I knew my mother had gotten pregnant with me her senior year and they’d “had” to get married. It was nice knowing you weren’t planned. He kept talking, about having worked long hours, spending time apart, and how he tried to make his marriage work over the years. “I guess I’d had enough when I came home and went into the kitchen and there was food on the floor, you know, crumbs from something, and then I put my hand on the counter and it was sticky.” I’d been looking at him across the front seat of his car, my preadolescent unibrow a mirror of his own unibrow, while he continued. “It was right then that I realized, you know, I just didn’t want to be there. I had to get out of there.”

So that was my explanation: He’d left because of a dirty kitchen. Needless to say, wherever I lived, the kitchen was always very clean, no crumbs anywhere.

When I was in high school, I found out through my mother’s sly comments that my dad had always messed around on her. Just a year into their marriage, she’d had a feeling that he had something going on with a woman at work. She thought about where he could be hiding clues, things that would betray if he was having an affair. Mom finally thought of the one place she’d never needed to go: the trunk of his car.

She pulled up the carpet in the trunk and found a dozen love letters from the woman at work. He’d put them inside the spare tire, something my mom would never have needed to use. So she was right. I believe in women’s intuition. I think what men fail to realize is that we can usually tell because they act totally different when they are leading this other part of their life. The cheaters reveal themselves.

After their separation, life kind of stood still for my mom. She worked long hours and we always had some bill collector calling about something that was past due. The paint peeled from the front of our town house. Our living room carpet was still light-blue shag, a color my mom hated because it was her mother’s favorite color, which never made sense to me. One summer both our washer and dryer broke down, but we only had the money to get one of them fixed. We fixed the washer; my mom reasoned that our clothes would dry quickly in the Arizona sun. I know the neighbors saw our underwear hanging limply from the clothesline and labeled us white trash.