I had been deeply, mutely certain that there was something very wrong with me, that for all this I was to blame. Thirty-five thousand feet in the air, between Minneapolis and San Francisco, that mute certainty began to fall away as if I were a molting animal. There had been something amiss. We didn’t add up. And not because I wasn’t my father’s child but because I—and possibly one or both of my parents—had never known.
