I knock on the laundry room door. “In a minute!” he says, voice muffled. I hear him moving around, papers shuffling, the flick of a light switch.

He opens the door. I slide in and shut it behind me. To the left is the table with the hamper, the extra-large bottle of detergent, a precarious pile of tablecloths and old, ripped-up rags. But in front of me is where the real work happens, the washer and dryer serving as a countertop for an enlarger, three developing trays all in a row, a single set of tongs.

In our last month together as mother and child, my seventeen-year-old son and I approach the aspen grove where the marriage that created him and his twin sister met its shattering end.

Today he’s choosing the hiking trail, and I’m pretending not to remember the emotional geography of this place. Our conversation will stay safely in the future—his senior project on supercomputers, then high school graduation, Arizona State University for a bachelor’s in computer science and on to a doctorate in artificial intelligence, work at NASA or a savvy startup. He has it all mapped out.

“What kind of records, specifically?” I ask Sarah as I climb over and sort through boxes, working my way to the back of the narrow storage unit.

The rush of traffic echoes each time the light changes on the busy street nearby. The storage unit is filled with the contents of the apartment Sarah had shared with her wife Aimee. Sarah seems to prefer to let me do the sorting and climbing, perhaps to avoid sifting through memories of a now-former life. I don’t question her; I don’t mind.

I’ve been looking for a birth certificate, financial or medical records. I am sweating—it’s Michigan in mid-August, that midwestern, late-summer light beaming golden across the boxes as dust and pollen hover in the stagnant humidity. Sarah stands at the entrance to the storage unit, directing me as I report what I find in each box—kitchen appliances and utensils, Christmas cards from friends, notebooks filled with Aimee’s poetry, concert T-shirts from when she’d worked at the arena downtown, the Wonder Woman wallet I gave her. At one point I hand Sarah some banking records; she accepts them without comment.

You catch a glimpse of me in a bar in the early autumn of 2013, and you might even know me from our high school days.

But I like to think my power chair is not so noticeable, even though it clicks and flashes green whenever I move. Alternatively, I like to think I am at once recognizable by the way my eyes light up when a flannel-clad philosophy professor in his mid-forties works the death of Kurt Cobain into casual conversation.

“He was taken from us much too soon,” he says, as if the Nirvana front man was one day beamed up by the grunge extraterrestrials who were good enough to loan him out.

We are at the stove.

I am probably ten—perhaps younger—at an age when I had to look up to you.

You were so tall, so handsome with your dark, wavy hair and blue eyes. You didn’t normally cook, Daddy. You certainly didn’t bake and were not often in the kitchen.

But on this day, Mom is not cooking, and I am standing at your side—me with my reddish-brown hair and your blue eyes, looking up at you, watching you, listening to you tell me how to make that wonder of egg and bread—Toad in the Hole.

This morning is not like any other. You woke us from our beds, two tousle-haired, sleepy girls whose mother is gone.

It is summer, and there is work to do on the farm, and that is why you could not go with our mother who already left an hour ago, rising in the blue dark before dawn to make the drive to see your youngest daughter, our little sister, who lies in a body cast in a hospital three hours away.

You have made toast and set out honey. You have sliced peaches into bowls. You have poured orange juice, but we want only our favorite cereal. I am amazed at all this because you have never once cooked a meal. You have never once even served us.

Out of the haze of heat over New Salem Road, Todd’s white Lincoln Town Car shimmers, solidifies, and speeds forward.

He slows near the fuel pumps, cranes his neck towards the garage bay—where Karl and Joe are replacing an exhaust pipe and muffler under a rust-pocked Buick Skyhawk—then accelerates east toward Uniontown.

It’s early August, a Saturday, and I’m seventeen, sweating on a barstool in the stuffy office at Karl’s Sunoco as I stare through a window at the quiet stretch of road, waiting for a customer to pull in to the pumps.