I keep going back to that day three years ago, picking at it like a scab. I’ve left out a part because it’s the part that guts me. When she grabbed the nurse’s arm and said get him out, she didn’t stop there.

I just stood frozen in that doorway with my coat still on, and she looked dead at me and said it again, soft this time. “Please. He’s going to do it again.” Her voice cracked right in half on the word again, and her hands were up by her chest like she was trying to cover her ribs. Those same ribs he broke. After all those years her body still remembered to protect that exact spot.

The nurse, a young gal named Renata, tried to calm her. “Eileen, honey, this is your son, this is your boy.” And Mom shook her head so hard her glasses slid down her nose. “No. No. I don’t have a son like him.” I backed out of that room so fast I knocked a little cart of paper cups over in the hall. They went everywhere. I remember bending down to pick them up off the floor with my hands shaking, because picking up cups was easier than standing up and feeling all that. A nurse told me to leave them, they’d get it, but I kept right on stacking them up, one inside the other, just so I didn’t have to look at anyone.

I sat in my car that day for two hours before I could drive. I keep thinking if I’d had Carol’s chin, or Patty’s nose, even just Mom’s gray eyes instead of his brown ones, she’d have reached for me. She’d have smiled. That’s the thing nobody warns you about.

You can spend your whole life being a good man, a quiet man, the opposite of him in every single way that counts, and none of it shows up on your face. She never once saw the choices I made. She only ever saw the bones I was born with.

So that’s the whole of it. That’s why I sit out here in this lot with cold coffee and never go up. Renata waved at me through the front glass on her way back inside today, and I rolled my window down, and she leaned in and told me one more thing Mom said before she’d left the room.

“She told me to make sure that nice man out there gets home safe.”

I sat there a long while after she went back in. Then I started the engine. I’ll be that nice man out in the lot again next month, the stranger she worries over, the fella she hopes makes it home okay. And I will. I always do. I just won’t be the son. Not to her. Not anymore.