“She was going to go to Chicago with that boy, and she would have never come back.”

“Just like he did,” she said, pointing a trembling hand at me.

I felt a chill go through me.

I had only moved three miles away, to this one-bedroom apartment on the west side of Cleveland.

I had spent ten years working ten-hour shifts, my hands scarred from pulling copper wire through freezing basements, just to have this small place of my own.

“I didn’t leave,” I said, my voice sounding distant to my own ears.

“I bought this place.”

“I helped you pay your rent.”

“You paid because you felt guilty,” my mother said, turning her anger on me now.

“You got out, and you left us with everything.”

“I needed her here, Arthur,” she cried, turning back to my father.

“I couldn’t be alone in that house with just the bills and the silence.”

My father looked at her as if she were a stranger who had walked into my apartment.

He looked down at his own hands, the hands of a man who had worked forty years at the manufacturing plant until his back gave out.