When I was six, that story was The Giving Tree. It was my favorite, and my father’s favorite, and I wanted it to be her favorite, too. She sat against the headboard of my narrow bed, the book propped on her lap, and read about the tree that gave up its apples, its branches, and its trunk to the boy it loved more than anything.

She finished, closed the book, and set it on her lap. “That tree needs boundaries,” she said.

•

When Vietnam Tim and I got back to the house, my mother was readying her camera bag. “Diana,” she asked, “do you want to come with me today? Just the two of us?”

I was so excited to be asked that I didn’t pay attention to the fact that her eyes were red. That my father was nowhere in sight. Instead, I climbed into the blue Jeep that she and Vietnam Tim had driven up in yesterday. I didn’t ask where we were going, because that wasn’t the point.

It was about a half hour before she pulled to the side of the road, fussed with her camera bag, and started trudging across the withered landscape. I scrambled behind her, kicking up clouds of dust with my sneakers. “Where did Dad go?” I asked.

She stopped walking. Her hand fidgeted at her side. “Would you … would you rather be with him?”

“No,” I said immediately. “I like it here with you.”

Her breath gusted out and she nodded. Then she started walking again, with me trotting behind.

She stopped when we reached a field so dry it had cracked into a thousand shards. It looked like a shattered mirror, a broken windshield, tempered and held together only with sheer determination rather than the laws of physics. I found myself stepping backward gingerly, afraid to put even a toe on one of the rifts in the earth. What if I was the last straw, the pressure that broke it to pieces?

I thought about the ground giving way, swallowing us whole.

My mother bent down with her camera, trying to find a sight line for her shot. She edged one knee onto the web of crevices, and then another.

Later I would learn about people with trypophobia, who might look at a pattern like this and get queasy; of other people so afraid of the unknown they couldn’t leave the confines of their house. But at that moment, all I knew was that my world was literally crumbling beneath us.

“Mom,” I cried, panicking. “Don’t.”

She immediately sat back on her heels, surprised. “Diana?”

“What if it’s not safe?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”