I’ll never forget my mother’s startled and hurt expression when she overheard us that day. We hadn’t noticed her walk into the room. She looked at us for a moment, and then she just turned around and walked out. It was like the sun going behind a cloud. And now, I sometimes relive that moment when I detect even a small measure of disquietude in my mother’s face, in the same way that I experience a twinge of pain after a glance at a scar on my hand.
“So, what happened?” Hannah asks.
“Well, nothing at first. When my mother heard us, she just walked out of the room. Later we made up this story that Carla so liked the expression ‘oops-a-daisy’ when we tossed her around that we were calling her ‘Oops’ for short. It might have worked too, except that my father ignored us, picked up Carla and s
