Do you know how many times I’ve tried?

—Grace

Big strength was my mother’s blessing. The strength to birth Pat and me in less than a year. To wake every day before dawn to cook and ready us for school and spend the rest of her day mopping and folding and washing and scrubbing, to do that and look past what her husband’s family, Andrew’s parents, Mama Liza and Bubba, who were well off from bootlegging, said about her and hers. Since I wanted to be strong too, I was Mom’s shadow, scouring the tub with ammonia, and hand-mopping the tiles till they were clean as our silverware. For this my mother treated me as a friend, told me secrets she never told Pat, roused me from sleep some nights to sit with her well after she’d sent him to bed.

The morning it happened, Mom kissed my eyes wide and told me to wake Pat and I hustled down the hall and up the steps to the attic, where my brother slept in a room that, no matter how bad Mom stayed on him to clean it, forever smelled like feet. To wake Pat you had to snatch the covers off him, which he knew but never liked. We headed downstairs to a breakfast of bacon, grits, eggs, and homemade biscuits. Mom was standing over the stove and Andrew was reading a paper, wearing a shirt Mom had stiffened crisp with homemade starch. My mother was wearing the same thing she wore each day: a nightgown, a black head scarf, and fall-apart house slippers. Mom fixed Andrew’s plate and hovered close while he took his first bite. She asked him if he was going to fix the blinds and he said that he would and that he didn’t need any more reminders. When he finished, Mom stalked him out of the kitchen and into the living room. We heard her ask again about the blinds, heard the door slam shut.

Pat and me were finishing our plates when she came back in and ran a tub of water and piled pots and pans and skillets in the sink. All you could hear was those dishes and Pat scraping the last bits of food off his plate. Pat swallowed his last mouthful and pushed away from the table and stood gazing at our mother.

Mom, he said. Is Daddy a good man?

Of course, she said.

Mom, he said. Do you love him?

What kind of question is that?

She snatched his plate off the table and grunted it back to the sink. Pat looked at me and I looked away.

Well, if you love Dad, Pat said, then why do you get mad and try to hurt him?

This sucked the color out Mom’s face. She dropped a plate and stared into the sink. You could count the words she spoke to us for the rest of the morning and that afternoon after school. She was more of herself later that night, letting me piece puzzles in the living room while she hummed along to her favorite 45s and waited for Andrew to come home.

He slugged in late and slumped on the couch. He kicked off his shoes, undid the throat of his shirt, propped his feet on the table, and lay his head back. My mother watched all this, waited till he was settled, and asked again about the blinds, asked if he planned to fix them that night as he had said he would. He said no, he’d do it the next night.

Mom stood and sighed. She sighed from a deep place and you knew it. She walked over and dragged a needle across her 45. She tied her scarf and smoothed her gown and sent me to my room, where I lay in my bed counting, counting, counting, how long it would take for her to erupt. It didn’t take long at all before the screaming began, before Andrew whisked past my door and up the steps to Pat’s room. Then I heard Mom in the kitchen. Then I heard Mom stomping up the steps. The boom of their voices coaxed me into the hall. That’s where I saw Mom and Andrew tangled at the top of the steps, saw light catch the blade of a long knife, saw Andrew push and my mother tumble down the steps. It hurt to look, so I didn’t look, not until she was at my feet, a blade in her chest, blood soaking through her gown. She died before I let her go.

I’m parked near the hydrant outside Andrew’s place, the house he bought with his wife. He’s got his front porch primed and his handrails sanded and his siding power-washed. You can see his wife—his sun, moon, stars—inside with a TV dancing grays across her face. She peeks up at me at the sound of the doorbell, then strolls into another room. She lolls out with Andrew behind her. He’s the one that answers. He jitters the handle to open the storm door. Grace, he says. To what do we owe this surprise?

Afternoon, I say

He steps aside to let me in. I say hello to his wife and she plays like she doesn’t hear it. Humph, I say, and follow Andrew into the kitchen. Out in the world this man is meticulous—shirts with creases in the sleeves, slacks with all the wrinkles knocked out, wing tips polished. But today he’s dressed in a T-shirt and unpressed khakis with his belt unfastened.

Drink? he says.

No, thank you, I say.

He pours himself a vodka straight, no ice. He asks me what I’ve been up to. Says he hasn’t seen me in days.

Days, weeks, months, I say

So let me guess, you’re back in church, he says.

How would you know? I say.

It’s about the only time I see you, he says.

It’s the only time I can come, I say. The only time I can stand that woman, what you’ve done.

Which church? he says.

First Zion, I say.

That Baptist? he says.

Andrew’s a Catholic, attends St. Andrew’s hour-long Sunday masses, Wednesday night choir practices, takes minutes at meetings of the local archdiocese.

He’s right too. This isn’t the first. First Zion, First Baptist. St. Mark’s. Maranatha, Parkside Missionary, New Hope. I join and go a Sunday, go Sundays, steady until a weekend binge keeps me away for a week, for weeks at a time, for too many Sundays to brave the faces, to face the pastor, the first lady, a deacon; I join and attend until a choir member or an organist or an usher sees me wild and stumbling outside myself. The times that’s happened it’s been much easier to find a new place to pray.

How long, how long? When will you let it go? he says.

Lose a mother, and lose a father, get replaced, and all is well, I say. It’s just that easy, is it?

Grace, he says. Give me chance.

Chance? You have no clue, do you? You could never know how it feels to be left behind and cast back?

The wife sweeps in and stands over the stove. She asks Andrew when I’m leaving, if I might stay through dinner, says she didn’t fix enough for company. Andrew grabs prescription bottles off a carousel and shakes out pills and downs them with his vodka.

Is that safe? I say.

These old things? he says. He re-racks his meds. We’re Thomases. We’re built to last. The wife clears her throat and makes noise in a cabinet over the stove. She tramps out.

What do you call that? I say.

Oh, what can we do? he says. What can we do?

The time for doing been passed, I say.

He says my name again and throws up a hand. This man is an expert too, has lied to himself about what he’s done to me. Their old Chihuahua barks in a back room. The refrigerator groans. It wouldn’t kill you to call me Dad, he says. That is, after all, who I am.

That is, after all, who who is? I say.

Is this why you came? he says. I know this can’t be why you came.

Correct, I say.

Then why? he says.

To invite you to church, I say. Come with me one Sunday, I say. Just one.

I’m not so sure about that, he says.

Why not? I say.

He gets up and pours himself another drink and pours me a glass of water and carries them both over. What is it you want from me? he says

You don’t get it, do you? It’s not what I want from you. It’s what I want for you.

He’s glum under the light, this man who’s been a man for all but me. I shove away from the table and stomp into the living room, stopping to gawk at the shrine of Pat and my adopted sister, a girl who was more of the girl he and his wife wanted than me—the first true hurt. I turn a family portrait of them facedown and whisk into the living room, where the wife is sitting on the couch smoking. I stop a few feet from her. She crosses and uncrosses her legs and blows outs smoke. God bless you, I say. May God have mercy on your soul. She looks over my shoulder and I look over my shoulder at Andrew, her husband, who’s standing in the kitchen’s entrance.

He has the face of a martyr, this man, he who hasn’t been crucified enough for his sins.