That summer she dated a younger man named Greg and got dumped. I don’t know what broke between the two of them, only that I found her at the kitchen table one night, and she used that exact word: dumped. Her voice was blunt and ugly as a stranger’s, but her eyes were clear and her speech was orderly. She never dulled herself with wine or heavy fits of crying. She only got sharper when she was sad, brutal and precise. “He thought he could make me hurt,” she said. “He didn’t even ruin my night.” She was sitting there with her hands crossed on the table, staring straight at the clock above the fridge. “You don’t have to stay and watch,” she said. “It won’t make me feel any better.”

The next morning I found her in exactly the same place. This time she was wearing a suit and holding a steaming mug of coffee. Her eyes looked bleary.

“Do you have a hangover?” I said. I knew from television that this was what grief could look like: getting sad, then getting a hangover. Getting drunk, presumably, between. Back then, the Hangovers were just getting started. Tom had gotten a set of secondhand snare drums painted with sleek silver flames.

“Excuse me?” she said. “Do I what?”

“Are you okay?”

“You think I got drunk last night?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“You think that man mattered even one little bit? You think I need a man to make me happy?”

I shook my head, staying quiet. I was afraid of saying something worse. She asked me if I was ready for work. It was a Saturday. I wasn’t dressed. I got dressed. My hello phrase is I am looking for a man to love I do not know the name. I wanted to tell my mother she wasn’t alone. All around the world, people were looking for love. No one knew which name it would respond to.

On the way to the office, we walked through an alley that smelled like pizza and urine. We passed a homeless woman crouched in the shadow of a Dumpster. She wore blue mechanic’s coveralls that had the name Pluto stitched across the breast pocket. She had a striped cloth wrapped around her head. Her skin was dark, like cola.

“Hey ya!” she called. “You girls spare any change?” Her accent was lilting and musical, inviting.

“Not today,” my mother said. “Not today.”

“That’s bullshit,” the woman said. She smacked her palm against the Dumpster. “Bullshit bullshit bullshit.”

My mother stopped and turned to me. She said, “Never do what I’m about to do.” Then she told the woman, “I don’t owe you anything.”

“You don’t owe me? You never seen a day of this pain in your life, and you don’t owe me?”