I was two days old when my mother left me in a pram outside Stammers & went home. She said she felt oddly lighter though it took a while to realise what was missing. Nobody noticed me. I might have been a window. For those twenty minutes the separation slipped by me. Mum was on her knees scrubbing floors in a convent by age seven. Her mother had been left in an orphanage & so it goes. Back to coda. You left a daughter with nuns & sailed away on your violin. So many women with habits that would never be broken. Minnie was the one who put my grandmother in an orphanage, ran around town with a gangster. He caught her fear by the hair, shot it through the temple. How carelessly/joyously she was losing her religion. I grew up with an irrational fear of nuns the way my dog always ran when I so much as reached for a violin. He saw right through me that morning as he watched me pack & leave my first husband. I know how I’m marked, how I can vanish.