The summer of 1989, shortly after my second husband and I married, we buckled my two daughters, who were seven and three, into the rear seat of a used car purchased for cash. We told no one where we were going. We meant to disappear.
I spent my morning at the Dairy Queen with the loafers and the cattlemen who get their feeding done before first light. It was a sparse crowd—we didn’t know yet what the wind was going to do.
For the first time in our lives our mother’s house on Hillendale Drive is dirty. She’s been on a walker for years and can’t bend at the hip but still won’t allow my sisters and me to bring someone in. We do it anyway.
Sitting on a cot in the emergency room, I filled out paperwork certifying myself as the responsible party for my own medical care—signed it without looking, anchoring myself to this debt, a stone dropped in the middle of a stream.
