“What has gotten into you?” she explodes out of nowhere. “What happened last night? How could you be so rude to Gill and George?” She sounds genuinely befuddled.

I almost laugh, but opt instead to exhale a long, exhausted sigh. “Are you ready to talk about my greedy, selfish, abandoning jerk-and-a-half dad yet? Because it’s essential to my healing process.”

Mara’s face twists up, her mouth shrinking to a tiny angry pinpoint. “Why can’t you just talk to me!”

I shake my head in frustration. “I’m sorry, what are we doing right now, clamming?”

“Clamming? Why would we ever be clamming?”

I groan and drop my head into my hands.

She merges onto the highway. “When I say I wish you would just talk to me, I mean talk to me about you.”

“This is about me! I need to know about Dad. That’s part of me understanding myself. I need to have all the information in this equation to be able to settle my heart and move forward as a healthy human being.”

I watch as her grip tightens around the steering wheel.

“Maybe you need an appointment with Captain Sparrow too,” I suggest.

Mom’s expression neutralizes. “You need to stop disrespecting me.”

“Tell me why I haven’t heard from my dad.”

After four silent minutes, I reach out and slap on the radio.

A millisecond later, Mara reaches up and turns it off. “Your father and I decided it would be healthier for you to grow up in one place rather than be tossed around between us like an object we were sharing.”

I blink at the road as endless clusters of evergreen trees go by. “You thought it would be healthier for me to … grow up completely devoid of a father?”

Mara rolls her eyes. “Come on, Siri, you have Papa and George.”

“Yes, I have Papa, your dad, and George, your boyfriend, and they’re great, but they’re not my dad. The problem isn’t what I have, Mom, it’s the absence of him all together. The void where there should be some sort of information. Why hasn’t he ever tried to get in touch with me? What made him so upset that after he left, he never wanted to talk to me again?”

Mara speeds up and gets into the fast lane. “It’s part of our divorce agreement. He’s not to contact you. He left. He made his choice. He didn’t deserve you. That much emotional turmoil in your day-to-day isn’t good for a kid. Children need a strong foundation, structure, and you can’t get that when you’re splitting your time on opposite ends of the country, Siri. You can’t. He wasn’t coming back here, and I wasn’t putting you on a plane like an overnight package however many times a year.”

“Doesn’t Dad have the money to pay for that kind of travel?”