“I don’t see what smoking has to do with it,” I told her, snotty-voiced, one insolent hip cocked at an angle my elder daughter would reinvent and throw at me before her age hit double digits.

My mother shrugged. “A pack a day, for years, right up until the test said I was pregnant. I knew that smoking killed people. It said so right on the package. I’d heard of lung cancer, emphysema. Still, I couldn’t stop. Smoking only hurt me, and I was used to being hurt. My husband made sure of that.”

Her gaze was so serious, her words so calm. She talked to me like I was a person. Not her kid. Like I was some adult she’d met on the bus, and she was telling me some factual information. It made my eyes ache and my mouth go dry.

“He hurt you?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. I had nine broken bones before I was old enough to order a cocktail. That was when people could order cocktails at eighteen. Then my period was so late. I took a home pregnancy test. Back then it was all test tubes, and you had to wait two hours. While I waited, I smoked. Chain-smoked, even. I’d just lit up a fresh one when I saw that the liquid had turned blue. I dropped the cigarette in the toilet, and I never smoked again. That blue color said the cigarette wouldn’t only hurt me. It would hurt you. So I flushed it, and then I left your father. He was at work. I knew if I didn’t go, he would beat you right out of me, maybe that very night. I could never be sure with him. I put as many of my things as I could carry into a Hefty bag and hitchhiked all the way to Georgia, to my mother’s house. He never let me have a car. I was pretty sure he would come after me and kill me. He’d always said he would, if I left. I slept on her sofa for weeks with a loaded shotgun right by me, hoping I wouldn’t be too scared to use it. What I didn’t know was, he was cheating on me. He was actually glad to have me gone. He moved the other woman right on in. He loved her more than me, I guess. So much more that she was the one he eventually beat to death. That’s why he’s in prison. Do you have any other questions about when you’re going to meet your dad?”

I hadn’t. My mother had never been allowed to tell this story to the girls. I’d forbidden it. He’d died, still in prison, when I was in high school, so he wasn’t real to them. The world he’d created for my mother wasn’t real to them.