Her choice for a second husband was the polar opposite of my kind and merry father, who was, I always thought, too good for this world. One of the first things my stepfather did was to take the house my dad was so proud of and sell it. He also gave away my father’s dog, a basset hound named Prudence. Erasing all those parts of my father seemed a weird flex, and my mother—whose own life had gone off the rails so abruptly—did not resist.
