It wasn’t so much that my parents hid from me what was going on back home. It was more that they were selective, hoping that none of it would ever be anything I needed to know about. Several months after the incident with the babies, Penny was evicted from the house she’d shared with Jon after not paying the rent for months. My mom went to help her clean the place and pack and discovered a horrifying scene. My sister’s house had become the house of a crazy person: the electricity had been shut off weeks before and food had rotted in the fridge, there were baby clothes and toys everywhere, and—worst of all—there was no sign of Noodles.

The only explanation I can offer for how we moved on so swiftly was that shortly after Penny lost the babies, she met Stewart.

Stewart Granger. He was thirty years old, originally from Hayden and now a captain in the U.S. Air Force, stationed out of Mountain Home Air Force Base. He was visiting friends for the weekend in his hometown when he met Penny.

Stewart was a cut above Penny’s other boyfriends in every way. He was tall and even a bit handsome in his sleek airman’s suit. He had the polite reserve of a military man: yes ma’am-ing my mother and yes sir-ing my father in a way that made him seem both older and younger than he was.

Most importantly for us, Penny just seemed better when she was with him. The cloud of melancholy that had settled on her after she’d lost the babies lifted, and the whole incident seemed to quickly fade into a terrible but remote memory. It was because of Jon, I was more convinced than ever.

“You know,” my mother told me on the phone right after they’d met Stewart for the first time, “I had a dreadful boyfriend right before I met you father.”

“You did?” I was surprised. Both because it’s always surprising that your parents were young once, and because it was hard to imagine my sensible mother choosing the wrong man.

“Yes. I was young and stupid. He was not nice at all,” she said in a way that made me understand that she meant abusive. He’d even convinced her to steal some money from her boss and lie to her own parents. She was ashamed of all of it but said it gave her perspective too; she’d never done anything like it before or since. Maybe that’s what Jon had been for Penny: just an aberration.

But now, there was Stewart, disciplined, solid, straight-and-narrow Stewart, a massive upgrade from the dreadful Jon, on whom we placed all of our grief and anger. This time when my sister said she was getting married, I hoped she meant it.

Liz Came Here to Forget