In the blink of an eye, one of my greatest fears came to pass.

After a return of only a few years, my mother disappeared almost as suddenly as she had reappeared. Everything in my world suddenly went to white noise—an infinite grainy uncertainty. When I blinked again, I found myself twelve blocks west at my Uncle Willie’s house on Nineteenth and Meineke—where I would live for most of the next three years. It was as though the script I was living one day got switched and I had to just jump in the next day with a new script and a whole new cast of characters, without asking any questions.

Unlike the evasive reactions I’d gotten to questions at Uncle Archie’s house when I was much younger, or the way that my mother would answer a question generally or partially, whenever I asked questions at Uncle Willie’s house, he or his wife Ella Mae gave no response at all, like I was talking a foreign language.