I was born in Camden, Arkansas, on the afternoon of my Great Aunt Eva’s funeral. Everyone was at the cemetery when my mother went into labor, so she drove herself to the hospital. My father was in Germany, finishing his post-doc on the Protestant Reformation. He once said that I was named after Martin Luther’s wife, a nun who escaped her convent in a fish barrel, but my mother later told me she’d never heard such a thing. Inevitably, it seems, they divorced. I can’t pinpoint my age at the time, but my guess is second grade; that’s when I put a worm on my teacher’s desk and my “Speaks and Acts Courteously” grade plummeted.

After my father left, my mother no longer spent her days silently folding heaps of laundry into perfect stacks. She went to work for the first time, leaving the clothes around the house in such huge piles that a neighbor once asked, “Are you guys moving?” A couple years later, we did.

At night, our son, who is five, and I lie in his bed and read a book about foods from Roald Dahl stories. We turn to Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, and I read the ingredients: one Heath Bar, butter, heavy cream, and marshmallows. We pinch our fingers in the air above the page and pretend to eat in loud, dramatic chomps.

One night I tell him something I’ve never told anyone, not even my husband: that as a child I imagined I had a secret door in my bedroom, and when everyone else was in bed I would open it and find a room filled with cakes and candy. He stayed uncharacteristically quiet, his blue eyes wide, a quizzical smile curling his lips.

I didn’t tell him that I conjured that room after my father moved out and my mother started crying and didn’t really stop for ten years. That, one night, while she was working, my brothers and I sat in the living room and ate a mixing bowl full of raw cookie dough in big, lumpy bites, then licked our fingers and dragged them across the bottom of the bowl. We weren’t poor, exactly, but we ate as if we were the starving African children we saw on TV.

I didn’t tell him that I grew up with two older brothers, not one, and that there is a newspaper clipping in a box at my mother’s house explaining the discrepancy. In it a railroad engineer says that, as he came around the bend that Sunday morning, my brother Matt scaled the embankment and laid his head across the rail, “as if in prayer.” I’ve always wanted to thank that man for making some part of my brother’s death sound beautiful.

At night, my son and I lie beside each other, his lean wire of a body so close I can feel his breath move through him. We talk and laugh and turn the pages. We pinch the air and bring sweet, rich morsels to our lips. Someday he will know my back-story. But not now.

Not yet.