One spring day my daughter sighed and said, “When will I ever get to see Ireland?” I didn’t know where her longing came from, but a week later I received an invitation to teach a writing course in Dublin. I accepted solely so that I could appear to be able to grant her wishes. Not long after I returned from Skid Row, we began preparing to move, for a while, across the ocean.

On my shelves I found this edition of Ulysses, hardcover, pages stitched, not glued. My mother’s. She died of breast cancer in 1989. I opened the book. Out fell a postcard. From my older sister to our mother, decades past: “Dear Mommy, I’m very sorry you banged up your hip. It scared me half to death. Don’t worry about the job and concert. Sorry we couldn’t come sooner but we were at the library. Love, Jocelyn.” I added a shaky “Jeff.” My father wrote our mother’s name.

They were divorced, bitterly, but he brought us to the hospital. It was the first day of her first real job on her own, working for a publisher. A truck ran a red light. My mother flew twenty feet before shattering against blacktop, her proud beautiful cheekbones splintering, her hip bones and her leg bones cracking into many small pieces.

That was when I learned to read. After she came home from the hospital, my mother was restricted to her bed for a long time. Sometimes she would read aloud to us, but more often she was too tired. One day she asked me to read to her. So I did. Babar. I had never read a book before.

I still haven’t read Ulysses, but I know what it is, the words on the pages beneath this postcard (a bookmark, which may mean my mother never finished it, either) that seem so at odds with a story about a mother. Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores, then gazes at the veiled mauve light . . .

But not at odds with my mother, who never hid a book or a story from her children.