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seven years my junior, I walked over to our
chairs, only to confront the conspicuous
absence of my own mother.

“Where’s Mommy?” I asked Aunt Kenda.

“She left,” she said, as if describing the
weather of a mild day in May, and not the
cataclysmic combined hurricane-tornado-
earthquake-type event it was. Tears began to
well up in my eyes and my voice shook.

“Why did she go?” I asked.

“Because she knew you’d get like this,”
Aunt Kenda said, exasperated.

I later learned her brother, my Uncle Keith,
had come by on his motorcycle. My mom left
with him, but in getting on the cycle, burned
her leg on the motor. Even eleven-year-old me
saw this as an act of karma.

My mother indulges my strange pickiness
when it comes to food. I like cheese, and
bread, and almost anything on the
carbohydrates rung of the food pyramid, and I
don’t like any of my food with extra
condiments—no butter on my toast, no
ketchup on my fries, no cream cheese on my
bagel. When I visited, she’d buy loaves of
French bread, bags of popcorn, and lots of
mac and cheese. She would make me cheese
quesadillas late at night. She taught me how to
make mac and cheese when I was young, and
to this day, it is the only dish I can cook.

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