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with his chin.
    "What do you think of the ziti your mother made?" he says.
    I chew. I swallow. I look at him. I look at my mother. She drops her shoulders in exasperation. Now they are both waiting.
    "It's not right, " I mumble, looking at my father. He snorts and shoots my mother a look"Even the kid knows, " he says.
    A Fresh Start
    "SO CAN YOU STAY all day? " my mother asked.
    She was standing over the range, scrambling eggs with a plastic spatula. Toast had already been popped, and a stick of butter sat on the table. A pot of coffee was alongside it. I slumped there, still dazed, having trouble even swallowing. I felt that if I moved too quickly, everything would burst. She had tied an apron around her waist and had acted, in the minutes since I first saw her, as if this were just another day, as if I had surprised her with a visit, and in return, she was cooking me breakfast.
    "Can you, Charley?" she said. "Spend a day with your mother? " I heard the sizzling of butter and eggs.
    "Hmm? " she said.
    She lifted the fry pan and approached. "Why so quiet? "
    It took a few seconds to find my voice, as ifI were remembering instructions on how to do it. How do you talk to the dead? Is there another set of words? A secret code?
    "Mom, " I finally whispered. "This is impossible.
    She scooped the eggs from the pan and chop-chop chopped them on my plate. I watched her veined hands work the spatula.
    "Eat," she said.
    AT SOME POINT in American history, things must have changed, and divorcing parents informed their children as a team. Sat them down.
    Explained the new rules. My family collapsed before that age of enlightenment; when my father was gone, he was gone.
    After a few weepy days, my mother put on lipstick, did her eyes with mascara, cooked up some fried potatoes, and said, as she handed us our plates, "Dad isn't going to live here anymore." And that was that.
    It was like a set change in a play.
    I can't even remember when he got his stuff. One day we came home from school and the house just seemed more roomy. There was extra space in the front hall closet. The garage was missing tools and boxes.
    I remember my sister crying and asking, "Did I make Daddy go away?" and promising my mother that she would behave better if he came home. I remember wanting to cry myself, but it had already dawned on me that there were now three of us, not
    four, and I was the only male. Even at eleven felt a obligation to manhood.
    Besides, my father used to tell me to "buck up” whenever I cried.
    "Buck up, kid, buck up. " And, like all children whose parents split, I was trying to behave in a way that would bring the missing one back.
    So no tears, Chick. Not for you.
    FOR THE FIRST few months, we figured it was temporary. A spat. A cooling-off period. Parents fight, right? Ours did. My sister and I would lie at the top of the staircase listening to their arguments, me in my white undershirt and she in her pale yellow pajamas and ballerina slippers. Sometimes they argued about us:
    "Why don't you handle it for once, Len?" "It's not that big a deal. "
    "Yes it is! And I'm always the witch who has to tell them!" Or about work:
    "You could pay more attention, Posey! Those people at the hospital aren't the only ones who matter!"
    "They're sick, Len. You want me to tell them I'm sorry, but my husband needs his shirts ironed?"
    Or about my baseball:
    "It's too much, Len!"
    "He could make something of himself. "
    "Look at him! He's exhausted all the time!"
    Sometimes, sitting on those steps, my sister would put her hands over her ears and cry. But I tried to listen. It was like sneaking into a grown-up world. I knew my father worked late and in the last few years, he'd gone on overnight trips to his liquor distributors, telling my mother, “Posey if you don't schmooze these guys, they gut you like a fish." I knew that he was setting up another store in Collingswood, about an hour away, and he worked there a few days a week. I knew a new store would