We lived in a two-story house that had probably been very beautiful at one time. You could see hints of what it used to be through the chipped, white paint. Mother and I tried to paint it once. She let me choose the color, and we bought gallons of the light blue paint that I picked out. We'd only painted a small section in the front of the house when mother started crying. She said daddy should be doing these things, goddamn it, and that we'd let him do it when he got home. I grew up in a white, chipped house with a blue patch on the front. The blue paint grew old and crusty in the garage.
               Lucien and Andrew can hardly remember our father. Lucien was two and Andrew was four when he left. But I was seven, and I remember the day when he put on his blue shirt and his brown pants and his black jacket, and he walked out the door and down the sidewalk and got into his truck. He drove off down the street and around the bend and just kept going.
               It seemed to rain a lot when I was a kid. Probably no more than it does now, really, but it seemed like it. Sometimes I'd lie in bed at night listening to the rain fall. As I drifted off to sleep, I'd imagine the rain filling the streets from curb to curb, washing my daddy back home like the trash that it swept into the gutters.

               Things usually seemed brighter the morning after a rain, and I'd wake to find a warm patch of light on the floor by my window. Sometimes I'd rush to my mother's room and open her shades wide, wanting her to see the light, too. But, she liked the darkness and would yell, from her bed, for me to close them. I always knew she'd make me close the shades, but I opened them anyway, hoping maybe one day she wouldn't.
               She began spending her days in bed not long after daddy left, getting up only when Andrew, Lucien or I needed something. We didn't need her very often – we'd grown up learning how to take care of each other.
               Actually, we were generally the ones who took care of mother. She'd go for days sometimes without eating. When things got really bad, I'd help Lucien carry soup and crackers in to her on a TV tray.
               "But, mommy, Molly and I cooked it for you and everything," he'd say innocently.
               She could rarely refuse Lucien. I often wondered if he knew that his puppy-dog eyes and chicken soup were keeping his mommy alive.

               Mother started going out of the house again as suddenly as she'd stopped. One morning when I woke up, she was in the kitchen cooking breakfast.
               "Want pancakes?" she asked, ignoring the surprised look on my face.
               "Yeah, sure," I finally answered.
               That's the closest we ever came to discussing it.
               She began to date again and to go out with friends. My brothers and I were happy about that, of course, but she'd never let us stay by ourselves when she went out. I guess she didn't want to admit we'd been by ourselves for months.
               Instead, she'd take us to our grandparents' house. My grandparents, nanny and papa, as I called them, lived about two miles down the street in a big house with an attic and lots of extra bedrooms for us to play in. On the living room walls were shelves of nick-knacks – ceramic bells, old perfume bottles from Avon in the shape of dogs and shoes, small wooden clocks. Nanny called them her pretties, and she was always saying "I'd give a pretty to know…" It's odd what you remember about people.
               I remember how my grandfather always smelled of tobacco. He kept a can of Prince Albert in the shirt pocket of the old work shirts he wore, and I used to love to watch him hand-roll cigarettes. His skin was dark and leathery from years of working in the sun on railroads, laying down railroad ties and driving spikes. Although he didn't spend all that much time in the sun in his later years, his tan never faded. My grandmother said it was because he had Mexican blood, though he always denied it.
               I once saw a picture of my grandfather and his three brothers. It must've been taken sometime in the 1940's. He was standing with his brothers in a street in California – they were all smoking cigarettes . Something about the picture made them look really tough, like they could've been bank robbers or gangsters. That's the main thing I remember about my grandfather – he was tough. So much tougher than I was.
               There are other things about him that I don't like to remember, like how he always wanted to know what color my panties were – how he always wanted to touch them. He made me touch him, too. It usually happened in the kitchen. Nanny would sometimes yell from the other room "What are you doing in there?" He'd say "Getting Molly a cookie." He'd take a white, cream-filled cookie out of the cookie jar, and he'd take me into the living room. He'd make me sit on his lap and dunk my cookie in his coffee. I'd almost gag on the cookie – I still can't stand cream-filled ones. It's one of my few remaining symptoms. Symptoms – that's what I've come to call the little things that remind me I'm not like everyone else.

               I was ten when my grandfather died. I couldn't cry at his funeral. I tried to make myself, because I felt I should, but I couldn't. I remember watching my mother, my grandmother and my aunts cry and wondering if they'd cry if they knew – if they knew how he'd touched me and talked dirty to me. I wondered if they'd cry then. And if they did cry, would it be for him or for me? I'd never cried for myself.
               It started to rain at the cemetery, and I was glad, because the raindrops streaming down my cheeks disguised the fact that I wasn't crying like everyone else. I didn't feel bad for not crying – only vaguely angry at everyone else's tears, because they weren't for me. When it began to rain, I thought: God is crying for me now. The pastor said my grandfather was in a better place. I thought "I hope he's in hell." When I realized what I was thinking, I started to cry.
               Lucien was five at the time, and I held tightly to his hand, wondering if he understood what was going on. He reenacted the funeral for years in our living room. Maybe he did understand – maybe that was his way of helping me through things.

               One of my first memories is of waiting for my daddy to come home from work. I was about three at the time – mother said I seemed to know when it was about time for him to get there, and I'd drop whatever I was doing at the time to sit by the door and wait.
               When he came in, he'd pick me up and spin me around and put his green work hat on my head. I can still remember what the hat smelled like – like a mixture of sweat and work and cologne. I still smell it every now and then on welders and construction workers who ride the subway. It's the only scent on earth that makes me cry.
               After daddy left, mother didn't talk about him much, but when she did, it was always about how he was going to come back eventually. Like the paint on the house, we used to leave things for daddy to do. The lawn would go unmowed for a week, because mother said daddy would do it when he got home. When a week passed and he wasn't there, mother would say maybe Andrew should mow it to save daddy the trouble. It probably would've disturbed mother's friends to hear her saying things like that, but my brothers and I grew used to it. Sometimes she'd leave the house for the evening saying "If your father comes home, tell him there's meatloaf in the refrigerator." In a way, it made it feel as if my father hadn't left. He just left for work early and came home after we fell asleep at night. At times, I almost convinced myself of it, and I'd struggle to stay awake so I could give him a kiss when he got home, but I never quite made it, and he'd be gone again by the time I woke up in the morning. Like trying to step on your shadow.
               I don't know if mother really believed he'd come home or not, but I guess convincing herself of it made it bearable. I never corrected her, at any rate – never told her that daddy wasn't on vacation or at work, that he'd just deserted us all. There were times when I wanted to tell her – wanted to make her admit it, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I knew what it felt like to be waiting at the door.