When she died three weeks earlier, alone only in the technical sense because half the town had passed through that house in the final days with casseroles and flowers and offers of help, I sat in the back row at her funeral and listened to my father give a eulogy about family legacy in the smooth resonant voice he used when he wanted something from a room. People cried. He spoke beautifully. He always had. That was part of the danger. My mother dabbed at her eyes with a folded tissue. Hannah read a poem she found online and spoke the word resilience as if she herself had invented it. I stood beside the coffin afterward while people lined up to tell me what a force Dorothy had been, and every time someone said, “She loved you so much,” I had to bite down on the inside of my cheek not to cry in public.
I had not stayed long after the funeral. I couldn’t afford much unpaid time, and there were bills waiting for me in Denver and a one-bedroom apartment with a leaking faucet and a secondhand couch that, for all its sagging cushions, was mine because I had paid for it myself. That had been the shape of my adult life for ten years: everything modest, everything earned, everything built without asking permission from the man who used to announce that he was teaching me resilience when what he meant was that he preferred obedience.