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year at Seneca Vocational High School in Buffalo. Mark was two years older, a senior on the track team. He was from a Polish family in Kaisertown, the German-Polish section of South Buffalo. She was from the North Side, a neighborhood called Kensington-Bailey, a leafy section of town with large houses and wide, quiet streets. They had been together for a year. Mark used to join Lynn’s family on picnics to Emery Park and the beach at Port Colborne, just across the border in Canada. The pregnancy posed a problem.
    She thought about marrying Mark and what that might be like, and she drew a blank. Mark was so meek. He let his family run his life, and whatever free agency remained, he ceded to Lynn. She couldn’t see spending the rest of her life that way. She thought about abortion, but that scared her. Mark was against it, too. They both came from Catholic families. Lynn had trouble processing the idea of giving a baby away. Whenever she thought about it, she’d start to cry.
    For two months, she kept the pregnancy a secret. Finally, in October, she told her mother, Linda. The news was a shock; usually, it was Lynn’s little sister who misbehaved, while Lynn was the one who had always performed well in school and followed the rules. Lynn was too afraid to tell her father, Elmer, so her mother did it for her. When he heard, he punched a hole in the bathroom door. They didn’t speak for months. Her mother told Lynn not to worry, he’d get over it. Meanwhile, Lynn had a decision to make.
    Lynn’s grandmother offered her wedding rings for a ceremony, if that was what Lynn wanted. At the same time, she tried to be candid. “Don’t marry him just because you’re pregnant,” she said. “You make sure you love him.” When Lynn decided to say yes, her grandmother didn’t let up. “Why don’t you live together for a few months?” she suggested. Mark moved in with Lynn and her parents and sure enough, Lynn learned how he really was. He didn’t dote; he hovered. If she got up off the couch to go to the bathroom, Mark would say, “Where are you going?” If she took a phone call, he wanted to know who was calling. She was about seven months pregnant when she told him the wedding was off.
    Her parents feared for her. “You’re going to have to get a job,” Lynn’s mother said. “And you’re going to have to pay for day care.” Lynn agreed to do both.
    Lynn was offered a spot at a different school, one for teenage mothers. She said no. She wanted to stay at her school and graduate like everyone else. Her swollen belly drew catcalls from the boys as she walked the halls. She got into fights. When the instructor in her church’s confirmation class started talking about abortion and locking eyes with her, Lynn walked out and told her mother the bitch was lucky she didn’t slap her in the face. That spring, when she went into labor at a nearby Catholic hospital and the nun in the room tried to quiet her through her pain, Lynn, as furious as she was terrified, cursed her out: “Shut up! You probably haven’t even had sex!”
    Lynn’s baby entered the world on April 14, 1985, after eighteen hours of labor, weighing seven pounds, nine ounces, with a stubborn head that needed coaxing out with forceps. A few weeks earlier, Grandma Mary had died during an epileptic seizure. Lynn named the baby Melissa Mary Barthelemy.
     
    Lynn went back to school six weeks after Melissa was born. After the baby’s three-month checkup, Lynn got a job washing dishes after school at the Manhattan Manor nursing home, a twenty-minute walk from her parents’ house. Lynn didn’t know it then, but she would keep that job for the next twenty-five years.
    Linda and Elmer agreed to help with child care. Melissa spent most of her childhood in their house, a three-bedroom clapboard colonial on Stockbridge Avenue in the neighborhood of Kensington-Bailey. The family had moved there in 1978, when Lynn was in third grade. Elmer had paid nineteen