In July, shortly after I graduated from NYU, my mother called to say she needed my help. She was leaving my father, moving out of the house. She begged and needled and blackmailed me with the silent treatment when I balked. My manager at the smoke shop told me summer was not the time to be taking off and warned I might not have a job when I returned. My boyfriend, the glassblower, told me I was insane to leave now when we’d just begun to talk about moving in together. It was no use trying to illuminate anyone about the perverse pull home had over me, so I blew them off.

The following week I picked up a peppy Zipcar I named a Snot, which my mother had paid for, and headed up the Henry Hudson Parkway. It was dusk by the time I meandered through the quiet curvy streets of Brookline, Mass. Trees swollen with leaves stood guard over the legendary black and white Brookline street signs, their puffy green florettes shielding bleached brick houses and Queen Ann Victorians and colonials in white-washed colors trimmed with black shutters. I passed a red, white and blue mailbox, then a walled-in garden. A walkway dignified with stepping stones. A mural painted on a double garage door, each house so individual, so clearly defined, it could tell me the story of who lived inside.

Like Cheever and Yates and Updike and Perotta and Chang Rae Lee, I’d decided that writing a suburban tale would be my niche. I could be a lady who wore sunglasses all year long in a mid-century modern bungalow, or an eight-year-old child from Braintree who’d mastered fifteen languages, or some tech mogul in a multi-terraced house whose start-up had failed. I was good at it. While earning my BA in creative writing, I’d published two short stories, one in a literary mag, the other in an online journal. Both stories were about the New England suburbs though they were not about myself or my fam.

I pulled up to the curb, turned off the engine and sat lurking in the car. In the grey-violet light, it looked worse than I remembered. The sloping front yard was mostly hidden in overgrown or dead bushes and the lawn was patchy with brown grass and weeds, flecked with dandelions. Shingles were missing from the siding, the tan paint faded and cracked, dormer windows in the attic boarded up. And though it had been a long time since I’d come home, I knew, the way you know immediately when the skin of a piece of fruit is badly bruised, the outside was a key to the inside.

I gulped down the last drop of bottled water, hooked my laptop bag over my shoulder and lugged my duffel up the broken cement walkway. I didn’t want to belong to this or them. Yet here I was. My key still worked but I had to kick open the front door which was bent at the frame. My father was slumped over the piano, his back to me, playing a complicated jazz riff. Compulsively, I surveyed the peeling yellow walls, the pilled couch, the crooked book shelves. Two spindles of bamboo shot out of the wicker coffee table. Knee-high piles of books were strewn on the floor, alongside cartons of manila envelopes and newspaper clippings and whatever else. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe it was a disease.

My father, Robert Matthew Kaminsky, is a full professor at Boston College. Standing 6’3, with an egg-shaped belly, a deadly white complexion, bushy eyebrows and longish grey hair, he looks exactly like the mad scientist he is. He’s written scores of research papers on medical microbiology, with a specialty in how marine phytoplankton is being used to treat chronic illness. He speaks fluent French and Yiddish and loves to tinker with broken appliances and rusty machinery.

“Dad, I’m home,” I said.

He turned. I was surprised to see how fragile and thin he looked, less surprised by his dirty t-shirt.

“Good to see you, ma minette.” ‘My pussycat’ the nickname he’d chosen for me when I’d learned to crawl. “I wasn’t expecting you for another few hours. You should have called or texted.”

“Sorry, I lost track of time. The house. It.. It. What happened?”

He slid out from the piano bench and stood, looming over me. “Not even a proper hello and you’re starting in with me?”

“It, I..”

“Come here and give your old man a hug.”

He took me into his arms. There it was – that terrible ache I’d always felt from his long, tight desperate hugs. Guilt, love, rage, forgiveness. Impossible to tell.

“Much better,” said my father, releasing me.

“Where’s Mom?”

“On an observing run at Kitt Peak on the four-meter telescope. Her flight lands tonight.”

“Are you okay?”

He sighed. “Your mother is a contradiction. Although she can imagine how light propagates in space, after all this time she still doesn’t get me.”

“Is there any way you can talk her into staying? I mean, you love each other, right?”

“Love is a virus, ma minette. In Pammy’s case, the symptoms have apparently become poisonous. She may be leaving me, but I’m certainly not leaving her.”

My parent’s relationship was a mystery. Despite their constant warring, they’d always been loyal to each other, seemingly above and beyond their allegiance to me and Oliver, my much younger brother, who was away at Andover.

“If you could, you know,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t know. What?” He sounded both wounded and angry.

“Never mind,” I said not wanting to trod that slippery path.

My father checked his mechanical watch. “Go put your things in your old room and I’ll start dinner. I found this wonderful recipe for stew.”

So I hiked up the steps, sidestepping cartons of old magazines and an ancient printer. On the landing a pair of spaceman headphones I’d used for speech therapy was hooked over the banister. I felt myself blush. I’d had a severe lisp right up through middle school. I set my duffel in the hallway, pulled off my hoodie and maneuvered around a monstrous bookcase that had once been in my father’s study.

I eyed myself in the streaky mirror in the bathroom. a short, pudgy woman in a black tank and cargo shorts with star tattoos trailing around my left ear down my neck along the top of my shoulder, and starting just below my right ear, in letters the size of pinkie fingernails, the Vonnegut quote: Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, which makes me smile every time I look at it.

After washing up, I dug into my duffel for a bottle of Australian wine the glassblower had given me. Before leaving New York, I’d confessed I wasn’t ready to move in with him. We’d argued about who was making more money (me) and whose craft was more impressive (me again). He’d told me my writing was unformed. Not as unformed as your lumpy vases, I yelled. All the wine in the world couldn’t make up for the insults, leaving hurt lodged in our hearts right next to the love.

In the dining room, more dusty cartons of books lined the bay windows, the table littered with pens, pencils, melted candles, a little wicker basket overflowing with office supplies, crusty spices, a box of chocolates, and a jumble of yellowed mail.

“Here, come sit,” said my father, bringing out a couple of plates and a pot of stew.

I moved everything aside to burrow out a place.

“Do you have a corkscrew?” I asked holding up the wine bottle.

“Of course I do.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“I’m getting a negative vibe from that question.” He left, reappearing moments later and handed me a corkscrew.

“Not that way,” he said as I tried to figure out how to work the damn thing.

FU, I thought, grabbing my phone, finding a matching photo of the corkscrew (who know there were hundreds of complex corkscrews), then watching a 30-second YouTube to put it together and uncorking the wine. “Voila!”

“Bien joue,” exclaimed my father. I smiled with uncertainty.

He ladled out some stew and poured us both a full glass of wine. “Tell me about graduation. I’m sorry we couldn’t make it to New York. We wanted to. But your mother was giving a paper at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin.”

After a graduation ceremony with 8,000 classmates I’d gone back to my dorm, vaped some Indica Strain marijuana (strong, fruity and sweet aromas to provide an uplifting, euphoric sensation) and still in my purple gown and mortarboard, wandered through the cavernous NYU bookstore, feeling like one of Wendy’s Lost Boys, picking out books, putting them back, at last unable to resist buying one new and one old (November Storm and Tenth of December). I’d worn the purple gown for three straight days, had sold my last hookah wearing it.

“Graduation was fine,” I said. I stood up to get the bread and again to get the butter. We passed the butter back and forth over a chipped mug filled with packets of duck sauce, hot mustard and soy.

“Did you hear about this young woman, Reality Winner?”

“Who?”

“That air force vet charged with leaking classified info.”

“Reality Winner, no kidding? That is a mad cool name,” I said, obsessed with names for my characters.

“In any case,” my father said dismissively, “her arrest was completely unwarranted. If the NSA document she stole alleged that Russian government hackers targeted 122 local election officials right before the election, we are entitled to know. Don’t get me started,” he said but he’d already started. “Remember 9/11, ma minette?” (I was five). Strangers, anyone you met in Pioneer Supermarket would give you a sad, complicit nod, but now nothing that greedy lying cocksucker does is shocking because everything is. Forgive my bad language.”

 I gulped down my wine and poured myself a second glass.

“Yep, it’s a lot to take in,” I said, peering up at a 2003 New Year’s decoration strung across the dining room entrance.

 I was thirteen before I noticed my house was different. When Amy, my best friend in 7th grade came over with Tom and Stewie, her boyfriend, Stewie, called the place a fucking pigsty and my eyes popped open. (It had been more humiliating than Tommy slipping his hand up my shirt and wedging it underneath my padded bra.)

It’s a sickness, my mother told me as she wiped away my tears. Like alcoholism. Tell your friends to pretend they’re camping. But I hadn’t told them. I just didn’t bring them around after that. It wasn’t only the shocking awareness that my home was different. I suddenly saw the ugly complications of the whole world more vividly. And it became harder to love my parents.

The sadness was like a tangy stew bloating my stomach. I knew not to start but started in anyway “You know, I could help you,” I said softly.

“With what?”

“Fixing things up a little.”

“I’m not interested in fixing things up right now.”

“How come?”

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business but since you asked, I don’t have time. I’m busy. There are only so many hours in the day.”

I fortified myself with another gulp of wine. “Dad, won’t you feel better if things are organized? We could get rid of junk together and throw stuff out.”

“You want to throw out MY STUFF! What are you? Insane? ‘My stuff’ ISN’T junk. I’m not a hoarder. I’m not inept and I’m not crazy.” My father emptied the wine bottle into his glass. “You’re a chip off the old block, just like your mother, aren’t you?”

“I was trying to offer my help. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“You’re not sorry. You’re not sorry at all.”

The meat turned to rubber in my mouth. I struggled to swallow it.

“Excuse me.” I stood with my plate in my hands.

“You don’t have to do that. Just leave it on the table.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Leave it, I said.”

I trudged up the steps, walked into my room at the end of the dim hallway, hearing echoes of my mother. Not the words but the angry inflections I remembered hearing in my diluted sleep. Nothing had changed. My clothes were still scattered on the floor, my narrow childhood bed still unmade, the scuffed white furniture littered with knickknacks. Edges of Matchbox 20, Pink, and Foo Fighters posters peeling. I plunked down on my bed and reached for my laptop.

In the opened closet where I used to try and bury my mind, a thick shiny loose-leaf book caught my eye. My brother’s quarter collection. It had been my father’s. I’d thought at the time it was a dumb Christmas present but then I’d found Wisconsin and both Oliver and I were over the moon. I wished I could text him but he was fourteen and didn’t have a phone. I got up and flipped through the hard plastic pages, dumped my change purse to check for the missing quarters: Connecticut, Shenandoah and North Dakota, all dupes. I felt delirious from too much wine, angry and disoriented from arguing with my father. I meant to start writing but flopped down on my bed and fell asleep.

Much later there was a knock on the door. “Zozo, are you awake?” said my mother, flipping on the light.

“Mom?” I sat up in my bed.

The Second Brilliant Parent. My mother, Pamela Sullivan, is an astrophysicist, a leading expert in the field of massive star formation in giant molecular clouds. But beneath her dazzling theories and drive to succeed, my mother is a social misfit, aloof, self-centered and a severe yenta.

She shuffled towards me, looking the same as always, her grey hair in a short sloppy braid, her eyes as dark as space. An ill-fitting suit hugged her pear shaped body.

I rolled to the wall to make room for her to sit.

 “We have a lot to do. I’ve planned it all out. We can work for a few hours each morning and then you can write your Great American Novel.”

“Short stories. Are you sure about this?” I said.

“I’ll admit it’s a challenge. I’ve been mulling this over for years. I’m 51, more than half my life is over. Three days, four, five tops and then you go back to your novel.”

“Short stories,” I said, baring my teeth.

“Of course darling, but if you want to make a name for yourself that isn’t the way.”

 “We’ll talk more in the morning,” she added cheerily and kissed me on the forehead.

I was wide awake now. I opened my laptop and began to type.

The tech mogul sat on his third floor balcony with his gin and tonic. He lit his pipe, and he puffed and he puffed and he. Does anyone still smoke a pipe I wondered. What if the tech mogul stalked the woman with the sunglasses because of her lovely, scandalous body? What if he fell in love with her and didn’t care that she never took off her sunglasses even when they made love and eventually talked her into marriage? Suddenly my thoughts were textured and burning so bright I couldn’t stop writing.I imagined a big backyard wedding with Chinese lanterns where the wait staff all wore white and walked around the garden festooned with purple hydrangeas the size of cantaloupes, holding trays of Crystal. During the ceremony the woman in sunglasses slowly lifted them, uncovering her eyes the way a bride uncovers her face by lifting her veil and he saw she was missing an eye. Would he still love and adore her? Be blind to her blindness? I rubbed my eyes with my fists and the trance lifted. I needed to write something bigger and bolder than Boy Meets Girl. This was shit, anyway.

At 7 AM, I trotted downstairs and hunted for the Mister Coffee. The sink was piled with dirty dishes and greasy plastic take-out containers, the counter overflowing with more dishes. I was too repulsed to keep looking. Back upstairs, I showered and put on a pair of jeans. I knocked on the master bedroom, peeked in. Empty. Then I poked my head in Oliver’s room and there was my mother in her granny nightgown, jabbing away on her laptop.

“Darling, why don’t you run out and get us some coffee while I shower and we can get started as soon as you’re back.”

“Mom, this is crazy.”

“Do you know what’s crazy? All the weekends I’ve spent trying to put things away, moving them from one place to another. There comes a point,” said my mother. “Now please,” she hissed.

“Okay, I’m going.”

“Your father likes two Sweet ‘n Lows,” she called out.

My father wandered down the hallway with only his striped pajama pants hanging loosely off his frame. Now that I looked more closely I saw his sagging cheeks, lips thinned out, green eyes as murky as a pond.

 “I’ve been researching. Come, take a look,” he said.

A dank odor wafted from the study when the door opened. In the corner was a kiddie pool where he was growing unicellular algae. On his desk next to his microscope, a coffee maker stained brown and next to that a row of plastic containers, each the size of a bread basket. In one there were large test tubes, in another small ones and in the third, glass slides. “Look!” he said, pointing at the containers. “You’ve got to stay with one small area for 15 minutes a day. Every day.”

“That’s terrific,” I said though his pronouncement was upsetting for some reason. He must have sensed me trying to be kind because he kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m going out for coffee. Do you want anything?” I asked.

“Your mother likes those hard rolls.”

The deal was if I packed enough to pacify Mom in the morning, I could write in the afternoon. We started in the living room while my father banged out a Chopin prelude on the piano. Using a box cutter, my mother slit open a couple of cartons.

“So tell me Zo-Zo, why aren’t you writing the Great American Novel?”

“I love short stories, is why.” From Irwin Shaw to Lorrie Moore. It seemed I was also a poet.

“Have you given any thought to graduate school? You know Robert and I were in academia for a total of 24 years. Isn’t that right, Robert?” said my mother loudly.

“26,” said my father and ran his thumbnail up the entire keyboard.

“24,” mouthed my mother. “By the time I was your age, I’d written my thesis.

“I’m still in the early stages of my writing career,” I replied.

It was stupid and boring, sifting through my mother’s research, hearing about this theory of space or that theory of light. Admittedly, I simply tuned out. I came across a carton filled with old poems and drawings, school photos and handmade cards, mixed up with Oliver’s finger paintings.

“Does Oliver know?”

“There’s no point in upsetting him while he’s in summer school studying Shakespeare. He’s taken up fencing and I hear he’s quite the swordsman. We’ll get together in late August and have a family reunion. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

I looked up at my Dad’s rounded shoulders. “Would Dad go for that after you’ve left him?” I asked quietly.

“He would do anything for you,” said my mother abruptly and that shut me up. Silently, I picked through about a dozen poems I wrote when I was eight or nine, all mounted on construction paper and framed with glitter or macaroni, whimsical and far-fetched. I had no memory of writing them, only a distant humming quarrel in the background.

White is a lily, a diamond a dove.
White is a marshmallow and the first sign of love.
Frosting, pudding, vanilla ice cream.
White is the best parts of your dream.

 “The Snow Kept Falling” by Zoe Sullivan Kaminsky.

It was snowing. Everybody hoped it would stop. And it never did. It kept snowing and snowing and snowing and snowing.

“Even then, I didn’t know how to end a story,” I said but nobody was listening.

Outside, the electric green foliage glistened in the sunlight. Carol and Sherry Greenstein, the neighbors across the road in the yellow colonial with Grecian columns, were weeding and mulching, looked up and four heavy gloved hands waved at me. I waved back. My god, how they must despise us, having to look at the house every day and on such a warm and cheerful day, a perfect day, in a perfect neighborhood. A Perfect Day for a Bananafish, the epic saga of the Sullivan-Kaminsky family with its enigmatic ending. I ducked into the Snot.

The town library was an austere, mammoth three-story brick building with concrete columns and cornices. Inside, it was airy and bright. Was clutterless a word? Before settling down I roved up and down the aisles past Anthropology, History, Psychology, Law, Philosophy, Religion and Education. The Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Oceanography, Engineering and Medicine. My mother had taken me to this library when I was little, holding Oliver in a sling. We would hang out together in the YA section and she would pull out books packed with facts that piled up on each other and got so weighty I could feel them topple over. This was where I’d learned that every star was a galaxy all its own and there were billions of galaxies. Later when my mother would leave me alone I could float away on whatever stories I chose. Peter and the Starcatcher, The Fault in our Stars, Number the Stars.

I found an empty table and opened my laptop.

What if the tech mogul and the woman with one eye gave birth to a child prodigy and the little girl was revolted by her mother’s deformity and resentful of her father’s wealth. What if the girl’s parents kept missing her spelling bees? A child. A foreigner. A freak. Alone. I did not want to write a namby-pamby Coming of Age story. Everyone in my Intermediate Fiction Workshop had written one. I wanted to write a story that would elevate people and save them from their darkest thoughts, at least for the time they were reading it.

Perhaps the family had fled from Djibouti or Burkina Faso and gotten asylum in Brookline. Could a 21 year-old white girl inhabit the minds of a tortured African family?

Boy Meets Girl. Coming of Age. Stranger Walks into a Room. I’d burned through all the possibilities. Three false starts and all of them shit. I could no longer find my voice. So I stayed in the library until closing plowing through Ploughshares and then in the Busy Bee Restaurant, I sat in a booth and read Booth and then later in Mad Murphy’s Pub, the Missouri Review. And every short story I read was sharp and witty or quiet and heartbreaking. Every one contained a new world!

The next morning my mother gave me a shoebox full of pens, highlighters and markers and asked me to go through them and get rid of anything broken or dried out and I went to work on them. Meanwhile, my father was in the dining room separating packets of duck sauce, mustard and soy sauce. I saw that he’d managed to clear out a circle on the table the size of a laundry basket. Maybe he was getting better. When it came to experimenting, he was a perfectionist.

“What do you think?” I said holding up the piece of paper filled with colorful doodles from all the pens and highlighters.

“A regular Willem de Kooning,” my mother said dismissively and went back to her papers. My father walked over to the pile of dried out markers and pens, bent down and picked out a rusted drafting pencil.

“How dare you throw this out!” he boomed.

I lurched back. “Dad, it doesn’t work.”

“I taught your brother how to spin that pencil.”

“Oh for godsakes,” said my mother. “It’s obviously broken.”

“You want to take your crap, go ahead, but you have no right to mine!”

“Come Zoe, let’s go upstairs. I can’t concentrate around your father.”

“Go! Get the fuck out of here.”

“Robert!” reprimanded my mother.

“Zoe’s heard that word before, haven’t you? My college students say it all the time.”

“Oh Robert, grow the F up,” said my mother.

On a late afternoon of the fifth day, I kicked open the door and found my mother’s cartons flanked on either side of the door, looking like the entrance to a stronghold. No one was home. My mother had sent me a text saying she was out playing bridge. I had no idea where my father was. Having just come from the library and in no mood to write or be trapped in the house, I went out to the back. It was twilight. Above me, the sky was a striated pink, below me, the deck was splintered, whole boards rotted away. In the yard, Oliver’s swing set had rusted next to some old machinery and a set of truck batteries. The swings glided in the breeze in time with the tree frogs.

Amy answered my text immediately. “Yes, come over now!” with a row of smiley emoticons and clown faces.

Amy Featherbed’s house, a nine-room mansion with eight bathrooms, was spotless. Every room a shade of white, like my fourth grade poetry.

White is the whisper of clouds floating by and white are the snowflakes
      that dance in the in the sky.
The absence of all color is white. It’s fresh, it’s pure, it feels just right.
White is a cherry bloom as the wind makes it fly. Turn off the light
      and then white will die.

In the hallway, photos of Amy and her brothers hung in frosted silver frames. I followed her through the kitchen with its shiny ceramic bowls of fruit, past the fluffy toy Pomeranian sleeping in her pink bed perched on an oversized striped couch.

“Come upstairs,” said Amy prancing up the winding staircase. “God what has it been, three, four years?” In college, she’d zeroed in on political science at Georgetown while ferociously campaigning for Hillary. She was home studying for the LSAT’s. “Perfect timing. Logic Games is a bitch,” she said, opening the door to her room. “So what brings you to the homestead?”

I sat down next to her on the lacy duvet. “My mom’s moving out and she wants my help packing.”

“Oh,” said Amy. “Sorry to hear. Is the house still a mess?”

I blew out a breath. “You could say that.” I explained how my father had been making little piles to sort things out. “But it makes him so out of sorts. People don’t change, do they?”

“Love changes people,” said Amy brightly and I remembered why we’d drifted apart. Amy was one of those people with boundless energy and confidence, perennially upbeat. Despite working around the clock for Hillary, commandeering a team of volunteers, getting doors slammed in her face from Iowa to Nashua, then losing, she was determined to change the world. In high school, she’d cut her hair for Locks of Love and fed the homeless in Brockton while I holed up in the library reading about fictional heroes. Amy’s the real thing. She’ll be a mayor or senator someday.

“My cousin has a prescription for medical marijuana,” said Amy and took out a spliff rolled as artfully as any cigarette, tapered at the end with a little filter. “The old bank building on Mercer is now a huge pot store with cubes and flowers. You go from one counter to another, like a wine tasting.” The more Amy talked about getting high, the less I wanted to do it. I always felt guilty afterward, knowing I could have spent my time writing. Then again, everything I’d written was shit.

 “I read your story online,” said Amy, flicking her lighter. “The couple in the eight-room mansion could have been my parents. They went to the same schools, Cornell, Tufts, MIT. I loved when the dad says and I quote,” she said laughing, “‘My fifteen year old son is now walking around with a vagina!’ Imagine if that was one of my brothers? Peter is head counselor at a jock camp and Ben is at Habitat for Humanity, roofing.”

For an hour we toked and scrolled through Instagram. Amy showed me her pins on Pinterest and her OKC profile. I showed her photos of molten glass and explained how heavy it was. We snapchatted with Tom and Stewie, got caught up on everyone’s latest whereabouts. It was fun until it wasn’t.

I waved her hand away. “If I smoke anymore I could start hallucinating.”

Her hand stayed put. I sighed. “Okay, one for the road and then I’ve got to blow this pop stand.”

I staggered home. The streets were radiant black under the streetlights. No people anywhere. A rabbit or possum darted out at me and ran into someone’s yard. It felt ominous. Paranoia I told myself and starting naming books I’d loved with people in the title to keep calm: Hamlet, Emma, Madame Bovary, Harry Potter, Ann Karenin, Harriet the Spy, Mrs. Dalloway. Sarah’s Key, Lolita, Life of Pi.

I kicked open the door and my mouth gaped open. I froze. A madman was hacking away at the wicker coffee table with an axe. It was my father, in his pajamas and sneakers. “Dad!” I shrieked. “What are you doing? Stop!”

 But he wouldn’t stop. The axe was coming down hard. Bamboo splinters flying everywhere. “You want this place cleaned up! I’ll clean it up!” The table collapsed into a V, my father threw down the axe and I screamed again. He traipsed into the dining room, yanked down the Happy New Year 2003 decoration, then using his forearm, swept everything off the table, first one side, then the other. Dishes and mugs and books clattered to the floor. Papers went flying. He was having a nervous breakdown. My heart was in my throat. His pajama top was soaked in sweat. He started flinging old Nature magazines across the room. The magazines flew open and spread across the floor like breaking waves. The front door banged opened. The police. A raid! I thought. We’re going to be arrested. They would think my father was an intruder. I smelled like a pot store. I didn’t have a prescription. We’d be locked up for sure.

But it wasn’t the police. It was my mother. “Robert,” she said softly. She went to him and held out her arms. He fell into her embrace and began to heave, sobbing into the darkness of her shoulder. I thought I heard her weeping as well. They stayed wrapped in each other’s arms, swaying as if they were a single shape, bobbing in an ocean of debris. I was relieved, of course, but jealous. Left out. Lonely. My mother coaxed my father to the couch. They sank down together and my father laid his head on her lap. “Sit with us, darling,” said my mother, so I did.

I woke up stiff from sleeping on the couch. The wicker table was gone and the living room floor was bare. My parents shuffled down the staircase in monogrammed bathrobes, smelling of soap.

“Breakfast, anyone?” said my mother, already setting out orange juice and a package of croissants. My mouth tasted of cardboard so I lunged for the juice.

“It needs to be shaken,” said my mother.

“We were quite shook up enough last night, don’t you think?” said my father.

“Oh honey, that was a joke,” he said to my mother.

“A bad joke,’ said my mother with a wry smile.

When my father reached over to brush a crumb off my shirt, I teared up.

“It’s time for you to go write your short stories and then on to The Great American Novel,” said my mother.

“Never quit trying, ma minette,” said my father.

“Your father has agreed to go to Ethan Allen to buy a new coffee table,” said my mother.

I packed up my belongings that afternoon and shoved the half drafts of Backyard Wedding in the back of a dresser drawer. On the way down the steps I picked up the spaceman headphones to give to the glassblower. I’d never told him about the lisp. There was quite a lot I needed to tell him. My mother dutifully held my father’s hand and the three of us went outside. Across the street Sherry Greenstein was unspooling a hose.

“Cute little Dart,” said my father, patting the top of the car. He knew so many things! Then he gave me one of his bear hugs. “Text us when you arrive,” said my mother and she hugged me too. I still felt dazed, too numb to say much of anything except goodbye.

 Somewhere around Hartford, a story took shape. A story about a house in Brookline, Mass., unlike any other. Parts would be awful (if I was going to be honest. I would admit how badly it hurt that they’d missed my graduation) and parts would beautiful (knowing my parents might find a way back to each other). The ending would be ambiguous.

In New York City leaves fell like rain. It was suddenly sweater weather. Graffiti had spread and cranes towered elbow to elbow. The smoke shop was now a Subway. I landed a job on Park Avenue as an au pair to a rambunctious three-year old boy whose vocab in both German and English was astonishing. My only reference came from Oliver, my little brother, who wrote a precious letter about what a wonderful babysitter I’d been. Also, the man who hired me happened to be my English professor. The glassblower and I moved into a walk-up studio apartment on York Avenue, hauling cartons of lopsided wineglasses, novels and literary journals. Five months later and five years before our baby boy, Tobias, was born, “Cleaning House” was published. Occasionally, I still feel worried or embarrassed by my upbringing.