I remembered how after our scrubs, my mother suggested we stock up on groceries at H Mart, so that she could marinate some short rib at my house and I could have a taste of home after she left. How I held my breath as she entered my dilapidated home, waiting for her to pick it apart in all its squalor or serve up some of the same acerbic wisdom she proffered when I’d gotten fired, but instead, she made her way to the kitchen without a word of critique, squeezing past the collection of bikes propped against the wall without faltering. She even generously ignored the gaping hole in the back wall, to which our landlord had taken a hammer in a resourceful effort to warm the frozen pipes, revealing in the process the utter lack of fluffy pink insulation.

She didn’t comment on how nothing in our kitchen cabinets matched, that our dishware was made up of thrift store finds and spare parts from my roommates’ parents’ houses. She found the things she’d gifted me over the years—the orange LocknLock storage containers, the Calphalon pans—then pushed up her sleeves and spread the meat she’d bought from H Mart out on a cutting board and began to tenderize it with a mallet. I kept waiting for her to say something under her breath. I knew she saw all the things I did and more, her sharp eye tearing apart the used furniture and undusted corners and the chipped, mismatched plates in the same way she used to tear apart my weight and complexion and posture.

She had spent my whole life trying to protect me from living this way, but now she just moved about the kitchen with a smile, chopping green onions, pouring 7Up and soy sauce into a mixing bowl, tasting it with her finger, seemingly unbothered by the cockroach traps that lined the counters and the smudged fingerprints on the fridge, intent only on leaving a taste of home behind.

My mother had either finally given up, conceding in her efforts to try to shape me into something I didn’t want to be, or she had moved on to subtler tactics, realizing it was unlikely that I’d last another year in this mess before I discovered she’d been right all along. Or maybe the three thousand miles between us had made it so she was just happy to be with me. Or maybe she’d finally accepted that I’d forged my own path and found someone who loved me wholly, and believed at last that I would end up all right.

* * *

—

PETER DROVE UP to New York anyway. He closed the restaurant at two and got to Greg’s by four in the morning. Still sticky from blood-orange margaritas, refritos caked onto his jeans, he squeezed next to me on the couch and lay still as I cried into his gray college T-shirt, finally able to release the billow of emotions I’d suppressed all day, grateful he hadn’t listened when I told him not to bother. He didn’t tell me until much later that my parents had called him first. That he had known she was sick before me, that he had promised them that he would be there when I found out. That he would be there through it all.

5

Where’s the Wine?

“Why won’t you include me?” I whined into my cell phone as if I were tattling on an older child for neglecting me. As if I hadn’t been invited to a birthday party.

“You have to live your life,” my mother said. “You’re twenty-five. It’s an important year. Your dad and I can handle this together.”

More news had come and none of it was good. Dr. Lee, an oncologist in Eugene, had diagnosed her with stage IV pancreatic cancer. There was a 3 percent chance of survival without surgery. With surgery, it would take months to recover, and even then, there was only a 20 percent chance of emerging cancer-free. My father was fighting for an appointment at MD Anderson in Houston for a second opinion. Over the phone my mom pronounced it “pancry-arty” cancer and “Andy Anderson,” which led me to believe our only hope lay in the hands of some kind of Toy Story character.

“I want to be there,” I insisted.

“Mom’s afraid you two will fight if you come,” my father admitted later. “She knows she has to put all her focus into getting better.”

I assumed the seven years I’d lived away from home had healed the wounds between us, that the strain built up in my teenage years had been forgotten. My mother had found ample space in the three thousand miles between Eugene and Philadelphia to relax her authority, and for my part, free to explore my creative impulses without constant critique, I came to appreciate all the labors she performed, their ends made apparent only in her absence. Now we were closer than ever, but my father’s admission revealed there were memories of which my mother could not let go.

* * *

—

FROM DAY ONE, I’m told, nothing about me was easy. By the time I was three, Nami Emo had dubbed me the “Famous Bad Girl.” Running into things headfirst was my specialty. Wooden swings, door frames, chair legs, metal bleachers on the Fourth of July. I still have a dent in the center of my skull from the first time I ran headfirst into the corner of our glass-top kitchen table. If there was a kid at the party who was crying, it was guaranteed to be me.

For many years, I suspected my parents might have been exaggerating or that they were ill prepared for the realities of a child’s temperament, but I have slowly come to accept, based on the unanimous recollection of multiple relatives, that I was a pretty rotten kid.

But the worst was yet to come, the tense years to which I knew my father was referring. By the second semester of eleventh grade, what could have passed up to that point for simple teenage angst had begun to escalate into a deeper depression. I had trouble sleeping and was tired all the time; I found it hard to muster the will to do much of anything. My grades had started falling and my mother and I were constantly at odds.

“You get it from my side, unfortunately,” my father told me one morning over breakfast. “Bet you can’t sleep either.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, slurping a bowl of cereal and reading the newspaper. I was sixteen and recovering from another blowout with my mother.

“Too much going on here,” he said. He tapped on his temple without looking up and turned to the sports section.

My father was a recovered addict and had endured an adolescence far more troubled than my own. When he was nineteen, residing semi-permanently under the boardwalk in Asbury Park, he was caught selling methamphetamine to a police officer. He spent six weeks in jail before moving to a rehabilitation center in Camden County, where he became a guinea pig for a new psychotherapy treatment. He was made to wear a sign around his neck that read I’M A PEOPLE PLEASER and engaged in exercises in futility that would supposedly stimulate moral fiber. Every Saturday he dug a hole in the yard behind the institution, and every Sunday they made him fill it back up again. Any trouble I might be in seemed minor by comparison.

He attempted to console my mother, convince her it was a normal phase, something most teenagers ache in and out of, but she refused to accept it. I had always done well in school, and this shift coincided all too conveniently with the time to start applying to colleges. She saw my malaise as a luxury they’d paid for. My parents had given me too much and now I was full of self-pity.

She doubled down, morphing into a towering obelisk that shadowed my every move. She needled me over my weight, the width of my eyeliner, the state of my breakouts, and my lack of commitment to the toners and exfoliants she’d ordered for me from QVC. Everything I wore was an argument. I wasn’t allowed to shut my bedroom door. After school, when my friends would head to one another’s houses for weekday sleepovers, I was whisked away to extracurriculars, then stuck in the woods, left to grumble alone in my room with the door left open.

* * *

—

ONCE A WEEK I was allowed to sleep over at my friend Nicole’s apartment, my sole respite from my mother’s overbearing supervision. Nicole’s relationship with her mom was the complete opposite of mine. Colette gave Nicole freedom to make her own decisions, and they actually seemed to enjoy spending time together.