Because I know what Ty would want now.

He’d want me to return the picture to this frame.

He’d want me to tell Dad.

To make it right.

I put the photo in my pocket and return the collage to its place behind the door. I turn the light off.

“No,” I whisper to the empty room.

Upstairs, I go to my closet and get out my suitcase. And I start packing.

13 March

My dad left our family on a Tuesday morning in July. I was 15 that summer, and Ty was 13. It was 9 months before Ty would go on his little escapade with the 63 Advil and ask Dad to come home, 3 years ago now, although it feels like longer.

I was brushing my teeth when it happened.

Dad appeared in the mirror behind me, and he said, “Hi, Lexie. You and I need to have a talk.”

My first thought was that he was going to lecture me about how little brain-work I’d been doing that summer. That’s what he called it—not homework but “brain-work,” stuff to keep my brain in shape during the months I was out of school. So I wouldn’t lose anything, he always said. So I would stay sharp.

But it wasn’t about brain-work.

It was about him moving out.

“Why?” I asked him, stunned, but I don’t remember how he answered. I just remember that he said he was going to live at a house in town. With a woman, he said. Who he’d fallen in love with.

I couldn’t get my head around it.

“Everything is going to be okay, Peanut,” he said.

That was the last time he ever called me that.

I said, “I love you, Daddy.” Like maybe I could talk him out of it.

He said he loved me, too, and he took me by the hand and led me out to the living room, where Mom was sitting on the couch, crying so hard she was having trouble breathing. I sank down beside her.

Ty appeared in the doorway. He’d heard her crying from the basement. He looked scared, like he wanted to run away. Dad took him by the shoulders and walked him out to the back porch. I could see him through the window as Dad told him, his face folding in on itself as he tried to hold back his tears.

Dad brought him inside. Ty sat down on the other side of Mom. He took her hand. She stopped crying long enough to say, “Mark. Don’t do this.”

We looked up at Dad.

“I love you all,” he said.

Then he turned and walked out the front door. We listened to his truck rumble to life. We listened to it crunch down the gravel driveway. We listened to the sound of his engine getting farther and farther away. And then he was gone.

Somewhere over the next few hours the details came out: Dad had been having an affair with the secretary. Mom had known about it for months.

I could see, in that hindsight-is-20/20 way, that both of my parents had been acting strangely for a while. Dad working late. Coming home smelling of cigarettes. Mom speaking to us more sharply than usual, trying to keep the house perfectly clean and organized, dinner on the table at precisely 6 p.m., running to reapply her lipstick when she heard him coming up the driveway. Like if everything was in place, if our home life was perfect enough, he would stop what he was doing.

There were signs. I was just too caught up in my own thing to catch on.

The only clue I’d noticed that summer was the dog. Our golden retriever, Sunny, had been lying around looking mournful. Whimpering. Not eating.

“What’s wrong with Sunny?” I’d asked about a week before Dad steamrolled us with the news. “I think she’s depressed. Can dogs get depressed?”

“I don’t know,” Mom had said. A lie.

“Do you think they make Prozac for dogs?” I’d joked. And she’d laughed. Which was also a lie. Mom knew that Sunny knew. The dog was there after everyone but Mom had gone to sleep. Sunny watched her cry.

At some point during that day, Mom’s best friend, Gayle, showed up and tried to give my mom a pep talk. Gayle’s husband had divorced her a few years earlier, and I remember that she kept saying, over and over, “You’ll get through this, Joan. You’ll be stronger for it.”

But Mom just shook her head, wringing the tissue in her hands into smaller and smaller shreds.

We went out for pizza for dinner. Because Dad never let us go out for pizza. Because Dad was a tightwad. While we were eating, Ty, who’d been quiet for nearly the entire time, said, “I’m glad he’s gone.”

“Don’t say that, honey,” Mom said.

“No. I am. I’m glad,” Ty said, his voice cracking on the word glad.

That night, after Mom went to bed, Ty woke me.

“Come on,” he said, and I didn’t ask questions; I slipped into some jeans and followed him outside. Under a full moon we walked to the park, to this rocky area behind the baseball field. Ty carried a cloth grocery bag and a metal baseball bat. He handed me the bag. It was full of bottles of Dad’s old cologne.

“Put one right there,” Ty directed. I set a bottle of Old Spice on the rocks in front of him.

Ty took a deep breath. He closed his eyes, like he was sending up a prayer or making a wish, then opened them again.

“He’s a cheater,” he said, and brought the bat down hard. The bottle shattered, and the smell of the cologne washed over us, so strong I felt nauseated.

“Now you.” Ty handed me the bat.

I got out another bottle. Polo. My favorite on Dad. I’d given it to him for Father’s Day one year.

“He’s a liar,” I said, and swung as hard as I could.