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was a stunning redhead, the kind most men could only dream of. And while she was indeed a sight to behold, everything on the inside seemed to contradict what the outside was doing. There was something so broken about her, so incomplete. The short version: my mother was like window dressing draped over a cracked cinder block wall.
    From the start—and at their best—my parents never had the high-functioning or strong-loving marriage that I think was my father’s dream. Mom was skilled at projecting a facade of buoyant optimism, which along with her beauty made her an easy sell to men. But beneath the surface, she was a jumble of complexity. Unfortunately, by the time my father figured that out, it was too late.
    Whenever anything went wrong—she forgot to pay the gas bill three months running; she gave away my father’s heirloom casserole dish as a gift for a neighbor—Mom flashed a little charm, poured a nice glass of sweet tea, and pretended whatever it was had never happened. That would be my father’s cue to come swooping in and turn her fantasy into reality. He’d clean up the mess, make it go away, and then, presto change-o , that was that. This crazy, backward dance became our family blueprint, our baseline for normalcy, while our foundation progressively crumbled.
    The evidence of my mother’s pathology was both illustrative and endless. One day, while driving me home from school, she decided that applying lipstick was more important than watching the road. Seconds later, we hopped a curb and hit a trash can, which flew into a speedy roll, dead-ending in a neighbor’s cellar window.
    And she kept driving.
    “Mom! What are you doing?” I said, watching as she made her mistake disappear in our tracks.
    “It was only a trash can, dear,” she replied, then stepped on the gas. “It’s nothing.”
    “But that trash can just broke a window!”
    A mild shrug, an oblivious smile. “I didn’t see that happen.”
    “But I did!”
    “And you didn’t, either.”
    “How can you just—”
    “I said, you didn’t, either .”
    Whether we saw it was academic, because the homeowner most certainly had, and about ten minutes later, he came stomping up our front walkway. When he banged on the door, my mother ignored it, continuing to unload groceries. Dad, by now an expert at sensing this kind of trouble, immediately headed for the front door while keeping a wary eye on my mother.
    Several minutes later, it was all taken care of, my dad apologizing profusely for his wife’s derelict behavior and writing a check to cover the damages, his wife acting as if none of it had happened.
    Problem solved.
    Business as usual.
    But living with such lunacy eventually took its toll, and my father wasn’t the only victim. Struggling to survive inside this thickly encapsulated, reality-skewed world was no way for a kid to grow up. It was shaky footing indeed, one that continued to chip away at my ability to trust the tangible.
    Me at age ten. “Mom! There’s a giant spider on the ceiling!”
    Painting her toenails, refusing to take her eyes off them, “Nonsense. There are no spiders in this house.”
    “But you’re not even looking at it!”
    Finishing one foot, moving onto the next, “It’s just a shadow, darling.”
    “It’s not a shadow. It’s got legs!”
    “Such a willful mind you have,” she replied through a dismissive laugh, wiggling her toes and admiring them. “I swear I don’t know where that comes from.”
    The irony.
    The following afternoon, still bothered by the incident, I asked my dad, “How come Mom pretends?”
    His smile was tolerant and knowing. “Your mother’s a bit, well . . . she’s different.”
    “Different.”
    Sensing my confusion and taking the cue, he said, “Or maybe a better way to say it would be fragile .”
    I still didn’t get it.
    “Think of it this way,” he went on. “What happens when you drop a tomato onto the ground?”
    I shrugged. “It smashes?”
    “And how