FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY
"What is this one?"
"Don't know yet," he says, same answer as always. Then: "How old are you turning?"
I look at him. "Twenty. Why?"
He shrugs, mixing something on his palette. "You seem older. I keep forgetting." He pauses. "When?"
"Eight weeks," I say, and something in saying the number out loud makes it more real, the milestone sitting there on the calendar with increasing solidity, twenty years old in Paris, a full decade from the ten-year-old whose mother started making bad decisions and never quite stopped.