If she’d been suggesting you couldn’t mourn someone you’d never known, then trauma número two made sure to acquaint her with sorrow. Her dad, like her mom, had been a gymnast. At first she described him as a walking paradox, but paused, then retracted the first half without explanation. He’d been top-heavy and toothpick-legged, kind of like a pasty, hairless Donkey Kong. Despite a racist streak and shitty grades, an athletic scholarship and persistent coach had gotten her dad through college, which later landed him a job as a high school history teacher, a post he’d only accepted so he could coach the gymnastics team. As considerate and attentive as he was with his athletes and the two daughters he brought to every after-school practice and off-season gym session, her dad was as mistrusting and bigoted. She snickered, saying he must have hated the Civil War and the 1960s units, if not straight-up skipped them, like. Irregardless, she never got to see him in action in the classroom. The accident happened her last year of middle school.

Freak accident. A neglected springboard turned a routine vault demo into an unplanned Produnova. Lower spine broken—she could never stop herself from snapping her fingers whenever she told the story—just like that. The school district managed to eschew liability. Scrounging up the cash to lawyer up, let alone for surgery and the ensuing months of physical therapy, was a laughable impossibility. The sum of the workers’ comp lasted just over a year before her sister had to start waiting tables. The three of them were barely able to get by on her sister’s seventy-hour-a-week wages, even when they were supplemented by pushing some of their dad’s pain pills. So, when a line chef jokingly suggested her sister put her parallel bar skills to work at the newly opened club by the outlet mall, she took him up on it. With their dad a breathing corpse in the bedroom and her older sister sleeping days and working nights, Michelle had been free to destroy herself as she saw fit.

Henry asked for one of her Pall Malls, hoping nicotine might kick him steady. This wouldn’t have been the first time he’d mistaken damaged for deep. During those miserable, glaring moments of clarity, the cynic in him—the Papa in him—had been quick to spotlight his misguided tendency to romanticize anguish, as if only those bereaved or redlining in self-destruct mode had authentic, unfiltered access to the human condition, you know, like he did.