My mother purchases a cross too big for her to carry. She finds it at a store in the East Village that sells clothes and antiques, things passed down and salvaged. She pays a big price for it too. The cross is four feet tall, made of a thick iron, and covered in floral engravings.

My mother is a tall but slender woman, and she has a habit of overestimating her strength. So she sends my brother, Dylan, fourteen years old and already her height, to bring it home. Dylan carries the cross ten city blocks to our apartment. He balances it on his shoulders using both hands to hold up the weight.

Later that night, my brother tells me he prayed, the whole time, not to run into anyone he knew. He is cool—a student body president who keeps his sneakers clean—and I suspect what he means is that he didn’t want the girls from school to see. But I also know he wouldn’t have known how to explain, should anyone have asked, the things we did for her.

We do not think of ourselves as Christians. We do not go to church or read the bible. We do not even call ourselves religious. But we are a family looking for signs. My mother looks for them in symbols that suggest something more powerful than herself, and my brothers and I look for them in my mother. We study her for shifts in her tone, or in the gloss of her eyes, or tension of her cheeks. We use them to tell us when she is sober and when she isn’t.

We move often and fill each space with an assembly of objects imbued with meaning: seashells, butterfly wings, branches from a tree, a figurine of Magdalene strung on fishing wire. There is the house on Lincoln Pl., where my mother brings home a statue of Mother Mary. She arrives holding Mary sideways in the back of a taxicab. And there is the apartment on Rutgers St., where my mother brings home flowers and ribbon left by the curb of a nearby church.

In the house on Pioneer, we have a backyard overrun with our neighbor’s roses. Their prickly stems wind their way through the metal fence. Their buds promise something for the future and my mother loves them.

When the flowers bloom and the petals drop, my mother sweeps them up from the backyard. She lets the petals dry before grinding them into a powder. Then she adds water, rolls the mush into balls, and bakes them in the oven until they are firm, but soft enough to poke a hole through.

They look ugly, like half-inch balls of dirt. One day, I inspect them while they cool down on a baking sheet and see my mother through the back window. She is sitting by the flowers. Her eyes are closed, and her chin is tilted to the sky. She is so still. She looks beautiful, her body framed by what is left of the roses.

Later that night, she comes back to this spot. And while I do not go downstairs to see her, I hear her scream and know her face is tilted back to the sky, her mouth opened in repetitions of “Fuck you.”

“God is my witness,” my mother says to me the next morning, while holding my hands and promising me there will not be a next time. I do not know what she means when she says the word God, or who I am talking to when I pray for her to stay inside, but I like the idea that there may be something bigger than the two of us standing in the kitchen.

We leave things behind with each move: pieces of furniture or art that won’t fit where we are going. Eventually, we leave behind the sculpture of Mother Mary on the roof deck of an apartment on 2nd Street. The roof has a small table and pots of red gardenias and the last time I see Mother Mary, she is in the corner looking onto the street.

Years later, I will visit a friend a few blocks away from our old apartment and it will occur to me that I don’t know whether the tenants after us kept our Mother Mary. Wanting to see if she remains, I will walk towards the opposite curb to see if, from a diagonal, I can catch a glimpse of her silhouette.

She won’t be there, but I’ll wonder what it would have felt like if she was. What would that sculpture have done for me in all her age and distance? There were so many days she scared me. The details in her eyes were missing, and I disliked the way her hands were carved into herself. But I loved her too, for all her familiarity, and for the way I felt as a kid, the way I feel now, thinking of her: there is so much I want to believe.