I HAVE A FLOOD story about Mom, too, a different one, but I don't tell it to anyone but myself. When Dad left us in January of 1990, it hit me differently than it hit Mom, in that I felt, generally, that I was better off without him, a feeling I've managed to project onto the men I've dated since, none of whom have stuck around long. Mom kept food in the fridge, drove us to school, put on a brave face at the library. Everyone admired her strength in adversity, but at home she stared out windows, absent, her body with us but her mind gone cumulus. I turned fifteen that year, on Valentine's Day, a few days before the giant molasses tank in the Great Western yard ruptured, sent a knee-deep flow of molasses, glacial and viscous, across Madison Avenue, which was much less glamorous than it sounds, the bankrupt sugar mill on one side of the street, a well-kept little trailer park on the other.

I will admit that my memories from childhood, even those teen years, are shady at best, but I do think the moments I remember at all are the moments that built me. One early teenage Easter, I wore the dress I'd worn the year before, because there was no money for a new one. When I came downstairs, my father choked on the beer he'd taken to drinking with breakfast, and said to Mom, not to me, “She's not going to church looking like some sort of whore,” and then he stormed out to the lawn chair he kept on the front porch. Dad got laid off from the sugar mill the same time everyone else did. He had been distant before, easily irritated, but the layoff turned him mean.

I pulled at the seam of my skirt, trying to stretch it past mid-thigh. Some sort of whore. Mom shook her head. “He's right, Lottie. That dress is a goddamn invitation. Go change.” I'd had no idea, in that moment, what I might possibly be inviting.

I remember Dad catching a Whitesnake video on MTV, Tawny Kitaen dancing on the hood of some car. Andy had turned it on, was practically drooling, but Dad pointed at me and said, “That's nothing but cheap,” as though I were the one doing the splits, turning my come-hither eyes toward the long-haired glam rockers.

Later, when celebrity gossip told us Tawny's marriage was on the rocks, Mom nodded like she'd known it all along. “She'll have a hard time finding anyone else with that reputation. Don't forget, Lottie. You are the choices you make.” I think about that all the time, the impossible bar Mom set for me when I was nothing but a confused teenager, all my inevitable bad choices still ahead of me.