Later, I would learn some truths are better left unknown.
Take, for example, the fact that cockroaches littered our house. Ants crawled up the wall. I was young and inexperienced. I thought everyone had them. I assumed everyone lived like that. Aunt Jeanie used to say the roaches would outlive us. They could outlast a nuclear explosion. I read it in a book, so it made sense. Until the first and only time I brought a classmate home, and I learned other people did not, in fact, live in filth. Jeanie had a very unique housekeeping schedule, which usually picked up right before my father was due home on leave. This was back before I learned how.
“I’ll send you something special when I send the money for the month,” my father said each time he walked out the door. Maybe it absolved his guilt,
