was able to answer Jenny’s question correctly that day because I had grown up in the house of my mother and my father, listening to their terse back-and-forthing every night during dinner and afterward, the clipped allusions to certain events and people (Oh your father, your father, he wasn’t such a hero, believe me); and, during one particular period when I was in my teens, had learned how to read the fraught silences, too, as my father stalked off after dinner to sit at the tiny desk in his room with his head in his hands and my mother cleaned up the floor on her hands and knees, muttering
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