On My 18th Birthday, My Parents Drove Me to the Ai…

I packed underwear, socks, a second shirt, a toothbrush, and the small paperback I had been reading. I almost packed the framed photo from my desk, then stopped. It was not even really a family photo.

It was a picture from when I was thirteen, taken at a company picnic for my father’s firm. My mother stood beside him in a white blouse. I stood slightly apart, smiling too hard, as if trying to prove I belonged in the frame.

I left it. Downstairs, the house was dim. My father waited by the front door, keys in hand.

He was not my biological father, though I did not know that yet. To me, he was simply Richard Smith, the man whose last name I carried and whose approval I had chased like a dog chasing a car it would never catch. He wore his gray overcoat and the expression he used when a meeting had already gone badly in his head.