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looks happy to celebrate another year in my life. Those weightless images don’t flick in the View-Master of my memory bank when I recall my parents’ marriage; it’s always the scene of Dad sobbing, Cori with the blood-soaked towel, and Mom, defeated, bleeding on her bedroom floor.
    It’s the only memory I have of my parents in the same room. Mom told me later that there were other women and other suicide attempts. Dad told me she was possessive and wasn’t afraid to confront his other women. It would take decades for those disparate early memories of my parents to fuse: Dad’s secret visits to Dara; Mom’s anguish slashed through her veins; Dad being kicked out shortly thereafter. Mom said that Chad and I spent a lot more time at Dad’s mistress’s town house than I remember.
    “While I was at work, you guys were at her house playing with her kids,” Mom told me, and she wasn’t wrong. Years later, when I was well into adulthood, I finally met my youngest sister, the product of Dad’s affair with Dara. She showed us a video of Chad and me at a playground with her other two half-siblings, in which Dad and Dara’s voices call out our names from behind the camcorder.
    When our parents split, Mom returned to Grandma’s house with me, Cori, and Chad. Dad protested that he wanted his boys back, and they agreed that Chad would live with him; I’d stay with Mom. Chad, whose skin was as yellow as the corn bread on the Jiffy box, says he remembers crying every time he saw a plane in the California sky, hoping I was on it to be with him and Dad. I imagined his big black eyes swollen with tears as he looked up in hope.
    Selfishly, I wasn’t mourning our separation, because I had Mom all to myself. I was the baby now. Being beside Mom as she read her paperbacks and snacked on canned tuna spread over Hawaiian soda crackers and crunched on cups of ice—that was home. But Mom wasn’t all mine for long. She soon found another man, one she moved in with, leaving me at Grandma’s.
    Sitting on Grandma’s couch, I meditated on Mom’s belly, which carried my baby brother. I was excited to have another sibling and assumed that, with his birth, she would get a place big enough for all of us. When Jeffrey was born in August 1989, Mom and Dad made plans to send me to Oakland to be with Chad. “We never should’ve separated the two of you,” Mom later told me.
    The seven-year-old in the adult me can hear the silent outbursts. What about you and me? What about us? But I knew the answer to my unspoken protests: Mom was moving on, starting anew, and in order to fulfill the promise of new love, she had to discard her past. Like Cori and Cheraine, who were initially denied by my mother when she met my father, I represented her past, a remnant of her failure. Mom needed to travel light, so she sent her baggage to Oakland in 1990, and I wouldn’t see her for another five years.

Chapter Two
    I learned to ride a bike without training wheels atop a hill in an Oakland-area park. I was just seven years old and terrified of Dad’s accelerated cycling method. Chad stared Dad’s challenge in the face and excelled.
    “There you go!” Dad applauded. “That’s how you do it right there.”
    Hovering over my seat, I watched Dad clapping and smiling his starry smile as Chad made that steep hill his bitch. He was pedaling fast while our father’s gold-toothed grin broadened, as if those pedals were a jack that lifted Dad’s entire pleasure and pride system.
    “Hit the brakes, baby!” he shouted when Chad reached the bottom of that grassy mount, conquering his first solo ride.
    Placing his hands on my handlebars, Dad leveled his face to mine. I could see him rummaging his mind for the words to coax me down that hill, something he never had to do with Chad. There was a natural ease in my father’s interactions with my brother that was nonexistent in our relationship.
    “Just start off slow. And once you feel yourself going faster,