“I can’t even trust those,” she said, her voice thick. I realized, with a start, she was crying herself. “Your tears are lies, too.”

“Please, Mama, just let me inside, and I will explain. I will explain everything.”

“You cannot sleep here,” she said.

“Please!”

“I cannot trust you underneath this roof.”

I do not know how I managed to be on the ground, but I was. I had sunk all the way down into the earth, and could only double over and cry. I knelt like that until I heard the swing of her skirts as she came down off the porch, as she stood over me. I could smell her perfume, the smell of the lemon juice she used to bathe her lily petals and keep her skin soft and bright, the hot cotton of her waistcoat—my mother’s good graces in the air around me.

And then she thrust something small and crumpled up underneath my nose.

In that queer purple light of the evening, I could just make out my wife … you would wish it, too … Emmanuel Chase.

“What is this?” I said.

“I am not a fool, Libertie. So do not treat me as one.”

I took the paper from her hand and turned it over in my own.

“This is what’s upset you?”

“You’ve compromised your honor with a man who lives in my house. Of course this has upset me! Have you lost your mind?”

She did not know. She did not know that I had failed. I heard myself give a short, hoarse laugh. And then she slapped me.

My mother had never hit me before. Even as a small child, she had not swatted me—only Lenore, on rare occasions, had done something like that. I cannot say it even hurt very much—her blow landed soft, like a brush of silk, as if she had changed her mind between raising her arm and swinging it down.

When it was done, we both could only look at each other in surprise.

She recovered first. “I cannot believe you could be so foolish.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You have ruined your future. You have spoiled our plans.”

I laughed again at that, in the same hoarse voice, which sounded foreign, even to me. “They’re already spoiled.”

She raised her hand again. “Don’t! Don’t tell me if you’ve sunk that low! Don’t say it!”

I should have said, I am a failure, but not in the way you think. I should have said, I cannot pass a simple anatomy class, and even if I raise all the money in the world from Tom Thumb weddings and girls singing, Cunningham College will probably not want me back.

Instead, I said, to the dirt beneath me, “I will never be a doctor.”

She sank down beside me. She was there on the road beside me, in front of our house, and her face now was merely her own, the moonlight masking the changes that had shocked me when I first saw her that day. My mother.