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a ring with our birthstone. One time he took us to a double feature of his two favorite James Bond movies— Thunderball and Goldfinger . That was supposed to be a secret except that when Patty came home, she told our mother she wanted to get a cat and name her Pussy Galore.
    Our mother had been, briefly, the object of our father’s adoration, but he moved on early, while she stayed in the same place. Hard to say which one of them gave up on the other first, but it happened, and once it did, there seemed no way back for either of them. Our mother must have seen him slipping away—like a piece of an iceberg that breaks off and drifts out to sea to form a whole new continent—and there was nothing to do about it but stand there and watch him go.
    H E MOVED OUT WHEN Iwas eight, Patty six. After that he lived in an apartment back in the city, with a hideaway bed for Patty and me when we came to visit, which we hardly ever got to do. We stayed at old number 17, with its small dark rooms and thin walls through which the sound could be heard of cars on the highway, and keeping a secret would have been impossible. It was through those too-thin walls I learned the reason for my father’s departure. A woman of course. Margaret Ann.

 

    Chapter Three
    I n the early years, when our father still lived with us, there was a set time when we ate dinner. Our father’s cooking filled our house with wonderful smells: onions and oregano simmering in the tomato sauce, and garlic of course. Red wine on the table, and candles, even on weeknights. Music, always.
    Our mother tried cooking for a while after he moved out, but she gave up on that early on. Then we were left to heat up frozen dinners or soup. The good nights were the times our father came to take us out to the restaurant we favored, Marin Joe’s, where we had our special booth and the waitresses all knew what to bring us: a plate of spaghetti with marinara sauce, garlic bread, tiramisu.
    Back on Morning Glory Court, there never seemed to be enough money. We got used to the fact that we didn’t get TV at our house anymore. We owned an old Zenith, but its sole function was to hold a plant, and the piles of books our mother brought home from the library, the bills that came and sat, mostly unopened, until their replacements showed up, with even bigger print on the front, in red: Last Chance .
    In those first days after they disconnected the cable, my sister had drawn a picture exactly the size of the TV screen, which she taped on the front where the pictures used to be, featuring a person who looked like a news anchorman with a bubble coming out of his mouth and the words “Traggic News!” (The spelling is Patty’s.) “The Torricelli Girls cant watch their favorite shows any more! Mean mother says USE IMAGINASHUN.” Now even Patty’s drawing was barely visible, since the philodendron leaves had wound their way over the front of the set, curling clear to the floor.
    The notion of a life without TV had felt harsh, briefly, though in truth, we replaced it with better. We invented a ritual called Drive-In Movie for watching our shows. When darkness fell—earlier in fall and spring; later in summer—we cruised the backyards of the houses along Morning Glory Court until we found a spot in the backyard of one of them where the TV set was on. This part was never difficult. Every house on Morning Glory Court featured an identical picture window, and at nearly every one the TV set had been placed directly in front of it, facing that hillside. All we had to do was find a set tuned to a channel we liked and hunker down low to look inside and watch.
    Mostly we’d position ourselves in the yard of our elderly neighbors, Helen and Tubby. Their viewing habits weren’t always to our taste, but they had the biggest TV, which made it easier to make out the faces on the screen.
    We’d lay out a blanket—the one we’d used for