“Where Do You Keep Your Guns?” the Boy Was Asking Me

On the downstairs porch of our very own house.

With two and a half years of sobriety under my belt, and after two rejections from the bank, 1992 brought a “yes” to a mortgage application, and the boys and I moved across the road from the rented lake house (a grand old structure where the porch hung over the water) into our very own house. Clumsily built, with an extremely narrow and steep staircase to the compact second floor, it felt like…