During the summer when I’m ten-years-old, Mom takes us for a walk while we’re visiting at Nanny’s house. This is kind of unusual, as Mom didn’t take many walks with her four girls. At Nanny’s house, Mom spends her time indoors, chats it up with Aunt LaLa, Nanny, and, more often than not, Cousin Lucia, and Great-Aunt Lizzie, who trails whispery smoke from a cigarette as she walks across the street, up the path alongside Grandpa’s zinnia bed, her flowered housecoat hanging loosely on her soft, round form.

Mom was good at nagging about walks. She rarely gave us rides, sometimes due to the break-down of the car, sometimes not. We walked to school, from school, to and from church, the park, the beach, the grocery store.

“When I was a kid, I walked everywhere,” she said.

Never mind if you just didn’t feel like walking sometimes.

Her tone suggests that because she suffers, we must suffer. So, since she walked, we walked.

This particular summer, Mom led the way, Indian single-file style, on the grassy area that surrounds Uncle Pippi’s garden, along the gray-weathered split rail log fence and the paved roads. The garden was on a plot of land shaped like an island, surrounded on all sides by three roads. The neighborhood had been chopped up by the addition of the I-95 Turnpike in the 1950s, cutting off Linden Avenue along one side of the island.

“Girls, your Daddy and I are getting divorced. We won’t be living with him anymore.” said Mom.

I pull a long piece of grass out by its roots and stick it in between my teeth. It twitches nervously, shivers in my mouth. I wonder if Nanny is watching us from her house across the street. I don’t want her looking at us. At me. I don’t like to be looked at, to have any attention turned on me. I don’t want to look at my own feelings.

“Are we going to live at Nanny’s?” Donna asks, relief in her face, round eyes wondering. She is relieved that we are finally leaving Daddy.

“No, Donna, we’re moving to our own apartment,” said Mom.

It was as simple as that. On the outside of the garden, looking in, the end-of-summer decay of garden plants, as they wither and dry, turning in for the winter, the last of their old life dusting down to the dirt of Dear, Sweet, Jesus’ earth.