("One Through Six" here. "Seven and Eight" here.)
1991, age nine
My mom and dad sit us down, to tell us we're moving to Minnesota where my dad has gotten a job as the Twin Cities Marathon director. I call my best friend MacKay, as soon as I hear the news. My parents' friends throw us a going-away party out at Lake Merced and we dance and eat while we're buzzing with excited energy. My dad has to leave early for Minneapolis while we stay behind to sell the house and finish the school year. We'll join him in June, just a few short months away. We take him to the airport for a tearful but happy goodbye. For a few weeks, we regularly talk with him and during one call I ask him to tell me the name of the elementary school I'll attend. He can't think of it—he's scattered and distant—and my stomach drops although I'm not sure why. The calls eventually become less frequent, and my mom and sister become quieter. We've fixed up our little blue house. My mom has quit her job. We have it all planned.
I walk up the stairs one night, in early June, confused to find my sister cutting up pictures of my dad while sitting on the top step. Later my mom sits us down to tell us we're not moving to Minnesota, our dad isn't moving back to California, we're staying put for a while but everything—just everything—is changing. I cry and cry and cry as I bury my face in my mom's lap. I cry tears I can still feel. My dad calls the next day to ask if my mom has told us the news. Out of all the decisions my dad has ever made, and he's made some head-scratchers, this one ranks as the most cowardly, one of very few I'll never be able to forgive—the decision to let my mom handle this alone, the decision to sweep in the next day with platitudes, the decision to not get on a plane and tell his daughters face-to-face that he has left us.
I won't see my father for the rest of the year.
Despite a lot of pain, despite reality stripping away all the idealistic views I once held, we laugh a lot this year. We stay up late, talking around the dining-room table. Rachel and I dance for my mother. I begin going to an after-school program where I meet a boy who becomes my "after-school best friend" and I remember, precisely, what he looked like. We play tether ball on the playground for hours together.
Christmas rolls around and my mom fills the room with gifts, overcompensating a little, I know, but loving us so much, always loving us with such a fierceness that she'd do anything—break the hardest news, remake holiday memories, laugh with us when it's nearly impossible—to make everything OK.
It was the hardest year of my life. But, somehow—as she always, always does—my mother made it OK.