I didn’t understand what she meant. America was still a mysterious country to me, and in my childish imagination, I pictured her going someplace outside the city, high on a hill, where fathers waited in lonely rooms for their long-lost brides to return. She would report to a person at the front desk who would yell out her name to a crowd of anxious men. One of them—handsome, strong, with dark stubble of a beard—would rise and yell “Yes, that’s me!” and run to embrace my mother for the answered prayer of her arrival.

It did not go that way.

Whoever the man was, he did not receive my mother well. I was awakened that evening by her smashing things in her room, and I ran in to see her running scissors through the dress she had worn. Her makeup was tearstained, her lipstick smeared, and when she saw me she screamed, “Go away! Go away!” But even then I could tell she was only echoing my father’s reaction to her.

She offered few details about him. I learned that he was rich and that he lived in a house in Beacon Hill. My mother tried to insist that he cared about me, but I knew it was a lie. I saw the heartbreak in her eyes as she told it. I understood, at that moment, that she had been planning all my life for that night, to try and make us whole, to try and make us a family, to unruin herself, and that she had been rebuked, an act that, in my mind, cemented my father as forever a bastard, and me, by definition, a bastard as well.

My mother was a contradiction in many ways. Skinny and frail, she had nonetheless uprooted us, by herself, to a strange new country. When her hoped-for rendezvous collapsed, she did what she had to do. She worked tirelessly at that plant, taking overtime, going in on weekends. She had the endurance of five men, I swear. But one day she fell from a scaffold and damaged her spine so badly that she couldn’t walk. The plant, trying to avoid a large payment, said in court that she was negligent. My mother had never been negligent in her life.