There had to be something wrong with my mother, everyone agreed. She wasn't stupid, or clumsy, or ugly, or lazy, or any of the other faults people presuppose when they're talking about people having something wrong with them. She was just my mother, which meant that she had something wrong with her.

Maybe it was the way she looked at people which put them off. My mother had an unpleasant habit of staring two feet past a person whenever she talked with them, and this put some people off. In my family, we just learned to accept it. She'd had her eyes checked thousands of times; there was nothing wrong with her. And yet, there was something wrong with her.

It's also possible that she was mentally ill. Certainly that could have explained her strange behavior. But we loved my mother, and so we didn't really think that having her committed to an institution was the way to go. People shook their heads and made little clicking noises with their tongues, but my father and my sister and I would hear nothing of it.

She wasn't very happy to hear the news of my imminent departure either. "Bennie, where are you going again?" she asked me for the fifteenth time.

"I told you Mom, I'm going to live in Metha's attic. There's enough space for me up there, and I don't mind sharing common space. She really wanted me to move in."

"And what did your father say?"

"Well, he wasn't happy." That was putting it mildly. My father had perhaps never been less happy than he had been when I told him.

"You should listen to your father. He knows what's good for you."

"Mom, I'm old enough to know what's good for me."

"What am I going to do all alone in this house with him," my mother pleaded. "You know I can't eat the food he cooks. Who's going to eat it?"

"I'm sure he'll manage."

Then my mother did the thing which she always did that made people say there was something wrong with her. She turned and talked to my Uncle Paul. "You hear this boy, just a boy, and now he wants to move out on his own. What am I going to do Paulie?"

Uncle Paul must have been especially talkative that night, because there was dead silence for nearly half a minute. "I know, but he's not ready, and we need him around the house."

"Mom, for God's sake, I'm the only person I know who still lives with his parents. Why can't you make Chuck move back in?" I called my sister Chuck, and she called me Smart-Ass. Her given name being Persephone, I couldn't see why she didn't like going by Chuck.

"You know I hate it when you call your sister that," snapped my mother. "And you just interrupted your Uncle. Now shut up and let us have a decent conversation. Speak when spoken to, that's how it should be."

Uncle Paul might have agreed, but as he had died almost twenty years ago, only my mother seemed to be able to tell.