the wine and set the glass on my dresser, before crawling back into bed and waking up my laptop. I put on some music, a lyric-free band that I used to study to, and start my journey upward into Odilie’s life, or the life that she wanted to present to the world, an illicit, yet possibly expiatory activity.