“How could you?” she whispered. She held the baby, his son, asleep in her arms, swaddled in a pale blue blanket.

But how could he have known she would go into labor so early? Didn’t she see all he’d done to prepare? Didn’t she know he was not the deadbeat she seemed to want to make him into? He was about to say all of this to her, but the look in her eyes stopped him. It was not sadness, or hurt, but a brittle, impassive stare. The world had disappointed her once again, as she always expected it to, only this time he was the one who had done it.

The baby began to cry, a desperate wail that sucked the air out of Clive.

Sara turned away from him as she rocked the child. “Hush, Bryan. Hush, my sweet love.”

When Clive told me I was beautiful, my heart cracked. All my life I had waited for a boy to say that to me, and now one had, and it didn’t matter, because I could not let myself believe it. I had finally gotten what I wanted and it was no good because I was who I was and I always would be. Everything was like that, ruined just because it was me it all happened to.

Sara Lycott. So proper and well spoken, so devout at church, so obedient at school. How my friends would have recoiled if they saw who I became at home with my mum, how we yelled and yanked and scratched.

Behind its freshly painted exterior, our house was a wild place. We were not so much mother and daughter as two women suffocating together, breathing into one another until all the air in the house had been warmed by the insides of both of us. There was nothing in life we were not tired of.

Though we fought all the time, we only had a single argument, which we repeated over and over until I was insentient to it as stone. Our fight was like the walk home from school, marked by familiar signposts: the Scotts’s orange front door, the pothole shaped like a heart on Underhill Road. I think there was comfort in knowing we would only hurt each other in familiar ways. I think I hoped each time that the argument would finally take us somewhere new, out beyond the hating and loving and hating that was all I had ever known.

It went like this: I would sass, or leave a mess, or be a disappointment to my mum in some other way, and she would scold that I should be better, for I was the daughter of a government minister and I could not afford to forget it. I would shout back, call her hypocrite. “When was the last time you did clean we house?” I would say, and off we would go, shouting about all the ways the other had failed to live up to the kind of family we both pretended we were.

On the morning of the Grand Parade, we had found ourselves deep in the mud of this same fight once again. She had come into the parlor to find me scratching at my scalp. She grabbed my elbow.

“Stop that. Where are your manners?”

“‘You’re a minister’s daughter,’” I mimicked. I wrenched my arm free and went right back to sliding my fingernails beneath the irresistible dried skin on my scalp.

“Don’t you mock me.”

“And you’re a minister’s wife. Must be some other lady I saw in we house yesterday itching she pum pum.”

“It’s a good thing your father’s dead. How ashamed he would be to hear you speak this way to your mum!”

How many times had she said this to me? A dozen? A thousand? But this time the anger I felt was different, feral and hopeless, sharp as teeth.

“You never tell me again whose daughter I be!” I shouted. “The only person I see I’m the daughter of is you. A sket like everybody say!”

I screamed so loudly my throat would be raw later that day, when I told Clive Richardson he could walk me home. I held my mother’s gaze and sucked air through my teeth. I swear the whites of her eyes turned black.

Her hands fell to her sides. “You think I’m nothing but your mum,” she whispered. “But someday you’ll see.” Then she turned and walked slowly to her bedroom at the back of the house and pulled the stained curtain across the doorway.

Oh, what a fine actress, my mum, playing the victim of my cruelty. Where did I learn how to lash with words if not from her?

I changed into the shortest dress I owned. I snatched my purse and slammed the front door behind me. At the end of the parade, when Clive Richardson stumbled up to me and mumbled his invitation, it was like God or fate or whatever thing I lacked the time or proclivity to wonder about then was handing it to me, just giving it to me for free: a chance to take my life into my own hands and spoil it before it could disappoint me; to break my mum’s heart and free myself from our suffocating life together; to prove I was every bit my mother’s daughter. Though in the end, the cost would be more than I could have imagined.

THE SECRET CITY

IN MID-DECEMBER, a food deliveryman on a bicycle turned the corner by my apartment too sharply and mowed down pitiful Jefe mid-elimination. I was at the other end of the block when it happened, returning home from work. I did not see bike and pup collide, but I heard Jefe’s high-pitched yelp and witnessed the aftermath: The man in the NASCAR hat gathering Jefe in his arms like a baby. The deliveryman putting his hands up defensively and repeating, “Sorry,” in heavily accented English as the old man berated him in Spanish and passersby craned their heads to watch, sometimes pausing as if they might intervene before averting their gaze and hurrying along. The deliveryman backed slowly away and got on his bike (plastic bags of takeout still hanging from the handlebars). He rode quickly around the corner and out of sight.

The old man carried Jefe to the front stairs, sat on the lowest step, and rocked him. I’m not sure whether the dog was still alive or whether he’d already departed this mortal coil. As I approached them, I thought I ought to say something, but when I reached the steps it seemed that to intrude in their final moments together would be obscene, so instead I walked quietly past them up the stairs.

As I disappeared into the vestibule, I heard the man whisper, “Nos vemos pronto, viejito.”

When I was underground in my apartment, it occurred to me that now there was not a single soul in the building whose name I knew. So began winter.

An entire season had passed since I found Clive Richardson. I had been conversing with him for several weeks, and an ironic reversal had transpired. In the beginning, our proximity had terrified me. Now it was just the opposite. When I was away from him I became unnerved, agitated, itchy, feelings that festered until I was sitting across from him again, our trays of stew and beer before us. I’d catch myself prolonging our evenings despite being aware that he was ready to leave, because once he was out of sight the dread would set in all over again, and I would face the long night hours alone with it.