The City of Denver’s rabid football fans – probably the most fanatical in the country – had turned out in force on this bleak November Sunday afternoon, filling Invesco Field to capacity for the final game of the Bronco’s so-so season. High up in the third deck, near the fifty-yard line but too far from the field to rub elbows with those who could afford expensive tickets closer to the action, a young woman, dressed in a second-hand black pantsuit under a dark green car coat which had seen better days and offered only limited protection against the cold, sat alone amid the loyal, but at this point in the game, subdued crowd.

Almost five years had passed since she’d seen or spoken to her father; not since, at the age of sixteen, she’d announced that she needed “ my space,” and flounced out of his single-again apartment to move in with her mother in an older, inexpensive apartment complex on the east side of town. There, along with her mother and brother, she had attempted, for awhile, to live out the last vestiges of what had once been their happy family life.

Some families of divorce were able to make a go of it. Not hers. Chaos had reined. But instead of facing the truth and dealing with it, they’d denied it. Especially her mother, who kept saying, mantra-like, “Everything is just fine… just fine.” A line from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems ran through the mind of this young woman, barely out of her teens but mature beyond her years:

“Tell all the truth but tell it Slant
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight,
The truth’s superb surprise.”

What, exactly, was the truth here? Was it that her parents had grown apart: mother morphing into liberalism, father into conservatism? Was it that, unable to agree on anything anymore, they’d become increasingly unhappy living together? Or was it that her mother, tired of living in her husband’s shadow and no longer wanting to be his “cheerleader,” had decided to embark on the career of her own which she’d secretly coveted for years?

She brushed a strand of shoulder-length auburn hair back from her pretty face, revealing high, firm check bones, eyes deep brown, luminous and intelligent but a trifle sad, and a jaw line that promised serious obstinacy at times. “I hated hearing my mother say “we both have grown in different ways,”” she said