I think it was very selfish of my father to die in September. That was always my favorite month. Cruel, too, to die right at the beginning — of cool nights, golden afternoons, a blissful absence of mosquitoes. Withered leaves, shriveled flies. September always felt new, even as around me things were dying, and I think that’s why I liked it.

It is September, now, as I write this. I have not been a child for a long time. Some things are how I remember them — the evenings still darken at the right time, and the light still has that syrupy quality just before the sun sets. But the heat hasn’t broken yet. The mosquitoes haven’t died. Just last week I watched a fly — a fat, horsey one, the kind you’re almost afraid to squash, the kind that bursts like a ripe blackberry — bump up against the window screen, trying and failing to get out of my house, looking for a way back to the summer outside, and I slammed the window shut, trapping it between the screen and the glass, and watched it bash fruitlessly against both, buzzing, whining, caught up in something it could not see or understand, and I thought, there she goes. 

When I was a child, August brought an anxious holding pattern of droughts and storms. Either the earth was too dry or the air was too wet. There were years when it rained so little that the corn didn’t grow above my knees, and Dad would shake his head and say we should be praying for the farmers, and there were also years when it rained every day before supper, and the creeks became violent and swollen, and the sky bleached white with lightning. But September meant you could breathe again.

I was eating a garden tomato over the sink when Mom told me Dad was dying. He had been dying for a long time, but I received this as news. I think she needed it to be news. The tomato, huge and watery, enlarged like a sick heart, fell apart in my hands. I went to his bed with her. It was final this time. The last time he had been dying, it didn’t kill him, but now it would — now it was, as Mom and I had joked, darkly, “the kind of dying you don’t get better from.” When it was over I went to the bathroom and saw that the remnants of the tomato, the last of that season, were still on my face and hands. Everything in the mirror was red.

Here is how my mother told the story of her husbands: “The first one died because he was crazy. The second one died because he was drunk. And the third one died because I never met a good thing I couldn’t ruin.”

In the months after my father’s death we saw few people. We stopped going to church. I went to school and spoke to no one except to graciously receive condolences. Mom talked about moving. She seemed unmoored, unfocused, as if she had forgotten how to behave.

I can’t remember how I first became aware of my mother’s other husbands. I suppose I must have always known about them. There were a few photos of them around the house: strange men smiling next to my mother when she was younger and even more beautiful. One had a mustache. Let’s call him Abe. The other had unusual eyes, a brown so pale it looked yellow. Let’s call him Bill. 

Abe and Bill haunted my childhood like friendly ghosts. When my first pet died, a floppy beagle named Pork, and my parents tried to explain what had happened in a manner appropriate for a four-year-old, I said — apparently quite firmly and calmly — “Pork is dead like Abe and Bill.” I thought of them as imaginary friends. As bonus fathers I’d been denied, which was sad, but could make up stories about, which was fun. 

I’m grateful, I suppose, to have learned early on that my mother was a person who existed independently of me, and who had her own private sorrows. I understood from a young age that she had suffered greatly before I was born. This made me both fiercely protective of her and morbid, even sardonic, in my approach to the world. When I was seven, I asked if she was glad Abe and Bill had died, because if they hadn’t, she never would have met Dad and had me. I did not think of this question as pointed or cruel. I believe I would have been satisfied with any response. Perhaps I even expected her to say no, of course it hadn’t been worth it; how could it be? She was pounding a sirloin as she answered, and in my memory she is as long as an El Greco figure, illuminated by a harsh and vivid light.

“Sarah, you are the great happiness of my life,” she said, not looking at me. “But if you keep pestering me while I’m cooking dinner I’m going to give you an answer we’ll both regret, and probably a spanking.”

My father — Carl — was solid and quiet and capable, fifteen years older than my mother. He was not the type, I think, to dwell on any of the metaphysical questions his position as a third husband might raise, but I never asked him how he felt about it, and now I never will. 

He was older than the other dads, and slower, and serious, but he delighted me. He played the trumpet and the guitar and could “mess around” on a banjo. Despite his general disinterest in talking, he knew how to tell a story. He had lived an itinerant life before he settled down and opened his tiling business, and he had a knack for doling out details. He would start out with some offhand comment about how he liked his coffee and end up implying he’d been in Cuba during the revolution, doing God knows what. I grew up believing he’d been a spy in the Cold War. I grew up believing he’d been a jazz musician in France. I grew up believing he had a trunk of gold bars buried somewhere out in Nevada. I know some of what he said was true — he had been in the military, then worked as a merchant marine for a while, and he’d seen a lot of the world — but much of it, I’m sure, was tall tales. 

Still, my mother’s beauty made anything he said seem possible. Her looks distorted the space around her. She changed a room by walking into it, changed a street by walking down it. I was shocked when I went to school for the first time and realized other people’s mothers were — could be — ugly. Before then, raised by my mother and television, I assumed all women were beautiful.

I won’t try to describe her. I will only say that under slightly different circumstances she might have become a movie star — she had that kind of look, both luminous and vulgar. Instead she became my mother. Even as her daughter I felt a strange pull toward her, and a faint sense of pride that her breasts had once been in my mouth. 

When I was 21, she confessed to me, drunk, that she had grown up believing all she was was fuckable. “I’m glad you didn’t turn out to be a beauty,” she said. “I never wanted you to go through what I went through.” We were sharing a bottle of cold white wine at the kitchen table. There was a cocktail shaker in the sink with some melting ice cubes inside, remnants of what she’d drunk before I got there. “I didn’t even know I was beautiful,” she said, looking at the clock. “I only knew I was fuckable.”

So the other thing I understood from a young age was that my mother had been fucked. I suppose, in its own way, every child knows this.

The first time my mother was fucked was when she was born, poor, in a small town, to parents who did not like or trust girls. The second time she was fucked was slow, constant, gradual, and happened throughout her childhood. Her parents were very religious — later I would learn to call them fundamentalists — and they raised her strictly and suspiciously, constraining her choices at every point. 

The third time my mother was fucked was when she got married, at eighteen, to her high school sweetheart. He played football, well enough to earn a scholarship, and my mother married him so she could follow him to college. Her parents were skeptical of education and they would not have allowed her to go otherwise. When I asked my mother why, she said that it would have been whorish for an unmarried woman to leave her parents’ house. For a long time I did not understand that she did not agree with this. She said it so neutrally and dispassionately that I assumed it must be true.

My mother was right, by the way. I am not beautiful. I look like my father, who was handsome enough in the manner least likely to look good on a woman. I have a very large, heavy jaw and thick, straight eyebrows. My hair is dark and brittle. My eyes are set so deep in my skull that I joke I can see my own eyebrows by staring straight ahead. As a child I longed for nothing more than eyebrows that arched like my mother’s — except, perhaps, for hair that was blond like my mother’s. I can’t hold her assessment of my looks against her; she was free with compliments, and often told me that I was smart, brave, kind. It was simply not in her nature to lie. And she was bitter about her beauty, I believe. She had never gotten much out of it, and it had been the source of a lot of pain.

The one time I was glad to look like my father was right after he died. I was sixteen, the age when I cared most about being pretty. But it was a comfort, then, to carry his face in mine. His face had been stolen by death and then by the mortician, who made it too shiny and tight. The day of the funeral I put on a black dress and used pale green concealer around my eyes and went and looked at his body, which had been manipulated like candle wax. As we sang hymns for the dead I stared at his cheeks and thought, distressingly, of reality television.

After my father died I tried to leave. I was bored in school and exhausted at home. I had expected to need my mother in the wake of Dad’s death, but the extent to which she needed me caught me by surprise. 

She alternated between silence, which sometimes lasted for days, and an almost manic reminiscence. For a while I loved the remember-whens and the family photo albums, but soon they only made me sad, especially since they came at all hours, sometimes in the middle of the night. She would wake me up, eyes ablaze, and make me look at a photo of us by a lake, or at an amusement park. “Do you remember?” she would ask. Do you remember this red jacket, do you remember when Dad took you to see the elephant, do you remember the Fourth of July when we were both scared of the fireworks? “Yes,” I would say, even if I didn’t. 

Sometimes she wanted me to tell the stories; sometimes she interrupted me when I was reading or doing schoolwork and demanded that I tell her something she didn’t know about my father. She wanted to hear about outings we’d taken without her, about bedtime stories he’d told me when she was in the other room. She wanted me to give her every piece of him I had. 

I had heard of a place on the East Coast where you could go to college at sixteen. I dreamed of trees and gorges, books and fireplaces, people who didn’t know me and had never seen my mother. 

I applied. I got in. One thing I had always been was smart. But when I told Mom about my plans, she got very quiet. 

“You can’t go,” she said finally. 

“But I’ll leave in two years no matter what,” I said. I was surprised; she had always seemed to want me to be brilliant. “And I’d rather go now.”

“It’s too soon,” she said. “Please, baby. Don’t go yet.” 

The “please” threw me off. She could’ve forbidden me from going. But instead she was asking me not to. I hesitated.

“I think it would be a great fit for me,” I said, parroting the brochure. “I think I would, uh, blossom.”

“Who will love me if you go?” she asked quietly.

“You could get married again,” I said.

“No, not at this age. Who would want me like this?” she said.

“Oh, I’m sure lots of people would,” I said helplessly. I had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or many friends at all. My mother was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. What did I know?

In the end I didn’t leave. I agreed to stay and finish high school, and then when I was eighteen I took a full scholarship to the state university less than an hour away rather than go east or west or anywhere else. I did not resent her for this, not exactly. If she needed me, wasn’t that only fair? Hadn’t I needed her for most of my life?

Here’s a bit my mom and I used to do when we had company. She would say: “What do you think, Sarah? Are those storm clouds gathering on the horizon?” And I would furrow my brows and narrow my eyes and say: “I think… I’m due for a threading appointment.”

Sometimes that one killed, but I guess it works better if you can see me.

We had another one that I liked even more. I would say: “What do you call a man who’s willing to die for some pussy?” And Mom would say: “My next husband.”

That one was very crass, though, so we only did it when we were alone.

My mother’s jokes sometimes gave me the outline of the facts, but she didn’t like to talk about her past, and I was afraid to ask about most of it. I only pieced together what happened to Abe and Bill through years of eavesdropping. Here is my account of her first marriage, as I understand it.

Mom lived with Abe in a dorm for married couples at a small Christian college. She studied art history. She hid her birth control pills. Abe played well enough to transfer to a bigger school and then to dream of playing professionally. He made it, sort of: there exists one record, only one, of Abe’s name in the reserves of the Dallas Cowboys. I found it digging through an archive in college. I don’t believe he ever played a game, though. He bounced around the junior leagues, none of which exist anymore, and played for a while in Canada. 

The one thing I grew up hearing about Abe was that he was crazy, but I didn’t know what that meant. I learned the truth — well, the details — when I was thirteen. By then Mom had stopped making me leave the room when she had her friends over for drinks. If I sat quietly and mostly out of sight, pretending to read or listen to music, I was allowed to stay. 

I remember the clink, swish, rustle of ice in their glasses, the laughing, the occasional hushed tones. Whenever they got quiet I knew it was time to listen.

After Abe retired, he began to hit my mother. He had been hit himself, over and over again, often on the head. He changed. He became paranoid, angry, violent. It was before anyone knew what years of concussions could do to a person’s mind, and so as Abe lost his, my mother had no narrative to turn to, no understanding of how a sweet boy, a boy who used to bring her roses from the gas station where he had worked in high school, had become such a brutal man. 

When he shot himself he left a note saying that he had to go before he killed her, because he wanted to kill her, and it scared him. 

So she still loves him, I think, just a little bit, for letting her live.

Becoming aware of the truth about Abe — that the friendly ghost of my childhood had beaten and considered killing my mother — upset me so intensely that everything else, with the exception of my father’s illness, seemed comparatively unimportant. I was growing breasts and beginning to menstruate, but nothing happening to my body seemed particularly interesting then. My body was superfluous, irrelevant. It touched and was touched by nobody. My mother’s body fascinated me, fascinated everyone; when we ran errands together, and I felt men’s eyes on her, it seemed to confirm what young children always believe: that your mother is the most important person in the world. 

Learning about Bill was not quite so much of a rupture. He was not monstrous. He was, in fact, almost comic, although his was a dark and mean-spirited kind of comedy. Mom met Bill when she was a young widow. He was rich for our town. His money was in a car dealership, a few fast food franchises, maybe something else I’m forgetting about. 

One of the few things my mother told me directly about her other husbands was that she tried to get pregnant with them and never could. She stayed on the pill until she was 25 — unthinkable in the context she was raised in — and once she went off it she thought she would get pregnant right away. But that didn’t happen. I’m sure she married Bill in part to have a baby, because he was rich enough and stable enough and crazy only about her. As much as they tried (how thrilled Bill must have been, the fervor with which my mother tried!) nothing happened. It is only when I reflect on this truth that I feel smug; I am the thing my mother has wanted the most in her life, so far as I can tell, and when I think about how jealous millions of people would be, how desperately millions of people would want to be wanted by my mother, I feel completely whole.

Bill was an amiable, sociable kind of guy, always shaking hands and attending parties. He was also a drunk. My mother learned this gradually. I will not bore you with the minutiae of their relationship — her begging him to stop drinking, him begging her to stop caring — but I will say that he was never violent, according to my mother. He was more likely to fall asleep standing up or lose a used car in a bet. Once he bet a rival a lifetime supply of fried chicken over a high school football game, and when he lost, he stuck to it, keeping a standing order for the man at one of his restaurants. He even accounted for it in his will.

Bill died when his car went over a bridge one night. It was during a summer rainstorm, I believe, the kind that whitens the river. 

My mother met my father a year later, and six months after that she was pregnant with me.

I find it strange, now, to look back on the facts of my life as if they could ever have been any different. The way I see it, there are no alternate histories lingering in my past, no inflection points where I might have chosen otherwise. All the ghosts are my mother’s. Everything that happened to me actually happened to her. 

For a long time I was in the habit of visiting my mother every other weekend. We enjoyed each other, mostly. I would drive 45 minutes out of the city, away from the parking garages and the meticulously planned walkable downtown, past the strip malls and car washes and slumped restaurants selling ham steaks and creamed spinach, and by the time I made it to the cornfields it was almost like I was a child again. We would go out for barbecue or Italian, or else eat corn-and-tomato salads in the garden. We talked about my work, her flowers, what we had been reading. We drank glass after glass of wine. She had started going to church again. She never asked about grandchildren. She was still beautiful.

The night of my last visit, she told me she was very lonely. 

“Isn’t it nice to go to church, then?” I said. “To see your friends there?”

“Oh, sure, but they’re all so little. Little small people living little small lives,” she said. 

We were sitting in Adirondack chairs on the patio. Her glass was empty. Mine was mostly empty. The air was humid and warm but kept alive by a breeze, so it felt soft and pleasant instead of greasy and oppressive. The sky was gray. I did not say anything. At that moment it seemed to me that our lives, too, were both little and small. Hers had the gravitas that came with tragedy, but as I had gotten older I believed less and less that one always followed the other. 

“I wish you had done more with yourself,” she said suddenly. “You had options, unlike me. You should have taken them. Here you are, had the grades to go to the best schools in the country, had the grades to do anything, and what have you done? At least if you lived in New York you could take me to the ballet.”

I had never before heard her say anything about New York. Or about the ballet. I looked straight ahead. I refilled my glass.

“Maybe, if that was what you wanted,” I said slowly, “you should have let me leave.”

She sighed. “Of course you can blame me,” she said. “I just wish you had fought back a little harder.”

“I thought you needed me,” I said.

“I did,” she said. 

I said nothing for a long time.

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I said eventually.

“You’re not a disappointment, Sarah,” she said. “But if all I’d had to deal with was my mother — ” 

She broke off and stared into her glass, then up at the sky. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“I wish I could have met you before everything you went through,” I said, as graciously as I could manage. “Before Abe and Bill. Even before Dad. I wish I could have known who you were without all that pain.”

“What makes you think I was any different?” she said. 

We said nothing more. It began to rain a minute later. We went inside. 

That night, after the storm had settled, I entered my mother’s bedroom. She was asleep already, her face shiny with cream. Her hair was spread across the pillow. I looked at her and felt overwhelmed by what I saw. It was my mother, it was my mother’s body, it was the place I came from and the place I’d failed to leave. 

I crawled into her bed. This was something I had done when I was small, for comfort, and then when Dad died, so I could comfort her. I lay next to her. I hated her. She reached for me. What good would it do to try to name what I felt then? If no one wanted me but my mother, then someone still wanted me. And if she did not want me now, or wanted me differently, what did that matter? When had she ever gotten anything she wanted? 

Tomorrow was Sunday. (“Tomorrow was,” a phrase you could never say out loud.) Tomorrow I would drive home, but tonight I would sleep in my mother’s house. I reached back for her. We held each other in the bed she had shared with my father. Her head rested on my collarbone like I’m sure it used to rest on his.