Walk Away, a memoir

First Step

Photo by Raphael Nast on Unsplash

In the summer after my sophomore year of high school, my mother returned unexpectedly from one of her angry abandonments of the family. My boyfriend and I were sliding our nakedness together in the finished basement of my parents’ oceanfront home when I heard the kitchen door slam shut and her high heels tick-tick-ticking against the flagstone floor. By the time she started down the stairway, Jimmy and I’d…