I'm usually more disciplined than this. It is morning, and fall, and I sit here in the kitchen, looking out the window. On the table next to me are two papers to referee, and a dissertation I'm supposed to review. My consulting business, which brings in the real money, is starting to get behind. I'll be overdue on some projects if I don't get busy soon. I should take all my work and go to one of my offices, because I don't work well at home, but in five days I fly back to Lawrence to get Zack, and all I can do is sit here and think of Melody and my mother, and look at my beleaguered husband. He is struggling with the brush along the fence behind our house. He does his best, but he's as ineffectual at this as at everything else he tries. It's why I married him. I knew he would put up with anything from me. How I have made him suffer, and what satisfaction it gave me.

Soon he'll come in and kiss me on the forehead, and then go to the water cooler (not the sink, because the water in the cooler is pure) and pour his usual glass of water. He's careful to do everything he should, including drinking however many glasses are recommended daily, and brushing his teeth immediately after every meal. He keeps a toothbrush at work.

He will sit with me while he takes his break. He'll want to gauge my mood. He'll say something like, "I let the brush get out of hand again."

If I say, "Yes," or change the subject, or in any other way don't disagree with him, don't absolve him, he will sit in silence until he finishes his water, and then go outside to finish his work.

But if I say, "It's not so bad. Didn't you clear it out last fall?" or, "No problem, as long as it's done before summer. It looks like you can finish today," then he will be happy, and he will stay and talk.

Perhaps his next gambit will be, "Why don't we go to that new Indian restaurant Saturday?" knowing full well that I won't be in town.

I'll remind ("remind") him, "I'll be gone. I'm going to get Zack."

He wants to come, and he'll offer to, again, saying, "I want to go. I'm going to be his father,"

And again I'll say that "I'd rather go alone." Instead of continuing with, "You'd distract me," I will edit myself and say it this way: "Zack knows me. Besides, his mother died, then his grandma, and he's been staying with Nina but she's old, and the court isn't happy because she isn't a blood relative. This is going to be tricky. The poor kid needs -- I don't know. Security. Reassurance. I think it will be more complicated if we're both there. I want him to know he'll be safe. I want to concentrate on him." It occurs to me now, what I should have thought of long ago, that I may need to give up my business and cut back on my schedule at the University.

My husband would distract me. I can't be worried about two children. No, that's a bit extreme. But I won't be able to take care of both of them there. It will be tricky enough once we're all home together, but the equation in Lawrence would be unsolvable with an extra unknown. I've never been a mother before, and I want to start right.

He'll fall silent, as he tends to do when hurt. This time, to comfort him, because comfort is what he wants and needs, I'll reach for his hand, and hold it, and say, "Zack needs all my attention." I will explain that, "I'm not doing this to hurt you. I only want to do what's best for Zack, and our new family." There's suffering enough. I no longer want to hurt my husband, if I ever truly did. I no longer want to make more pain for anyone. I've spent my life being selfish. Now that ends.

I hope I can be a better mother than I was a daughter. I hated being a child, and tried to break the bonds and boundaries of that state. I felt adult, so I should have been accepted as one, but wasn't, and I resented that, and decided to ignore the expectations and behave grown up anyway. But to do that I had to avoid the company of anyone old enough to have an existence independent of their parents. This baffled my mother, because she treated everyone alike, and wanted the children to join her famous kitchen-table discussions. Only Melody did, I think to charm the men. She had nothing else to contribute. Ever the little blond angel, people had only to look at her to abandon their critical faculties. She was beautiful (though Mama was more) but above all she had a liveliness that charmed men and women both. It annoyed me then. I pitied her later.

As for me, austerity is the style. I never wanted to charm, as my sister did. I wanted to control. I wanted to seem doubt-free. I wanted a coterie of admirers to do my bidding. I succeeded too well, but only later, after I got more cunning. As early as sixth grade I was trying. I was perfectly dressed. I hated gym class because it was impossible to get through without at least a little mess, but even there, I learned to keep disorder to the minimum. The girls thought I was stuck up. The boys stayed away from me because I towered over them. But I refused to slouch like other tall girls. I took dance for years, especially ballet, not only for my posture, but also as an achievement for my curriculum vitae. Life was a career to be advanced. I don't understand any longer why I always had to calculate. But it's too late. The listing of goals, and the making of plans and carrying them out has become a habit, one that seems likely to hang around like a dog that followed me home and never left.

Mama was the star around whom our separate planets revolved. She had dark eyes, and pale skin, and bright red hair, and she was little. She always remained a girl: hopeful, trusting, naive. I used to imagine that when I was born, she passed on to me all her adult characteristics and took my childlike ones for herself, so that I was born old and she grew younger, and remained so. But she doted on me as no one else did, always saying when I did well in school how proud she was (though, unlike her, who did well in everything, I did very well in what interested me and pulled Bs in other subjects), and how "elegant" I was. I think she admired my clothes sense: that ability to dress well, and achieve a certain consistent style, and to do my hair attractively, and adorn myself in every way. But she never would have thought to try these things herself. She wore no jewelry except her wedding ring, and that only in public, a habit she retained even as a widow. She owned and wore no makeup, ever. Her hair was unevenly cut; she did it herself, with scissors, and never quite got the knack. She didn't care. She noticed only what was outside herself. She never focused on her appearance, or even on her own feelings. Sometimes she forgot to eat, until I reminded her, and then she would agree that yes, she was hungry, her stomach hurt. I think this outer-directedness made it difficult to know how she felt, and therefore to decide what she wanted to do.

If you asked me how she looked and acted, I would paint you the picture I remember, of her walking home from school, standing at a corner, listening to one of her students. In winter she always wore that shabby dark old cloth coat, but the times of year I remember best are spring and fall, when she would wear one of the plain cotton dresses that always embarrassed me for her. She was dowdy. She favored brown shoes and white ankle socks. You would have thought she was a spinster, not a wife and mother of three. She always dressed that drab way, and stood and listened to her students, who loved her, smiling on them. Mama smiled more than anyone I've ever known. I never understood how she could be so happy.

My mother. How I love her now, and how ashamed I am for the ingratitude I showed. She adored us, but she wasn't effective. She wasn't calculating enough. Her way with me was to show pain and disappointment and puzzlement. This only made me feel guilty and annoyed, and determined to hide my transgressions better.

Though I loved her and the others (without knowing), I never felt part of the family. From the earliest, when I spent my summers in New York instead of in Costa Rica with the rest of them, I felt alien and excluded. Like everything else, this was wrong and not true, but I was too stupid to know that. Whatever the reason, I felt that I was at two removes from my family, trapped in that warm and chaotic unit, in which I was the only one too frozen to share the feelings that flowed back and forth among them with startling speed and ease. I watched from behind my glass wall, the sound of their voices muted, my hands pressed against the cold thing I could feel but not see, longing to join them.

Writing this is difficult for me, not only because I don't reveal myself easily, but also because I hesitate, I can't organize what to say. I edit, repeatedly, before I put pen to page, and the page remains an empty white reproach. There is too much ambiguity, too much possibility; I don't know how to begin, or end. I want to turn instead to what I know, the only bulwark against uncertainty, the one certain path to immortality. It was inevitable that I became a mathematician.