After she read the article, my mother moved in slow motion, the muscles on her face slack. She cooked dinner with the kitchen lights off, except for a dim light shining from under one cabinet. But in a few days she’d recovered herself and her sense of humor, and she sent my father a picture of me sitting naked on a chair in our house, wearing only those Groucho Marx joke glasses with the big plastic nose and fake mustache. “I think it’s your kid!” she wrote on the back of the picture. He had a mustache then, and wore glasses and had a big nose. In response, he sent her a check for five hundred
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