eleven days trying to find a way to say no again.
I wrote an email to my mother’s old address twice and deleted both.
And on the Thursday, Leo — who is ten and who notices everything — came and stood in the kitchen doorway and said: we don’t have to go if you don’t want.
Which is the exact sentence I have been saying to adults my entire life to get out of things.
He had learned it off me. At ten.
That is when I booked the time off work.
So we packed one bag and drove eight hours back to Ohio.
They had no idea we were coming.
Late that Saturday afternoon I stood on the same porch I had been put out of ten years earlier, with my son on the step behind me, and I knocked.
The door opened.
My father looked at me like he was
