“You shouldn’t say that in a letter,” I said.

“Oh?”

“It doesn’t seem right.”

“And what should we do? Head out to the desert?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Just understand my side of this? I don’t enjoy feeling like a villain.”

I didn’t say: You’re not a villain. I said: “I’m not making you a villain.”

“Well, good,” she said. “You always seem to think I am one.”

I spent one summer during high school working for my mom’s law firm. I was supposed to spend a month in Guatemala, building houses for a village in the northern jungles, but near the beginning of June some guerrillas held up an airport near Flores. The newspapers said they had a manifesto and a lot of guns. Their wives brought cold Fantas and tortillas to the hostages. The articles never said what their manifesto was about, but it said what kind of guns they had. I asked my mother if she thought it was safe.

“You’re worried about guerrillas?” she asked, amused.

I shrugged. But I was.

Around the house, Tom made comments like: “You don’t want to fuck with socialism.” I didn’t want to be scared of socialism, but there I was, a little scared. The headlines said things like: Ambushed!

That was when my mother suggested I could spend the summer working at her law firm. “Why make foreign countries better when you can help foreigners come here instead?” she asked. She was maybe kidding, maybe not.

I’d often argued with her social causes. “I think women should be able to cut their own vaginas if they want to,” I told her once, because she was a crusader against genital mutilation. I couldn’t stand the prospect of inheriting all her ideas about the world. They were rigid and particular, like armor that had been made especially for her body.

“It’s not a question of want,” my mom said. “It’s a question of coercion.”

Her certainty felt like a wall she’d built around herself—just like that, in the middle of a conversation—a sign that she lived in an entirely separate world more sure and steadfast than my own. She was a pro-choice woman who didn’t like to hear other women going on and on about how much they regretted their abortions. I could never understand the ways she wanted to love me. She always flinched when I hugged her, as if she hadn’t been expecting it, as if afraid of being crushed.