I’ve been parked outside this place for forty minutes now and I still can’t make my legs carry me through the front door. It’s one of those Brookdale homes, the assisted living kind, about seven hours from my house down in Louisville.

I left at four this morning and drove the whole way in the dark with a thermos of coffee that’s gone stone cold in the cup holder, sitting there where I forgot about it. I do this every single month. Drive up, park, sit here like a fool, and then I turn around and drive all the way home without ever once stepping inside.

My two sisters call me the son who never visits. Carol says it kind. Patty says it like a slap across the face. And I let them both say it, because the truth is a lot harder to type out than you’d think, and I’ve never once said it out loud to a living soul. But I’m sixty-eight years old now and I’m just plain tired of hauling this thing around by myself. So I’m going to set it down right here, with strangers, and see if that helps any.

My mom, Eileen, raised the three of us on her own. She worked the counter at a fabric store and still found a way to cut the crusts off our sandwiches because Patty wouldn’t eat them otherwise. She was the soft one. Sang in the kitchen. Kept peppermints in her purse for us. I want you to know that first, before I tell you the rest, because the rest doesn’t make sense unless you know how good she was.

My father left when I was six. I won’t go into all of it. The short version is he was a violent man, and there’s a restraining order from 1971 sitting in a drawer somewhere in my house that I’ve never thrown out.

He hit her. He broke her ribs one Christmas and she cooked the ham anyway with tape wrapped around her middle, smiling so we wouldn’t be scared. Then one day he was just gone, and she never said his name again. None of us cried. That tells you enough.

Here’s the cruel part. I grew up to be the spitting image of that man. Same heavy jaw. Same build. Same big square hands. My sisters got Mom’s face, her soft eyes, her way of tilting her head. I got him. For most of my life it didn’t matter much. But then Mom’s mind started going, and the years started peeling back on her one at a time, and somewhere in there she stopped seeing her son when she looked at me. She started seeing the man who hurt her.