“You just remember, honey,” Shirley told her, “half of what she’s paying you for is the right to treat you like trash.”

Since my mother also dropped off and picked up Mrs. Haltom’s prescriptions, we knew the variety of drugs she kept at her disposal—Valium, Seconal, Xanax, Percodan, Lortab, Dexedrine, Ritalin. It was no wonder Mrs. Haltom couldn’t remember whether she’d handed a credit card bill over to my mother, or that she was so irritable between noon and five, when she was stranded in the fog between one night’s indulgences and the next.

Sometimes, I heard my mother weeping quietly in her room. The drain was often clogged with the clumps of hair she was losing.

But Mrs. Haltom always countered her cruelties with kindnesses. She passed on the bulk of her wardrobe to my mother and paid to have it altered. She schooled my mother in her own version of the rules of etiquette and the minutiae of party planning and social arrangements. She taught my mother how to play bridge and took her along on shopping trips to New York and Los Angeles and, once, to Paris. It beat the hell out of carrying a tray for a living. Wasn’t it all worth the occasional insult?

I thought so, when I thought about it at all, which wasn’t often.

Sometimes at night, after Jamie gave up and went off to play video games or listen to music, I sat at the kitchen table with Vanessa while she studied, doing my own homework or drawing in my sketchbook. By sophomore year, I’d had pieces featured in the school art show and a painting chosen as the cover of the literary magazine. So it no longer seemed inappropriate for me to draw Vanessa right in front of her. I sketched her face at least half a dozen times, first in pencil, then in charcoal and pastel, sometimes abstractly in imitation of Matisse and Picasso’s line drawings, but more often realistically, so I could take my time memorizing her features.

There were many other sketches in my notebook, some better than others: Dean Varnadoe, holding his cane aloft at the head of the classroom; Miss Whitten poised in front of one of her own canvases. As my technique improved, I moved beyond the problem of realistic representation and became entranced by the mysteries suggested by a particular gesture or pose.