A few years later, my Papa left my grandmother for another woman, and my aunt’s husband became schizophrenic. In each case I watched women I thought were strong morph into shells of themselves, and the lessons I took from all this were complicated: you could not trust a man to be there indefinitely, and you couldn’t allow yourself to need one. My grandmother was the strongest woman I had known until a man took her money, her pride, and her heart.
