“I understand, honey. I really do. I understand dreaming. I understand getting away, starting fresh, starting over. But wherever you go, you take yourself with you, just remember that. You can start a new chapter and change things around, but sometimes you can’t just rewrite the entire book,” he said.

I thought about that. I didn’t quite believe what he was saying, though. In school they were always nagging us about rewriting things.

“But you escaped,” I said. “And then you just came back!”

“Well, you escape prison. I didn’t see this place as a prison,” Dad said. “But Nans as a warden, that’s…” He started laughing. “Seriously, though, I left because I wanted an adventure. I wanted to meet new people and see if I could make it in a place where everyone didn’t care about me and where I was truly on my own. I never had any plans to come back, but that’s how it worked out.”

“So why did you move back here?” I asked.

“Because of Mom,” said Dad. “She loved this place. I brought her here to meet everyone and she didn’t want to leave.”

“But Mimi didn’t want her to move here,” I said, trying to piece together what happened.

I had always thought it was Dad who wanted to move back home. Mom and Dad met in college. She lived at school like Dad did, but Mimi was close by, so she could drive over for dinner. Mom and Dad hung out at Mimi’s house a lot while they were in college.

“Noooo,” Dad said slowly. “Mimi wasn’t too thrilled about Mom’s plan. She didn’t really understand why Mom would want to move out here, so far from her family, and especially where there weren’t a lot of opportunities for artists.”

“So she changed her mind?” I asked.

I never remembered Mimi saying anything bad about where we lived, but Dad would always tease her, saying, “So it worked out okay, didn’t it, Marla?”

She came to visit twice a year and always seemed to have a good time. “It’s a beautiful place to live,” she would say, smiling.

“Well,” said Dad. “It took Mimi a while to change her mind. But she saw how happy Mom was and how much everyone here loved Mom, so she was happy that Mom was happy. That’s the thing about parents. They really just want their kids to be happy, even if they don’t understand why they do things. If you decide to move away from here, I’ll miss you every day, but if that’s what you want to do and that’s what makes you happy, then I will be there with the moving truck.”

“So if I tell you I want to move to Chicago for college, you’ll be okay with that?” I asked.