It was a standard if not cliché motel bathroom, and Mom had been in there a while. In August of 2001, we’d found ourselves at a Days Inn for the weekend—Mom, my sister, and I—despite her losing custody of us six years prior. We were one hour outside of Pittsburgh, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, though home was even farther, just over five hours east, in South Jersey. The Rolling Rock Town Fair was a grungy music festival headlined that year by the Stone Temple Pilots, Live, the Deftones, and Incubus. It was rumored to be a kind of nineties alternative Woodstock…
