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    YEARS EARLIER . . .
    I’ll never forget the sound my mom had made. It had been a gasp and a sob, like something someone snatched from deep inside her, the core of her heart, dropping it like a punt and kicking it high into the air.
    Then she did the worst thing you could ever imagine.
    I heard the soft scrape of her shoulder blades down the other side of my bedroom wall and the thump of her bottom as it hit the floor. Then, the muted crying. It hurt me, and it cleared the fog of war in my brain.
    I crept across my bedroom floor and opened the door, crunching the pieces of the broken bobblehead beneath my sneakers. “Mom?”
    She had planted her head between her knees and she wore her arms like a hat.
    â€œMom, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked to you that way.”
    She shook her buried head and talked between her ragged breaths. “No. Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry . . . I should have told you a long time ago about your father. I should have talked to youwhen you drew that picture of Julian in kindergarten and asked me. I wanted to. Tell you. But every time I was going to, it just . . . never seemed right.”
    I sat down with my back against the same wall and put a hand between her shoulder blades, against the knobby ladder of her backbone. “It doesn’t matter, Mom. I’ve got you.”
    â€œHe’d be proud of you.” She raised her head, her red-rimmed eyes burning. “He may be proud. I have no idea what he knows or doesn’t know about you. And you’d be proud of him, Ryan. I really think you would. He’s very successful, and he’s not a bad person. He and I . . . we just . . . sometimes adults have different ideas of what life is supposed to be.”
    â€œIs he a . . . does he play? F-football, I mean?”
    My mother laughed at that. “I suppose in high school he did. Not after that. He’s an engineer. Very smart. But he loves the game. That I know. He loves that game.”
    I nodded my head. I liked him already. Smart. An engineer. Football fan. I was hungry for more. “Is he rich?”
    She took a deep breath, uncovered her head, and looked up at me. “You and I are rich. Us. What we have, a family. And we love each other. That’s rich, Ryan. I want you to remember that. So, in that way, no, your father isn’t rich at all. Not by my standards.”
    â€œBut he has a lot of money?” I couldn’t help asking it.
    She sighed and nodded. “And to give credit where credit is due, that’s why we live the way we do.”
    â€œHe pays for things?” I asked.
    She nodded. “Everything.”
    â€œI thought Poppa and Nanna . . .” My grandparents lived inSeattle, in a nice home on Lake Washington. I just figured everyone had a bunch of money. No one I knew really talked about money, so I just assumed my mom had it, like everyone else.
    My mom laughed. “Oh, no. Not that they aren’t comfortable, but your poppa? Not a dime. He didn’t even pay for my college. No, they don’t believe in that.”
    â€œWhat’s my dad do?”
    She took my hand and held it and pulled me next to her so she could drape an arm around my shoulders. It wasone of the warmest moments in my life, sitting there, just the two of us on the floor with the big quiet house my father bought all around us. We were like seeds in the core of some wonderful shiny red apple.
    â€œWell, like I said, he’s an engineer, but he’s more than that now.” It sounded to me like she admired him, maybe even liked him. “He started out as a kind of inventor on a research team for a big company that made medical devices. Then he realized that if he could get his own company going, he could do things faster, even better.”
    â€œSo he just started a company?”
    She laughed. “In our garage.”
    â€œYour garage? You lived with him?”
    She looked