My cheeks were greeted with a face full of tears. By the time I was fifteen, my mother, an accomplished seamstress, was working with my father at his own business in Manhattan. I’m fifteen years older. My father was wrongfully imprisoned for fourteen years before he became a free man. “Sis, you’ve done just about everything for me. The state gave my father a few thousand dollars as a result of his wrongful conviction, and he got a small apartment in Brooklyn and started work in the garment section of Manhattan while going to college to become an engineer. I managed to get it together enough to say, “Yeah, and any time you think you like my stuff you can plant another one on my mouth.”
She looked at my face with a strange look, and said, “Put down the dishes,” which I did. She moped around. What we did next started a process going that I could never envision just an hour before. I didn’t dare move.