“You know it’s not stubbornness. And I wasn’t suggesting you come home,” she said again. But of course, that was exactly what she was suggesting. She was a woman who fiercely defended her independence while handing you her shopping bags to carry. She was used to being taken care of—first by her big family with four older brothers, then by my father, then by Lucas and me, but she told the world a different story and expected us to corroborate.

I felt a surge of anger, which seemed to gallop in alongside my own growing sense of independence. If she was going to pretend to be so independent, so capable on her own, then I certainly wasn’t going to race to bail her out.

“You’ll just have to figure it out yourself,” I said. “I have to go.”

Lucas did come down. Fell down, actually, some time in the night when I was sleeping, or lying awake in my dorm room, which felt smaller after that conversation. Lucas broke his wrist when he fell, but saved himself from being arrested since the police on the scene felt guilty about his injury. They drove him to the clinic and waited for him while Dr. Lyle set the bone. Then they drove him home, and literally, I’m not making this up, they gave him a lollipop.

That fall at Brown when Lucas was in trouble and I didn’t come home, that was the first time I took a stand against my mother. That was my rebellion. It’s funny to think about it now, my arrogance. As if I were somehow stronger than the forces that pull us together in this life. As if I could make a plan, a guess, a reasonable estimate of what life would hold for me.

Late that night, the night I hung up the phone on my mother, I went to the river. The river wasn’t on fire, but it was still beautiful, aglow with the reflection of the city’s streetlamps and headlights and lit windows. I walked over the footbridge and then back again. I touched the railing of the bridge, felt the heat from the day.