I can easily imagine anyone reading this thinking that Matthew was my just deserts for being not much of a mother to my other children. The truth is that Donald, now living in Oregon, no longer wished to speak with me or any of his brothers. Allen had two marriages, and his second wife wanted nothing to do with me because I had married a black man. Richard turned out to be like his father, David, a good student type. He’d gone to college, and afterwards made a lot of money working for some stockmarket company in San Francisco. He stayed in touch with me, and would occasionally help me out with a few thousand dollars, but I know he felt I had made a mess of my life. Joel, my fourth child, who had been wild as a teenager, died in a car accident in his late twenties in Chicago. I wasn’t able to attend the funeral.

I’ve tried to be as candid as I know how here, and so I had better go on to say that, after Matthew was born, I began to drink in a way I hadn’t done before. I was always what Mitchell, my second husband, called a short hitter, by which he meant that it didn’t take more than two or three drinks to get me flying. But now I looked forward to the haze curtain that alcohol drew across the sadness of my life with my broken, feelingless last child.

Lloyd understood, or at least he pretended to, when I would go off for two or three days alone and get quietly snockered. I don’t say that he liked it, but he put up with it. What was he going to do about it, anyhow? I had put on weight—maybe 50 or 60lbs—and men no longer hit on me the way they once did, so at least he didn’t have to be jealous. I was as little interested in men as they now were in me. Things had got beyond the stage of guilt and repentance in Lloyd’s and my marriage. I would come home from one of my little benders and pick up the old routine as if nothing had happened. After a while Lloyd stopped asking where I had been.

I watched Lloyd die. He was lifting a steel beam from the back of his pickup, when he stopped, the beam dropped to the street, he clutched his heart and fell forward. I ran out to the street, but he was already gone. He was the husband I was married longest to, and he also treated me best. Ours was hardly an ideal marriage, if such a thing exists. We’d long ago stopped making love or having long conversations. What held us together was our poor sad child.

After Lloyd’s death, I had to put Matthew into an institution. I visited him there, at first every day, then once a week, then less than that. When I would arrive, he made a gurgling sound. I’d put my index finger in his hand, and he grasped it tightly. There was no way that, without Lloyd’s help, I could have brought Matthew home. He died three weeks before his thirtieth birthday, roughly five months after his father.