We were gypsies, we were grifters, we were untenured faculty. After I was born, my mother left her beloved Manhattan and we embarked on the wandering life of an adjunct poetry professor, which as you might expect is about as lucrative as it was in Chaucer's day, adjusted for inflation. "And where are you from, Prudence?" Mrs. Litwin or Barone or Vasquez would chirp as I stood up before yet another elementary-school class, and I'd proudly recite, "New York and Cleveland and Durham and Lackawanna and..." I must have sounded like a train conductor.
     I probably didn't appreciate how little money Ada had. I thought we were traveling light because it was the cool thing to do. Freebird! Even her weird side jobs, I chalked up to research. Weren't writers always supposed to be gathering life experience? (That excuse didn't work too well when Freddy Herkimer and I cut fourth-grade math to sneak into the junior high sex-education class, however.) The most normal job my mother had was being a bank teller. She told me her hero T.S. Eliot had also worked in a bank. I was about seven then, so we must have been in North Carolina, and at first I thought she was talking about Eliot our pet parrot. He must have had an interesting life for a bird, but how could he process the deposit slips without any fingers? Ada thought this was really funny and told all the girls at the bank, which annoyed me, and annoyed her even more when they didn't know who T.S. Eliot was. The next year we moved to Buffalo and she signed up to sell bootleg T-shirts at Goo Goo Dolls concerts.
     When winter put an end to the concert season, Ada somehow managed to get a job in the university chem lab, although she knew nothing about science. The professor was this old Southern guy who was always licking his lips and smoothing his hair back. I think he liked her legs. I grew to associate the smells of acetone and lab gloves with my mother's goodnight kiss and the stories she told me at bedtime.
     We didn't read normal children's books. The closest we came was Sylvia Plath's The Bed Book, a dreamy blue picture book whose cover-flap bio gave no hint of her final sleep. Ada wasn't much in the cutesy-animal line. But we had a blast acting out the feminist fairy tales from The Maid of the North, an anthology we found one day in a used bookstore. My favorite was "Maria Morevna," about a Russian girl who rescued a prince from the evil wizard Koschei the Deathless. I was the girl, of course, and Mom did this spooky wizard thing with her black poncho that gave me chills in a good way. Every now and then she would throw in some really strange reading material, such as Coleridge's "Geraldine" (a/k/a "my dad is marrying a lesbian vampire!") or Emily Dickinson, who I'm ashamed to say bored me tremendously. All that twittering away about birds and flowers. We didn't get much pastoral beauty in Cleveland.
     I was glad my mom was so different from other people. It wasn't her fault that the other kids teased me for not knowing anything about Barney or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. We were proud. We were one of a kind. Like the Marines.
     I wanted to be a storyteller too. People asking questions about my dad gave me the perfect opportunity. I didn't know anything about him, so it wasn't really lying. There was a chance that he could be a botanist in Africa (I was very impressed with myself for knowing this word) or a coach for the 1992 U.S. Olympic swim team (I took care to point out one of the guys at the back of the pool who wasn't getting much attention from the TV cameras). When I claimed he'd gone down with the Challenger shuttle, though, Mrs. Litwin called Ada to say I was being sacrilegious.
     Mom took me to the Stavros Diner on Hertel Avenue, where we conducted all our important family business. We hated our apartment in Buffalo, which had brown wallpaper and a green fridge. The diner was perfect, big and warm, with a checkerboard floor and tight vinyl cushions and little pink plastic ashtrays that looked like candy dishes. Even being forced to join Ada for dinner with the skanky professor one time couldn't blunt its appeal. Mr. Stavros would let us sit as long as we wanted over a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I ate a lot of egg salad sandwiches that year.
     As usual, Ada got right down to business. "Why are you making up stories about your father?"
     "Because every time we move, I have to answer the same dumb questions all over again. Where am I from, what's my dad's name, what does he do, where is he now..."
     "Why can't you just tell them you don't know?"
     I was surprised that she wasn't coming down harder on me. She seemed kind of embarrassed, unsure of herself. I pressed my unexpected advantage. "Because that's dumb. Even the divorced kids know who their dad is. Everybody knows who their dad is. Except long-lost fairy princesses." I felt I had to add that qualifier for the sake of honesty.
     "It's nothing that exciting, believe me."
     "Then why can't I keep making things up? No one will know, we'll just move away like we always do."
     Ada looked uncharacteristically defeated. Like I said, it hadn't occurred to me that maybe she wouldn't have chosen to live the way we did. She attacked from another angle.
     "You shouldn't make up stories about tragedies that belonged to real people. Somebody really did lose their dad in the shuttle crash. That's not nice to them, to pretend it was you."
     "I'm sorry." I did feel guilty, since she put it that way. But if truth was so important, why hadn't she told me more of it? A thought struck me. I'd recently finished the Classic Comics version of Great Expectations.
     "Is he...is my dad an ex-convict?" That would explain why he hadn't come to see us. Maybe he had tried to find us, but because we kept changing our address so often, the slow prison mail system couldn't keep up. There could be birthday cards for me piling up in the Duke University faculty mailroom.
     Ada forgot she already had a cigarette burning in the pink ashtray, lit another one, then picked up the first one in her other hand, unable to make a decision. Part of me wanted to see her smoke them both at once, even if it meant delaying the answer to my question.
     "Prue, your father is..." She abandoned the cigarettes and took refuge in her coffee cup instead. "He's not a bad person, he just can't be with us right now."
     "Why? What did he do?"
     "He didn't do anything. Sometimes these things just happen, between people."
     "What kind of things?" I was only eight then. Parents weren't supposed to act like the weather: one day you wake up and it's sunny, the next day it's a tornado, oh well, goodbye house, nothing you can do.
     "Your dad and I loved each other, but he has to be with his other family now."
     "How did he get another family? Aren't we his family?"
     Ada's expression was pained. Maybe she was wondering how something that seemed clear to me could have felt so full of sweet ambiguity to two educated grownups. That must be why the human race keeps having kids. Just think of all the dumb things you wouldn't do if you had to explain them to an eight-year-old.
     "Well, you see, they were his family first, so he had to go back to them."
      "Why couldn't he have more than one?"
     "That's not how it works. There are some relationships you're not supposed to share with anyone else. Like, for instance, I'm your only mom. If you brought home Mrs. Litwin, or Andrea's mom, and said from now on she was going to be your mom too, I'd be sad."
     "What does that have to do with why my dad doesn't come to see us?"
     Ada sighed. I imagine the same look must have crossed her face — bewildered, exasperated, finally resigned to her unjust fate — when trying to explain the Cantos of Ezra Pound to a room of cheerful 19-year-old meatheads. "When two people fall in love and get married, they promise not to have any other family. Your dad was afraid it would hurt his wife and their little boy if they knew about you and me."
     I hated these people, whoever they were. I pictured a stuck-up woman like Daniel Frye's mom, in my third-grade class, who sent the teacher a note nearly every day about how her precious boy was allergic to peanut butter or glue or fingerpaint or getting his hair wet. "So they don't have to know, do they? He could still call us sometime."
     "Nathan couldn't do that. He's an honest man." The way she said it, though, honesty sounded nothing like a compliment.
     I mashed the rest of my egg salad sandwich into my mouth. It was gooey and thick, like a lump in my throat. At least I knew his name now, though oddly it made him seem smaller and less real — all the towering possibilities popped like a balloon, reduced to a hard knot of torn rubber that was no good for playing let's-pretend.
     "Nathan what? Is his last name Porter, like ours?"
     "No, that's my name." Ada seemed to regret the little information she'd let slip. "Prue, I really don't want to talk about him anymore. I'll tell you the rest when you're older, I promise."
     Was there a magic age when you were allowed to know everything, but it didn't suck yet? As far as I could see, grownups were always trying to be younger, even Ada, who said she didn't care what anybody thought of her, but had been known to tweeze a white hair out of her black eyebrows on at least one occasion. "Then what should I say to the other kids when they ask where he is?"
     "Tell them he's a lawyer in Brooklyn, and we got divorced when you were just a baby, so you don't remember him."
     "But that's not true!"
     "It's also not true that he's a dead astronaut or a circus magician."
     "Well, he could have been."
     "So I could have been his wife." And this, even I could recognize, was a statement with which one argued at one's peril. I slurped my cranberry juice in feeble protest.
     Thus I learned that there were good lies and bad lies, just as my father had his good family and his bad one. And thus it was that I apologized to Mrs. Litwin, in what I hoped was a sufficiently traumatized voice, for making up stories because I was having trouble dealing with my parents' breakup. In return I got a squishy hug and a picture book called Dinosaurs Divorce. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't take relationship advice from creatures that went extinct.
     My mother moved us to Massachusetts the following year, having secured (at last!) a tenure-track position teaching Victorian literature at Boston College. I heard a rumor later, at a faculty end-of-year cookout, that she'd passed up the chance to work at Stanford for a year with one of the leading experts on Coleridge (I forget his name, something like O'Dooley or McFeeney), because the next year she'd have had to move again. But to me she never spoke of dreams deferred.
     When we had our going-away lunch at the Stavros, I shoved one of the clean ashtrays into my bookbag. It didn't occur to me to ask Mr. Stavros if I could have it as a souvenir, though he'd probably have said yes. Ada spotted it on my dresser when we were unpacking, before I'd had time to hide it in a drawer.
     "I'm quitting smoking, Prue," she declared. She must have worried she was setting a bad example, but I took it as rejection of a gift I hadn't even intended to give her.
     "I didn't take it for you," I snapped.
     "That's why I'm quitting." Then she hugged me tight and kissed the top of my head, hard, and I started to cry.
     "You can have it if you want it," I mumbled, my face sticking to her silky green-striped blouse.
     "Okay," she said, and I thought she might be crying too, but I didn't want to look up and find out.
     We used the ashtray as a candy dish for about six months, then it disappeared from the coffee table. I was secretly pissed at all my friends, thinking one of them had swiped it, till I found it — full of cigarette butts — under Ada's bed while I was searching for a dropped ring. After a few moments' thought I slid it back into the dim dusty space. And if the occasional acrid puff from under her bedroom door might raise questions about her teetotaling façade, that was one more secret I was willing to keep.