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City and married him in 1964, a month after they graduated from high school. She had Sarah in 1966 and me in 1967, after my father was drafted and went off to Vietnam. I never laid eyes on my father; he was shipped home in a body bag by the time I was born.
    Ma provided for my sister and me as best she could by working as a bookkeeper for a small roofing company and taking in other people’s laundry. She didn’t talk much, and when she did, it was usually a bitter tirade against Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. She never dated another man and hardly ever left the house. Her only real requirement of me was:
    ”Get an education, Joey.”
    ”Sarah’s getting out of jail today,” I said. ”I hope she’s going to stay at my house for a while. Caroline was supposed to go down and talk to her sometime this morning.”
    Her eyes dropped at the mention of Sarah and she began to shake her head.
    ”My own flesh and blood in jail,” she said. ”Tell me where I went wrong.”
    ”No sense in beating yourself up over it. She is what she is. It isn’t your fault.”
    ”You better lock up your valuables, Joey. She’ll haul the whole house off if you give her the chance.”
    ”Sarah wouldn’t steal from me, Ma.” In fact, Sarah had stolen from me in the past, but I’d never told Ma about it.
    ”Well, she’s stole from me, plenty of times.”
    ”Maybe she’s changed. You looked sad when I came in. What’s the matter?”
    ”I was thinking about Raymond.” She reached for a tissue beside the bed and dabbed at her eyes. Raymond was Ma’s younger brother. He drowned at the age of seventeen. ”Such a waste.”
    ”No, it wasn’t,” I said before I realized what was coming out of my mouth. ”Don’t spend any tears on him, Ma. That’s a waste.”
    ”Joey, you’ve never had a kind word to say about your uncle. What did Raymond ever do to you?”
    I shook my head, not wanting to get into it. She hadn’t mentioned him in years. ”He wasn’t a good person.”
    ”He just needed—”
    ”Ma, could we please not talk about Raymond?
    You’re entitled to your opinion; I’m entitled to mine.”
    I wanted to tell her what my opinion was based on, but I didn’t see the point. It had happened so long ago, and Ma was dying. There was no sense in sullying whatever pleasant memories she had of her only brother.
    I managed to get her mind off of Raymond and onto my son Jack’s baseball prospects for a little while, but then, like a sudden change in the weather, she looked at me as though she’d never seen me before.
    ”What are you doing here?” she said. ”Who are you?” It was a fast transformation, even for her, like some inner switch had been flipped. Even the pitch in her voice changed.
    ”It’s me, Ma. I’m Joe. Your son.”
    ”Why are you wearing that tie? You some kind of big cheese or something?”
    ”No, Ma. I’m not a big cheese.”
    ”Where’s Raymond?”
    ”Raymond’s dead.”
    She let out a long sigh and stared at the ceiling.
    ”Ma? Can you hear me?”
    She didn’t respond. She lay motionless, almost catatonic. I looked over at the bedside dresser. On top of it were several photos of our fractured family.
    There was one of my grandfather, wearing bib overalls and following a plow pulled by a mule through a cornfield. There was a framed photograph of me walking across the stage at my law school graduation ceremony. Next to it, in a smaller frame, was a black-and-white of Sarah and me when I was seven years old. We were standing on a plank raft in the middle of a half-acre pond out back of my grandparents’
    home. Both of us were grinning from ear to ear. Two of my front teeth were missing.
    Just to the right of that photo was a slightly larger one of Uncle Raymond, taken about six months before he died. He was seventeen years old, standing next to a doe that had been shot, hung from a tree limb, and gutted. He held a rifle in his left hand and a cigarette in his right. I walked over and picked