Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

This was what I was always worried about. When Mom left for the store, I looked at her longingly, as if she was already dead. I loved her so much, it made me want to cry sometimes.

I knew, in that moment, with one single tear running down Peter’s cheek, that Peter was Very Normal. And Peter came from a Very Normal Family. He was always reminding me of this, how his mother served dinner every night at six, meat and three vegetables as a side, even though she worked, and also volunteered, because the Hearts were not criers. They were doers. The first and last time he ever saw his mother cry was when she had to give him cereal for dinner that one night, because she was late coming home from decorating the gym for the eighth-grade dance.

I wanted to remind her that she used to do this. She used to wear makeup while gardening. She used to wear gold earrings to bed. But I knew enough by then to know that it was unfair to use a woman’s past self against her.

I was thinking that there was nothing better in this world than to discover someone who was weird in exactly the same way I was weird. To be weird and then loved for it.

“How do you deal with all of this?” I wanted to learn from Dad. “I compartmentalize it,” he said. “I put it in a box, in some tiny corner of my brain.”

Ray grew up without much money, which is why he likes using it so much. It’s a toy he never got to play with as a kid.

Their careers are all about pretending to know things they don’t really know that well. Knowledge is power, including knowledge a person pretends to have.

He has made millions off this poker face. It is a lawyer’s strength, as well as weakness.