Depressed. I didn’t understand what your mother meant when she told me that was how she felt. Sure, we’re all sad sometimes, but what’s a teenager got to be depressed about? Trigonometry homework? Who you’re going to prom with? Everything your grandmother and I ever did was for her to have a chance at a better life. Lying on the ground between the corpses of our friends, pretending to be dead so the soldiers wouldn’t shoot, tiptoeing through minefields holding our breath—it was all for her. We scrounged all our savings together for a business we didn’t choose just so that she could have a better future. It was hard to hear that she was still unhappy. I didn’t have the words to explain how I felt so I just screamed, throwing every English word I knew at her as she ran into her room and locked the door shut. I never had enough words for her. I didn’t have enough patience either. After that, she started seeing your father, a boy from the grade above her. He wasn’t the best influence. She started skipping classes and getting detention. The stack of missing homework assignments piled higher and higher. In the middle of her shift at the shop, your dad would breeze in, throw an arm over her, take a coconut donut from behind the counter without paying, and drive away in his unwashed car to who-knows-where. Then she flunked out of school, he left town, and well, you know the rest. You would think that losing one daughter would be enough to make a person kinder.