I thought my mother understood a lot of hard things—more than you’d guess, from the way she spoke—but I couldn’t think of a way to say this to Tilly, the one she’d hurt most.

“How did it start?” I asked. “The prostitution, I mean. If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Not having any money,” she said. “That was most of it.”

She told me about wearing secondhand pants that smelled like other people’s privates and eating meals made from diner condiments: creamer and ketchup, salt and pepper on crackers. “I was poor,” she said. “Not artsy poor. Poor poor.” She told me about the men, how she still heard their voices. Some of them were time bombs, she explained. Tick tick tick. Just waiting to explode.

“Did you ever get hurt?” I asked.

“There are things you shouldn’t tell another person,” she said. “You can’t take them back.”

I told her it didn’t matter about taking them back. I wanted to know.

“It’s not for your sake,” she said. After that she was quiet.

The cliffs got steeper and the turns got sharper. She hugged the road and went slower. Other drivers honked and she cursed them loudly. I cursed them too. She bit the edges of her nails until they bled. I remembered the mocking lilt of Tom’s voice: Nervous Nelly. So she was one, too.

TILLY

Harrison Street wasn’t what I’d been picturing. There were strip clubs flashing neon signs and homeless guys sleeping behind Dumpsters, hiding from fog so heavy it felt like rain. The sky was gray like raw shrimp. The trees on the street looked dead but their roots looked alive. They pushed through the asphalt like tapped veins showing for needles.

But it was funny, you could tell the apartments on these blocks cost serious money. Their walls were the color of crayons, salmon pink and mint green, with big glass windows and patios full of ferns. It had been my hope from the first day, the first neon cross on the pee stick, that my kid would spend his life in places I could never afford.

He was waiting on the sidewalk, leaning against a big steel door. I double-parked our truck and climbed down without killing the ignition. Here he was, my boy. He looked just like his father, too much skin for his body. He smiled, very tight, and said, “I’d hug you, but I’m sweaty.”

“Do it anyway.”