“If you’re here to tell me how to live my life, I’ve been doing it without you since the night you—”

She stopped herself. Janelle has always known when to stop. I never did. That was kind of the whole problem.

I’m going to back up because I owe it to myself to say this right, even if nobody reads it. I kicked my daughter out of my house in March of 2013. She was seventeen years old. The reason was a tattoo. A small butterfly, maybe the size of a quarter, on the inside of her left wrist. She had saved up babysitting money and gone with her friend Deja to some place on Route 9 and come home with it, and when I saw it at dinner I put my fork down and told her that was not happening under my roof. She said it was already done. I said I could see that. And then I said the words I have thought about every single day for twelve years.

I said, “Not in my house.”

I don’t know why those specific words. I think I meant them as an ultimatum. Like, lose the attitude, not literally leave. But Janelle was not the kind of kid who called a bluff. She never was. Even at six years old she would just quietly do the thing she’d decided to do, and you would realize afterward that she had been three steps ahead of you the whole time. She went upstairs and she packed a bag. I heard the dresser drawers. I remember sitting at the kitchen table not getting up. My ex-husband Gary had been gone four years by then, and it had just been me and Janelle for most of her childhood, and I think somewhere in me I had started to believe she would always just be there. That she would stay. I didn’t get up from that table.

She came downstairs with a backpack and a duffel bag. She had her coat on. She stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and I looked at her and I thought, okay, this is the part where she asks me to take it back. She didn’t ask. She took one thing off the refrigerator before she left. A photo we had taken at a Sears portrait studio when she was maybe nine or ten, the two of us. I kept a magnet of a beach we’d never been to on that fridge for fifteen years, and she took the photo out from under it and put it in her coat pocket. Then she walked to the bus stop at the end of the street.