Sometimes Amber’s mom is late to class. Sometimes she doesn’t show up at all, and when the professor asks why she explains she’s a single mother, childcare is expensive and unreliable. She is the only parent in our classroom including the professor and no one challenges her tardiness after that. That’s where I first meet her, Amber a month later: Contemporary Critical Theory. Liminal spaces, “Notes on Camp.“ It’s our last semester before graduation, and a couple times after class we get coffee. She tells me she’s a widow. I tell her no one close to me has ever died but my mom was also a single mother. With coffee she plies me for details, what most fucked me up. The answers come easy.