small steel town in western Pennsylvania.
By the time she was eighteen, the mill that had once supported nearly everyone there was collapsing, and she understood that staying meant accepting a life someone else had already decided for her.
So she left.
She moved to the city with almost nothing and found work in an accounting office answering phones and organizing files.
That was where she met my father.
He was intelligent, funny, charming—and eventually restless.
When I was four, he left.
There was no dramatic confrontation.
No shouting.
No
