“Dad,” I said.

“Is that your mother?” Dad said. “Put her on.”

“Hang that phone up and come here,” Mom said.

“Let me talk to her, David,” Dad said.

I hung up.

Mom came down the hallway. “What did you ask him?”

“Why you can’t have babies,” I said.

“That’s none of your business,” Mom said. “That’s nobody’s business but my own.”

I took the phone and slammed it down on the table three times and yelled that it was my business, that if Frick wants his own but if there is only me then he’s going to keep hating me and you and this place. “No one’s ever going to be happy,” I said.

The refrigerator clicked on, growling, and the kitchen light buzzed. The phone rang. Mom answered it and immediately hung it up.

Mom’s knees cracked when she sat on the floor, and she pulled me shaking onto her lap.

“We’ll all be happy,” she said. “Every single one of us.”

I looked at her, but she turned away from me and stared at the back door. And so did I. From the angle I was at in my mother’s arms the door looked straight, like no foundation had shifted over the years, and I believed her—that I’d be happy, that she’d be happy, that Dad would be happy, that even Frick would be happy—and that I believed all that made it feel attainable, even if it was only for those brief minutes in my mother’s arms before she stood me up and I saw dead on that our door was crooked.

. . .

Since the day Frick left, Mom hadn’t cried once. She ate dinner every night with me at the kitchen table, and two nights in a row she dug out Monopoly, which we didn’t play properly and instead took wads of colored money and walked around the house pretending we were at Tiffany & Co.

A week went by, a week in which happiness seemed to course through our veins like blood, but since then I’ve come to think that it wasn’t happiness but instead numbness. At least for Mom. On a Thursday, I came home from school and Mom wasn’t home. And she wasn’t home when night dripped over, and so I heated up leftover rice and chicken and stared at the mess of food on the plate until midnight. When Mom didn’t come home, I set the food in the fridge and I stayed up all night, waiting, sometimes sitting in the living room, sometimes going outdoors and sitting on the cold concrete steps.

By the time the sun came up, I felt like I had to get ready, had to start the day, had to go on. I showered, dressed, ate cornflakes, brushed my teeth, but when the school bus stopped in front of the house, I stood at the back door, hand on the knob, not able to go, not able to pull open the crooked door, and eventually the bus pulled away, its white fumes thick in the cold air.