Our house became a tomb, full of her photographs and her clothes and the ghost of everything we had lost.
Then Patricia arrived.
She was a co‑worker of my father’s, someone from the human resources department who started coming by with casseroles and condolences. Within six months she was spending the night. Within a year she was moving in. Within eighteen months they were married in a small ceremony at city hall in our American hometown, the Stars and Stripes hanging outside the building.
I remember standing at that wedding, five years old, in a rented suit that didn’t fit right, watching my father smile at this stranger like she was his whole world. Like my mother had never existed. Like I was just a leftover from a life he was trying to forget.
Patricia was everything my mother apparently was not. Cold where my mother had been warm. Calculating where my mother had been kind.
