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sorry right now.”
    I ran outside and into the woods. I don’t remember ever apologizing to my mother, but Pop was back, girlfriend or not, and for a while things seemed to get back to normal, and there was less fighting than before. Each night when Pop came home from teaching, Mom would be cooking in the kitchen and they’d have cocktail hour, which meant none of us kids was allowed in there while they sipped Jim Beam and our father unwound and told Mom his day and she told him hers.
    Soon the hour would be over, and the six of us would sit at the rickety table in that small, hot kitchen and we’d eat. We lived in New England, but at suppertime our house smelled like any in South Louisiana: Mom fried chicken, or simmered smothered breakfast steak or cheap cuts of pork, all served up with rice and gravy and baking powder biscuits. On the side there’d be collard greens or sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions she’d put ice cubes on to keep crisp. She baked us hot tamale pies, and macaroni and cheese, or vegetable soup she’d cook for hours in a chicken stock, then serve in a hollowed-out crust of French bread, its top a steaming layer of melted cheddar. But while the food was wonderful, my mother and father hardly even looked at one another anymore and instead kept their attention on us, asking about school, about the tree fort Jeb and I were building out in the woods, about the Beatles album Suzanne listened to, the drawings Nicole did each afternoon. We rarely left the table hungry, but there was a hollowness in the air, a dark unspeakable stillness, one my father would soon drive into, and away.
     
    IT HAPPENED early on a Sunday in November. Pop was so much taller than the four of us, and we were following him down the porch stairs and along the path, Suzanne behind him in her cotton nightgown, then me and Jeb in our pajamas, Nicole last, her thick red hair and small face. We were eleven, ten, nine, and six. Ahead of us, there was the glint of frost on the gravel driveway and our car, the old Lancer, packed now with Pop’s things: his clothes, his books, his shaving kit. The house was surrounded by tall pines and it was too cold to smell them, the air so clear and bright. Inside the house Mom was crying as if her pain were physical, as if someone were holding her down and doing something bad to her.
    Daddy! Nicole ran past us over the gravel and she leapt and Pop turned, his eyes welling up, and he caught her, her arms around his neck, her face buried under his chin. I tried to ignore our mother’s cries coming from the house. When my father looked down at me over Nicole’s small shoulder, I stood as straight as I could and I hoped I looked strong.
    Pop kissed Nicole’s red hair. He lowered her to the gravel. His beard was thick and dark, his cheeks and throat shaved clean. He was wearing a sweatshirt and corduroy pants, and he glanced up at our house. There was only the sound of our mother’s cries, so maybe he would change his mind. Maybe he would stay.
    He looked down at us. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll go out to eat.”
    He hugged Suzanne, squeezed my shoulder. He tousled Jeb’s hair, then he was in his car driving down the hill through the pines, blue exhaust coughing out its pipe. Jeb scooped up a handful of gravel and ran down the hill after him, “You bum! You bum! You bum!” He threw it all at once, the small rocks scattering across the road and into the woods like shrapnel.
    Pop drove across the short bridge, then up a rise through more trees. Mom would need to be comforted now. Nicole too. There was food to think about. How to get it with no car. I tried to keep standing as straight as I could.
     
    SOMETIMES WHEN the husband leaves, his friends leave with him. That’s what happened to my mother; after Pop was gone, so too were his friends. And the parties. I don’t know how long it was before my mother was able to buy a second car or got her first job working as a nurse’s aide, or when