“I held onto that one,” he said. “Through everything. On the worst nights, when I couldn’t remember my own name, I could still remember the weight of you asleep on me. That’s the thing that kept me from letting go entirely.”
I had to turn away from him then, because I could not breathe.
For twenty years I had thought my father was a man who had not wanted me.
He was a man who had loved me so much that he had tried to erase himself from my life rather than let me watch him break.
PART 3
But my mother would not let him disappear.
That was the part I had never known, the part that rearranged twenty years of my life in a single afternoon.
Ruth found him, weeks later, sleeping under an overpass two miles from our house, confused and half-starved and ashamed.
She had looked for him every day he was gone. She had driven every street, called every shelter, described his face to every officer who would listen.
