“That’s your dad?”

I looked at my seatmate as the bus rattled to a stop in my apartment complex. It wasn’t really mine; we didn’t pay rent. I wasn’t sure how Mom convinced her brother to let us live there, since last I’d heard, she was dead to him. As long as she was with my dad, Danny told her, he’d have nothing to do with her. But here we were.

“Yeah,” I told the girl, and followed her eyes to the gangly, graying man waiting on the lawn in front of the leasing office. Other parents were there, but none looked like him. They grouped in clusters and chatted with babies on their hips and dogs on leashes, smiling when the bus hissed open. My father, by contrast, stood apart from them, hands in his pockets. Every few seconds, he’d cough into his arm.

“It’s just, I’ve never seen him,” she said. I didn’t know how to respond to this. It seemed like a weird answer, a placeholder when you weren’t sure what else to say. And what people usually said were things like, “I thought he was your grandpa,” or, “Is he sick?” I didn’t know what to say to those things, either.

“Bye.” I grabbed my backpack and hurried down the rubber-lined steps, my mechanical pencils clinking with every stabbing, purposeful stride. My goal was to breeze past him and into our building as fast as possible.

“Mara.” He shuffled in front of me and smiled. “Really? You haven’t seen me in two weeks, and I don’t even get a ‘hi’?”

I stared at a tree root clawing through the dirt and moss. “Hi.”

His arms were open. He expected a hug. I shut my eyes and leaned into his coat, cringing at the oil and smoke pressed into the fibers. As far back as I could remember, Dad carried his work with him like a shroud. Sometimes it was nice, like when he worked at the lumberyard and came home smelling like fresh cedar. It made me think he was new, himself: something blank and ready to build into whatever I wanted.

Most of the time, though, the smells in his coat weren’t nice. A lot of his work involved doing things no one else wanted to do: manning oil rigs, unloading trucks, cleaning old train cars. The worst was the lard rendering plant. He’d come home smelling like a corpse.

Today, he smelled like a full ashtray in an old garage. I told myself it could have been worse.

“Is Mom home?” I asked.

“Not yet. She’s visiting a friend.”

A friend. I knew what this meant. As soon as Dad came home from a job, flashing money at my mom and me like he’d won the lottery, like we’d finally made it, Mom would take a chunk of the bills and vanish for a while. She was always visiting a friend.

At six, I was still too young to know exactly what my parents were doing. I knew the tremors of their limbs best. The sunken set of their eyes and cheekbones, the murmur of their voices when Mom would finally come back from her visit and they’d lock the door, leaving me on the other side to count the minutes, then hours, until they’d let me in again.

I knew the bruises in my father’s arms, pressed into the skin like the inky fingerprints I left on everything after playing with Kiki and her markers. My mother didn’t have any, but then again, she only wore sweaters and long pants around me. Seeing her in all those knitted things and fleece year-round made me itchy. But it was still better than seeing my dad’s arms, when he’d fling his jacket onto the couch and stretch, saying how happy he was to be home.

“When do you leave again?” I asked, as soon as we were inside Uncle Danny’s apartment. My backpack slipped off my shoulders and onto the tile floor. The hook was barely a foot away, installed at just my height for exactly this reason: my uncle despised stuff on the floor.

I decided to leave it, along with my shoes. Maybe my dad would somehow get blamed.

“Eager for me to get out of your hair already?” I hated his laugh. It always sounded like he needed to clear his throat, but he never did. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were a teenager already. Come on, Mara, tell me about school.”

He followed me to the living room. Uncle Danny didn’t like me sitting on the sofa, but he was at work. I threw myself into the perfect white cushions.

“Any big projects?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Science fair, I guess.” I set the remote down and stared at his reflection in the black background of some movie credits.

“Wow. Didn’t know first grade did science fairs.”

“They moved me to third grade.” This was recent news, but I was still surprised he didn’t know. Actually, I was angry. Mom probably told him, and he forgot.

“Really?” His smile changed his entire face. “That’s amazing, Mara! Good job.”

My pride tangled with embarrassment, forming a ball in my chest I wanted to spit onto Uncle Danny’s clean rug. “Thanks.”

“Third grade. That’s when you learn cursive, right?”

I nodded and studied the dirt under his nails. Maybe it was grease. Maybe it was just the way his skin looked, now, decaying from the outside in.

Mom came home in a feel-good flurry, all tiptoed steps and big, sparkling smiles. There was an edge to her voice when she told me I could stay out here and watch whatever I wanted for a while; homework could wait.

As soon as the bedroom door locked behind them, I pulled out my assignments and got started. Dad promised he’d help with my science fair project before he left on his next job—three weeks away, for a month and a half in some shipyard town—but now I regretted telling him he could. I’d do it myself, starting right now. I filled page after page with ideas and plans: volcanoes with baking soda and vinegar, foam solar systems, bean sprouts in little Dixie cups.

“‘Why Water is Best for Plants,’” I wrote at the top of a blank page. Then I made a list of all the things I’d give my test subjects: black coffee, orange juice, cola, sweet tea, blue toilet water from Danny’s bathroom. I’d start with Mom’s stupid prickly pear cactus on the patio. Then the impatiens she loved so much. I’d save the toilet water for her sunflower, lone and taller than me, in an orange pot by the backdoor.

When they emerged, hours later, it was dark out. I’d finished my homework and planned my entire project. I’d fed myself dinner, too: a packet of Pop-Tarts and two juice boxes, even though it meant I wouldn’t have any for lunch.

Mom’s eyes were glassy. Dad could barely keep his open.

“I love you, sweetheart,” Mom whispered, and kissed the top of my head while I fought every urge to shove her away. I hated them both. But I hated him most, for coming back and making her like this.

“Pizza?” she asked, and I nodded. I wasn’t hungry anymore, but I wanted to eat with her. I wanted to see food enter her mouth and I wanted to see her chew it. I wanted to see her sweaters fit just a little better.

While we waited, Dad drank some coffee and told Mom he missed her. She sat in his lap and invited me to join them, but I said I was too cold to leave my blanket.

Truthfully, I just hated sharing her.

It was always strange to see my parents together, because she was twenty-four and looked sixteen, but he was forty-two and looked fifty. Strangers whispered about them when we went out. Old ladies thought we were three generations, not two.

But my parents acted like they loved each other. I guess they did. It wasn’t something I liked to think about, really. He’d hold her hand and she’d kiss his forehead, or he’d grab her waist and she’d giggle, running her fingers through his beard. They always looked so happy, when he came home. I wondered why I couldn’t be, too.

The pizza arrived. I washed my hands.

They disappeared again while the pizza cooled. I tried to get myself a piece, but it didn’t lift from the others.

“Stuck,” Dad noticed, as they drifted from their room like zombies. “Honey, where’s the pizza cutter?”

She passed it to him. His wiry fingers wrapped around the handle.

I don’t remember him tripping on anything. That’s what he and my mom would tell the police, social services, and the doctor who stitched my face and the gash between two ribs: his foot caught on the leg of a dining chair. He’d tripped. It was an accident.

What I remember is suddenly looking up from the pizza to see that spinning, silver wheel carving the air in front of me. Dad’s eyes, heavy and glazed, but open. That’s what I couldn’t understand. He saw what he was doing. He had to.

The rush of weight against me, his body leaning into mine as he went limp, hurt most. It felt like a boulder thrown on top of me.

The cut to my face came first. One dull, swooping arc of pain, right down my jaw.

Mom screamed his name. Whether she was angry at him for hurting me or worried because he’d fallen, I didn’t know.

The cut into my ribcage happened when we landed. I hit Uncle Danny’s clean, bright blue rug and felt the dampness of blood first, my shirt sticking to my skin, before I felt any sting.

His forehead landed squarely in my eye socket. It was already swollen and purple by the time we got to the hospital.

“You should leave the room for a moment, while we’re stitching her up,” the doctor urged them. They kept wringing their hands and taking deep breaths, like they were the ones in pain.

Mom hesitated. Looked at me.

“Lots of blood,” the doctor added with a half-smile. “We make everyone leave, as a precaution. Can’t have people fainting and needing stitches of their own, right?”

The door shut. I shivered on the cot and closed my eyes when they brought out the needles.

“Mara,” the doctor whispered. I liked him. He looked like Andy Griffith and kept a wad of peppermint gum at the back of his mouth. “I need you to tell me something.”

Through the dizziness settling in, I nodded.

“Do your mommy and daddy ever hit you?”

I opened my eyes and stared at him through the buzzing lights. The nurse seemed to be waiting for my answer, too.

“No.”

“Do they...I don’t know, ever touch you? Where people shouldn’t touch other people?”

“Your privates,” the nurse prompted.

“No.”

“Do you ever see them smoking, or using needles? Doing anything you think they shouldn’t?”

I watched him snip the scabby black thread on my side, all stitched up, good as new. Like a torn doll.

“I don’t know,” I said, while they covered it with a bandage. He touched my forehead gently and turned my gaze to the wall. Time to fix the doll’s face.

We were silent. The room felt smaller and smaller, every second.

“All done. Wow, that was mighty brave of you!” The nurse squeezed my hands and gave me a lollipop, then an entire roll of stickers. I wished I’d brought Kiki with me, so I could stick some on her.

“Listen, Mara,” the doctor said softly, and for some reason, I had to glance at that closed door, “if anyone comes to visit you soon, and they want to know what your parents are like—you tell them the truth. Okay?”

I furrowed my brow. I had told the truth: everything he asked, I gave the best, most honest answer I knew how. Why didn’t he believe me?

“Okay,” I said. Then I smiled at them the way they smiled at me, even though it pulled the tape on my bandage and stung my skin.

The scar never did heal properly. Mom dabbed at the loosening stitches with peroxide when it oozed from infection, until I cried and Uncle Danny took me to the doctor.

“I’m serious, Josie. Either you leave Collin for good, or I’m taking her away from you.”

I huddled in his backseat under my coat and silently begged him to do just that. I wanted him to take me away from her, from both of them. I wanted to be far, far away.

“Collin’s gone. I promise.”

She’d promised it before. He still always came back.

“Uncle Danny?” I sniffed, on the way to the doctor’s office. “Mom’s lying.”

His dark gray eyes flashed to me in the rearview. “I know.”

During the drive, I told him everything. The time Dad crashed our car coming home from Christmas at Aunt Brenda’s. The time he swayed too far left, passing me on the stairs at our old boarding house, and knocked me down all the way to the bottom. I’d had to skip picture day that year, because my lip was so swollen I couldn’t even smile.

Danny listened without a word while I detailed every instance I could remember. For good measure, and because I was furious at her, I even included the time Mom forgot to pick me up from a slumber party because Dad had just come back into town. My friend’s parents let me stay through the weekend, when I couldn’t remember my address and the phone kept ringing without any answer.

“Do they....” Uncle Danny pulled up the parking brake in the lot of his doctor’s office, a small building that looked more like someone’s house. “They never hurt you on purpose, do they?”

Suddenly, I felt bad. It seemed wrong to tell him all these things at once, eager to get my parents in trouble—eager for him to take me away from them, like he’d promised.

“No.” I wondered if this made it all better, if now he wouldn’t follow through, because I saw his hands relax on the steering wheel.

Then he twisted in his seat and stared at the bandage on my face. Blood and something yellowish kept seeping through, no matter how many times a day Mom changed it.

“I might need you to...to tell these things to someone else.” He adjusted his watch. It lit up every hour with a fuzzy-sounding beep. I’d always wanted to see it up-close, but he said it wasn’t for kids to play with. “Could you tell the doctor what you told me? And—and maybe a policeman, or someone, if you have to?”

For the first time since I told him everything, fear gripped me. “Will they put Mom in jail?”

He let out a breath I hadn’t seen him take. “I don’t know. They might. But you need to be somewhere else, Mara. You...you shouldn’t be with people who hurt you like that. Even if it is an accident. Your mom and dad need help.”

Somewhere else. The way he said it, I knew he meant “alone.”

“I can’t stay?” I hated that my voice shook.

“I’m nineteen,” he said, his laugh sounding strange and short. “You need real parents. You need people who know how to take care of you.”

“I take care of myself a lot.” I felt my heartbeat churning in my chest. I didn’t want to go away if it meant I’d be with strangers. I wanted Uncle Danny’s clean couch and clean rug and his warm apartment.

“I make my own breakfast every morning,” I added, while Danny shook his head and climbed out of the car, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. I scrambled to follow. “See, I undid my seatbelt myself, and—and look, I opened my door myself. I take showers now instead of baths, and I dress myself, and they put me in third grade ahead of my friends, and they let me go on the Williamsburg trip even though you have to be eight and I’m six—”

“Mara.” Danny turned and stared me down. He looked sad, or maybe just tired. “I promise, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. If you go somewhere else, I’ll make sure it’s a good place.”

I wanted to tell him his apartment was a good place. Danny could be my dad; I didn’t care how old he was or wasn’t. I wouldn’t be any trouble.

“Let’s go get those stitches looked at,” he said. I watched his spent cigarette spin into a puddle before I took his hand.

It didn’t make sense to me. If my mother could handle me as a baby at eighteen, why couldn’t Danny handle me now, when he was nineteen? An entire year older, and with a place of his own. And, most importantly, without my father popping in every few weeks to ruin everything.

The doctor didn’t want to see me, at first. It was obvious this was a grown-up doctor’s office; no toys in the waiting room, and nothing but boring recipe magazines on the tables.

“Please,” I heard Uncle Danny beg him. “You know I’d take her somewhere else if I could, Cam. She’s burning up, and it’s not healing, but my fucking sister won’t....”

The sound of him crying made me hold my breath.

Dr. Greenfield had cold hands. They rested carefully on my cheek when he peeled off my bandage, crusted again with ooze and blood, and turned my face in the light.

“We can’t stitch it closed any more,” he sighed to Uncle Danny, “but I can clean it up and prescribe some antibiotics.”

“Thank you. Really—it...it means a lot. I know you told me not to come to your work anymore. And I won’t. I mean...if it wasn’t an emergency—”

“I know.” His voice was quiet. I studied the gray in his temples and wondered how Danny even had a friend so much older than him. For some reason, my brain imagined Danny meeting Dr. Greenfield at the same place my mother said she met Dad: the speedway across town, where my father used to work on a pit crew for a real race car driver. He saw my mother with her friends during a race, smiling and screaming in the track lights over the bleachers.

“All set. The one on your side isn’t too bad, but I’d leave both alone for a while, if I were you. No picking, okay?” Dr. Greenfield apologized for not having any stickers to give me.

“That’s okay. I don’t even like stickers.” I crossed my ankles and sat as straight as I could, hoping to show Uncle Danny how grown-up I was. How easy it would be to take care of me.

We got ice cream before he took me to the police station. I could still taste hot fudge stuck to my teeth when I told them everything I’d told Danny in the car.

I tried my hardest to sit straight, to keep my eyes dry and voice steady. I was determined to prove how mature I was. Danny didn’t have to take care of me at all, if he didn’t want to. All I needed was for him to keep me.

But as the hours dragged past and my fever returned, I couldn’t fight the urge to slouch. All their questions and quiet words made me grumpy. I just wanted to go home and sleep.

Danny let me play with his watch when he went to a separate room to “talk things over.” I clicked the light button over and over again, keeping the face in a constant glow. It wasn’t as fun as I’d imagined. After five minutes, I abandoned it next to my apple juice.

I would never set foot in Uncle Danny’s apartment again. An officer took me to a little room to nap when I told her I was tired. I slept under an itchy army blanket in the same clothes I’d worn all day, until another woman woke me with a long list of questions about my parents. When I asked where my uncle was, why he didn’t even tell me goodbye, she promised I’d see him again in the morning.

I did, but just long enough for him to give me a hug and my backpack. He’d packed it with things I never would have chosen: a glittery pink shirt I hated, pants that rode too high on my ankles, a hairbrush with missing bristles, and two boring books I’d planned to ditch in the library return box at school.

But he had packed Kiki, along with all her markers, and a new toothbrush. When I pressed a button on the handle, the whole thing lit up just like his watch.

There was a note, too: Love you. Xoxo. Dan.

I was lucky, the social worker told me: most kids had to wait a while before getting placed with a foster family. After barely a week in the group home, I moved in with Ms. Faye. She loved cooking and had a sprawling old farmhouse filled with foster children, all girls. I shared my room with another six-year-old who told me her mom left her at the grocery store and never came back.

They all had stories to tell. Some girls didn’t share how they’d gotten there, myself included; the one time I dared speak up, an older girl told me it sounded like my parents were “junkies,” but wouldn’t tell me what that meant. I decided I hated her. And I decided not to tell anyone else about my family.

There were girls who’d had it worse, too, which made me want to share even less. Girls who’d been touched in ways they shouldn’t have been touched. Kids locked in closets for days at a time. A five-year-old who was missing an ear, because her daddy burned their house down in a fire while she was sleeping. She didn’t have hair above the bump where her ear should’ve been, either. It made her cry a lot, not even having hair to hide her scars, like I did.

“We can fix it,” I told her one night. It was the day after Christmas. Ms. Faye had given us all new books and reading lamps for our bedrooms, so I let the girl read mine while I trained the lamp on her head. She sat cross-legged on my rug and breathed hard when she saw the scissors in my hand, stolen from the kitchen.

“I can’t make it worse,” I reminded her, and she relaxed.

It took me an hour to cut and comb her hair just right. At first, the sight of her scar in the bright light made me want to throw up. It was gnarled and pink, shiny patches beginning to form. I hoped mine wouldn’t look that bad, when it lost its fresh red color.

Her hair lifted as I cut away the excess weight. Curls tumbled down her shoulders and onto the rug while my lamp flickered, the bulb loose.

Finally, I was done.

“See?” I took her to the mirror on the back of the closet door. “It’s fluffier now, because it’s shorter. And I put the part on the other side, so all this will cover the bad side.” The discarded hair tickled my feet as I stepped back. “Do you like it?”

The girl turned her head from side to side. She was also missing part of her eyebrow, but with her hair the way it was now, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t tell anything was wrong with her at all, in fact.

She cried when she hugged me. I didn’t even get in trouble for stealing the scissors Ms. Faye always tried to keep locked away. Everyone was just happy the girl was happy.

After the house fell asleep around me, I went to the bathroom and stared at myself. I lifted my hair to one side, then the other, and piled it in front of my face.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t completely hide the scar.

At least the other one was under my shirt. It looked worse, the way it twisted with my body, but at least it could be hidden. The one on my face always managed to peek out, somehow. When I smiled, which I didn’t do much anymore, it looked like it grew. Like it wanted to be seen.

The next day, my mother was allowed to visit. It was the first time I’d seen her since Uncle Danny took me away.

“I miss you, sweetie,” she sniffed, and held one of my hands in both of hers. She smelled like perfume, the kind in the deep blue bottle that I loved; she only wore it when we were going somewhere special.

“I miss you, too.” I actually meant it. As furious as I’d been the day I left, as much I wanted Uncle Danny to take me far away from her...I’d spent every day since with a deep, steady ache in my chest, wanting nothing more than to see her again.

“I’m getting better, baby girl. I’m getting better and—and I’m gonna get you back. I promise.” Her hands twitched at her sides. She wanted to pull me into her lap. I wanted to let her.

We both looked at the social worker across the room. She took a breath, closed the magazine in her hands, and nodded. “Just for a minute.”

Curling up into my mother’s lap again, after all these weeks without her, broke the piece of me I’d built stronger and stronger ever since I left. I didn’t care about seeming grown-up or brave. I didn’t care about staying mad.

The pills of her sweater made my skin itch. I inhaled the perfume and counted the heartbeats on my cheek when I pressed my face into her chest.

“Nobody’s taking you from me.” Her promise blasted out in a fierce, hot stream down my neck. “We just hit a rough patch, you and me. We’ll be okay. You’re my everything, you know that, don’t you?”

I nodded. I didn’t know that. But I wanted to believe her.

It was a year before Dad tried to visit. They didn’t let him.

Uncle Danny visited the most. Dr. Greenfield came with him once, and when I saw them holding hands, I asked if they were gay.

“Where’d you learn that?” Uncle Danny laughed. His face pinched behind the smile, like I’d made him nervous.

I shrugged. I didn’t know where I learned it. Between skipping grades and living with so many girls older than myself, I’d learned a lot of things that year.

“I am gay,” he answered, finally. “Does that.... It doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“No. Why?”

This time, his smile looked sad. “I don’t know. It bothered your mom. She doesn’t live with me, anymore.”

“Where’s she live?” The last time I’d seen her was two months ago, on my seventh birthday. She talked about house-hunting and her new job at the Laundromat like she’d discovered gold.

“I don’t know,” he said again. He kissed the top of my head. “But I’m glad me being with Cam doesn’t bother you.”

There was one thing that bothered me about my uncle being with Dr. Greenfield, actually: the ring I noticed on the man’s finger when he stepped away to answer his phone. I decided not to ask about it, but I had a feeling it was why Uncle Danny visited by himself, after that. He never mentioned Dr. Greenfield again.

Mom was back with Dad. No one ever told me. No one had to. He was the only reason her visits would stop—the only thing that could derail her life all over again, just when things were going well. He’d breeze into town with his paychecks and baggies, locked doors and heavy eyes, and transform her into the person I hated.

I was eight before he left for good. By then, I knew what “junkies” meant. I knew I came from two of them.

Mom went to rehab. She got a divorce and a new haircut. She found a townhouse, lawyered up, and did everything she promised. She got me back.

I’d lived with Ms. Faye for two years, but leaving was easier than I expected. Most girls came and went so quickly, I hadn’t bothered making friends. Even the long-timers like myself didn’t grow close. There wasn’t much point. Everything could end the very next day.

Ms. Faye cried when she heard I was leaving. “I’ll miss you,” she said, hugging me into her ample bosom until I couldn’t breathe, “but don’t worry—these are happy tears. Your mama’s worked so hard, getting you back.”

I told Ms. Faye I’d miss her, too. At the time, I didn’t think I would: she was nice, but I’d spent the last two years reminding myself she was temporary—even when a week became a month, and a season became a year. In my final days at the farmhouse, though, I did feel kind of sad to leave her. She’d treated me well. She might have even loved me.

The day Mom took me home, it was snowing.

“What do you want for Christmas? Another Pageant Girl, maybe?”

Her new car (used, but new to me) smelled like the bag of donuts at my feet. I reached in and passed her one, then took another for myself. My teeth sank into the dough and I suddenly wanted to cry, I was so happy.

He was gone. Finally. For good.

“I want to change my last name,” I told her, and took another bite before finishing the first, wanting nothing on my tongue but cinnamon and sugar and this one good moment.

On my ninth birthday, he tracked us down.

I sat on the stairs of our townhouse and listened. Mom had the door open an inch, no more, but I could hear his voice oozing inside like bad breath.

“Please, Josie. I know you’re moving tomorrow.”

Mom sighed and rested her forehead on the doorframe. “Collin, you have to stop this. It’s over. When it ends, it ends. Accept that.”

“I do accept that. Can...can I just come inside, for a few minutes?”

“Have you been using?”

A pause. “Monday.”

It was Thursday. Three days, if I felt like rounding up. Which I didn’t.

“I can’t be around you, if you’re still.... I can’t let Mara be around you. I’m not getting in that shit again, Collin, I won’t. I’m not letting anyone take that girl from me, ever again.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear my mother cry. I was surprised to hear him.

“I know you’re leaving because of me. I deserve it. And I promise, I won’t follow you—I won’t contact you ever again, if that’s what you want. But at least let me tell her goodbye.”

Mom took a breath. No, I told her silently. Don’t let him in.

“Mara?” she called, then started when she turned and saw me. “Oh. I didn’t know you were.... Someone’s here for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“I never meant to hurt you, baby girl. You know that, right?” His arm appeared in the gap of the door. I could hear his breathing turn ragged, like air coming through a broken straw, and it made me feel like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, myself.

Mom stepped back. He stumbled into the entryway.

We stared at each other. His eyes bore right into mine.

Everyone else, even my mother, looked at the scar first. Sometimes it was only a millisecond; they weren’t even aware of it. But I was.

That was one of many truths I’d learned, the last few years: when you’re broken, it’s the first thing anyone will ever notice about you. Most of the time, it will be the only thing. No matter how well you piece yourself back together.

Just once I wanted someone to look me in the eyes without even a glance at the scar. I wanted someone to look at me and see nothing else.

But I didn’t want that someone to be him. He deserved to see the scar like a billboard. He deserved it stamped onto his own face, or the backs of his eyelids, so that even when he slept he could never forget what he’d done to me.

“I hate you,” I whispered.

Dad had less of a reaction than Mom. While she covered her mouth and cried harder, he simply kept staring.

His tongue was a sick-looking, pale kind of pink as it wet his lips. Then he did something I never would have expected.

He smiled.

“Then we’ve got something in common,” he said shakily, and put his hands in the pockets of that old coat. “I hate me, too.”

No one made me hug him goodbye. No one even made me say the words.

We packed up the last of our things early the next morning. Mom wedged her suitcase underneath my feet and gave Uncle Danny one more hug, before he leaned into my window to kiss my forehead.

“Call me as soon as your phone’s set up,” he said. I hooked his pinky with mine. My heart ached, a real and physical pain in the organ, when I thought about being so far away from him.

I’d learned it wasn’t him being gay Mom didn’t approve of, but his tendency to date married men who had wives and kids. He broke up families, she said, and I wondered if she resented him for breaking up ours. I would never be able to thank him enough for that.

As we drove away, though, I wondered something else: if you could even break something that was already so broken on its own.