After my father moved out, my mother waited. To me it seemed that she had almost no reaction to the end of her marriage. She was friendly with the movers who came to take away his things in a small number of boxes. She tipped them well. I remember she was on the phone more often than usual. Sometimes she played records. Sometimes the house was silent, which was the only fact in all of this that made me think she had been hurt at all.

Two months later, she threw a party. An enormous one, bigger by far than her old Saturday night gatherings. From the stairs, I watched each guest step carefully into the house, not quite sure what awaited them—a tearful wronged woman? A sinner licking her wounds? I suppose they were curious. In any event, they came. She greeted each one warmly, loudly, with a joke, and the fear melted off them—I could almost see it, pooling at the threshold—and they slapped her on the back, and kissed her on the cheek, and told me how grown-up and beautiful I was, the filthy liars, and drank and danced and stayed out in the backyard past four.

One of them had a guitar. He asked me questions about my classes, about what I liked to do on the weekends, about whether I had a boyfriend, and why didn’t I, because clearly, I was a catch. A catch! I offered to bring him a beer, and he told me I was the best, truly the best, and after I brought it to him, he let me sit beside him while he played and played. He was young, a law student. My mother didn’t seem to notice him, or me, until she told me to go to bed. In fairness, I was barely thirteen. When I left, the guitar player squeezed my hand, and his calluses made me blush. I was wrong, before. Luke wasn’t the first man to touch my hands. At least there’s that.

Yes, I remember his calluses, and the fat, underwater sound of his guitar, and also the fat, underwater sound of his breathing, later that night, as my ear was pressed against my mother’s bedroom door.

In the morning, she was sitting by herself at the kitchen table. The guitar player was gone. She looked like an elegant statue that had been forgotten on the beach for many winters, warped by wind and sand, leaving only the vague shape of itself behind.

“Is that why Dad left?” I asked.

“Is what why?”

“I heard you last night,” I said. “With someone.” With him, I could not bring myself to say. (Of course, I can’t even remember his name now.) She got up and poured herself more coffee, added cream, and leaned against the sink.