My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door and I finally told them who his father was.

She never once tried to stop him.

She has told me since that she thought he would change his mind by the morning, and that by the morning I was gone, and that those are not the same thing and she knows it.

She also put forty dollars in the side pocket of that holdall while I was upstairs packing.

I did not find it until the Thursday. I have never mentioned it and neither has she.

Forty dollars is what she had in the house, and it is the only thing either of them did that night that was not about winning.

Nineteen, pregnant, no home, on my own.

I left the state six weeks later, when a girl I had been at school with found me a room in another city.

I changed my number. I started again.

And I kept my baby.

His name is Leo. It was not my choice. It was on a list of three that somebody else wrote in a hospital in the April, and I did not understand until about a year later that it was my grandfather’s middle name.