stared at the folded clothes. His face took on that wounded expression he
got whenever the world called his bluff. "You must be mighty ashamed
of your old man," he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You think I'm some sort of goddamn charity case."
Dad stood up and put on his bomber jacket. He was avoiding all our eyes.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
Dad just turned up his collar and walked out of the apartment. I listened
to the sound of his boots going down the stairs.
"What did I do?" I asked.
"Look at it from his perspective," Mom said. "You buy him all these nice
new things, and all he has for you is junk from the street. He's the father.
He's the one who's supposed to be taking care of you."
The room was quiet for a while. "I guess you don't want your presents,
either," I said to Mom.
"Oh, no," she said. "I love getting presents."
BY THE FOLLOWING summer, Mom and Dad were heading into their
third year on the streets. They'd figured out how to make it work for
them, and I gradually came around to accepting the notion that whether I
liked it or not, this was how it was going to be. "It's sort of the city's
fault," Mom told me. "They make it too easy to be homeless. If it was
really unbearable, we'd do something different."