The stacked and layered lives of the tenements, all that intimacy bred a common knowledge. The neighbors knew that my father had
walked out on us. That he had left the apartment to pick up a newspaper on a Sunday morning and never returned. Yet only my
mother and I knew of a letter that arrived six months later.
She began to read it, then stopped and walked into the kitchen
where she turned on a burner. She held the letter for as long as she could while it flamed. And when she finally dropped it into the sink,
the black shards of ash, now lighter than air, first lifted, then floated downward into the running water. “It’s just us now.”