I knew that little girl. I had seen her in exactly two other photos my mother owned, photos where the man beside her had always, always been cut out of the frame.
I had asked about that once, as a child. Why Daddy was missing from the pictures. My mother had said the light had been bad.
The light had not been bad.
She had been protecting me from a face I was looking at right now.
And then, standing in the backyard where I had spent twenty years resenting him, my father told me the truth my mother had carried alone for two decades.
He had been a carpenter, once. A good one. He had built half the porches on our street.
When I was six years old, he fell from a scaffold on a job site, three stories, onto concrete.
He survived. But the man who woke up in that hospital was not entirely the man who had fallen.
