You’re cleverer than I was, or maybe you just love your grandparents too much to hurt them the way I did at your age, when I boarded an eastbound bus. Holy Mount is perhaps the one college in Los Angeles they would approve of; but you must have known that, because it was your idea and your plan, presented to them in your politest voice at Sunday dinner. Just because you knew they were the ones you needed to convince, don’t be fooled into thinking any of this is easy for me! Being left behind feels very different from leaving.

Holy Mount was the only college in Los Angeles that the St. Margaret’s guidance counselor had a catalog for. Besides, my GPA was too erratic to get me into a school anyone had heard of, or to make me scholarship material, so it was a part-time job and what Lillian called “our nest egg,” which I assumed was money my grandparents had given her to help us out, though when I thanked them, they swore there was nothing to thank them for.

I kept waiting for someone to point out that Holy Mount meant my being two thousand miles away whenever my mother’s cancer came back. My grandparents couldn’t have discussed that any more than they could have let me order a hamburger instead of fried clams in the bad old chemo days. I knew that Lillian would never keep me from doing whatever I wanted to do. If anyone was going to bring up those two thousand miles, it would have to be me, and I didn’t feel like it. My mother had found a typing job. She was taking pictures and working in the darkroom the way she used to. There was always the chance she’d beaten the odds and wouldn’t get sick again, or at least not for a long time. I still think heading out west was the right decision. When the time came to be there for my mother, the problem wasn’t the distance between California and Ohio: the problem was me.

108. Father’s feet, Cleveland, 1974

The last time I saw him alive, I saw him in his recliner, his feet covered in blankets, so I never knew. Here, the ankles are gone, swallowed by swelling, the toes tiny in comparison. He didn’t want me to see that. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see that, yet he took off the blankets for my mother and let her frame those feet the way another photographer would frame a face. He did it because she asked, and because she was his daughter.

Meanwhile, I was in the land of lemon and orange trees, and people grocery shopping in flip-flops, and finger-sized lizards sunning themselves on curbs. A woman in a halter top and hot pants roller skating down the sidewalk wasn’t noticed any more than a man reading a newspaper. It all felt like freedom, like Los Angeles was busy being itself and didn’t care what anybody else thought.