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yell at me now. He looks old and tired. He looks disappointed. I think about this from his perspective, and it doesn’t look good. If he would get nice and pissed, then I could be defensive. This weariness just leaves me feeling guilty.
    What am I leaving college for? What better options do I see for myself? Good questions. Ones I don’t have answers to. I consider telling him about my visit. But I can’t find the words. Tell my father—the learned rabbi, the tenured professor—that I have been given a mission by an archangel, only to fail? There are lots of things I regret, but not telling my dad about meeting Raphael isn’t one of them.
    My mother cries when I tell her. Her small house in the country is the antithesis of my father’s modular Swedish Modern city apartment. We sit at the kitchen table with mugs of tea.
    I’m shocked when I see her eyes well with tears.
    “No, Mom, don’t,” I say, grabbing for the hand not holding the tea. “Please don’t.” Answering tears well up in my own eyes.
    When she sees that, she smiles, and soon both of us give a watery chuckle. I have always cried when others cry. I can’t help it. She pats my hand and then grabs both of us a tissue. I blow my nose and bury my face in my mug of tea, avoiding my warped reflection.
    “I’ll pray for you,” she says. “To help you find your way. For clarity.”
    “Thank you.”
    She doesn’t ask many questions. But then, she never has. She always is receptive to talks, confessions, but she doesn’t probe. After that first show of emotion, she’s much calmer and doesn’t seem as devastated as my father, though clearly she’s confused. I don’t tell her about Raphael either, though as a former nun I think she would have taken the news better thanmy father would have. But it doesn’t seem right to tell one parent and not the other. Ever since the divorce, I try hard to be fair. To keep things balanced.
    In the end, we reach an agreement. My parents won’t try to stop me from this oddly destructive (from their point of view) hiatus from college. In return for this benevolence, I’m to call in once a week and report where I am and what my plans are for the upcoming week.
    This is a very decent agreement, but I feel slightly sick from my deception. I never say I have a plan, but I don’t dissuade them from their assumption that I must have something in mind.
    After I tell my mother my big news, I call Mo. I start to talk but soon choke up.
    “What’s wrong?” he asks. I hear the intense concern in his voice. Until I started crying, he was probably e-mailing or watching a game. Mo tends to multitask. But now I can feel him turning away from everything except the sound of my voice. “Miriam, what’s wrong?”
    I want to tell him. It’s like a weight in my mouth, in the back of my throat, the words choking me. “I can’t tell you on the phone,” I manage to say. My chin is wobbling from the effort to hold back.
    “So come see me.” He knows I’m at Mom’s, which means I’m ninety minutes away by train. I hear rapid clicking as he checks train schedules online. “There’s an Amtrak that leaves in an hour. Get your ass on it.”
    The train station closest to Tech is a lovely pale graybuilding from the early 1900s, with all the beauty that architects seemed to invest in their work back then. Rising two and a half stories, its façade has weathered gently, radiating calm stability. Sea-green stained-glass windows glow like planets in the evening. But the area of town the station is in hasn’t aged as well. An interstate overpass looms above the parking lot, so everything is in perpetual gloom and clatter, while the surrounding empty lots are enclosed in chain-link fences, as if to prevent shards of glass, crushed paper sacks and other urban flotsam from escaping. I step off the train and see Mo leaning against a pillar, waiting for me. When I see him—the crooked smile, that wiry energy—I can’t hold back any