he decided, with the clean efficiency of a man who travels light, that a wife and infant twins were weight he no longer wanted to carry. He didn’t fight for custody. He didn’t ask for visitation, not really. He sent a check for a while, erratically, and then those thinned out too, and then he built a whole new family and a whole new life in which, I came to understand, my sons simply did not feature. The last photo he had of them was from their christening because he never took another. He never came to another thing.
So I raised them. Alone, on a single income, through every ordinary heroic thing single parents do and no one sees. The croup night in the ER when I was so tired I cried in the parking lot. The science fairs I stayed up helping with. The birthdays, the concerts, the
