I was eighteen years old. I had taken public transit from the suburb where I lived with my parents, changing buses three times. There had been nobody on the last bus but a few sullen night-shift workers, and I hoped I looked like one more sodden and unlucky minimum-wager. The bus wound through an industrial park as grim as a prison compound. I got off and stood a moment under a bus stop sign, alone. The bus lumbered around a corner, belching diesel fumes; then the street was empty. The warehouse where my father ran his criminal enterprise was a couple of blocks away.

I didn’t know much about the business except that it had been the subject of arguments between my mother and my father, as far back as I could remember. I had spent some of my childhood in Istanbul, where we lived for six years—that was why my friends called me Turk. In Istanbul, as in Houston, we had lived in a comfortable part of town while my father worked in much less desirable neighborhoods. My mother was a Louisiana Baptist by heritage and she had never gotten accustomed to the mosques, the burqas—even though Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city and we lived in a Westernized district. For a while I thought that was why they argued so often. But the arguments continued after we moved back to the States. And although they tried to keep it from me, I eventually understood that it wasn’t the long hours or the foreign interludes of my father’s work that upset my mother, it was the nature of the work itself.

Her shame and discomfort were expressed in small ways. She wouldn’t answer the phone unless the call came from a known number. We seldom visited relatives on either side of the family, nor were we visited by them. As the years passed, my mother grew quiet, sullen, withdrawn. Once I hit adolescence I began to spend more time out of the house—as much as possible. Better the street than these drawn curtains and whispered conversations.