The night my parents threw me out, rain needled across the porch light and turned the concrete steps silver.
I remember because I stared at those steps so hard they blurred, as if looking away would make the whole scene turn into a misunderstanding.
It did not.
My mother, Linda, had stood in the kitchen with a dishrag in her hand and a flat, exhausted expression on her face.
My father, Richard, stayed by the sink, avoiding my eyes.
Linda said I had become one more problem in a house already full of them.
Then she told me to pack a bag.
She spoke the way people discuss moving furniture, not losing a daughter.
I was thirteen.
I packed school clothes, two books, a toothbrush, and a photo of myself at age seven before I had learned to brace for bad moods.