My dad, Dennis, was spending time with a woman named Linda, who would eventually become my stepmother. Linda and Dennis met when they worked in the same office. I think of my mother now, her husband leaving her for someone else. She was alone, taking care of the child and working full-time as a teacher. Then, I’d return all giddy and insensitive with stories about swimming, blabbering away about the new lady and her waterbed, no grasp of the hurt, the resentment. How that must have pierced her heart. “It takes two,” my mother says. “I had a role, too.” I’ve always found it strange that my
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