From Shelter, a memoir, which will be published this month by Graywolf Press.

I plotted my return to Baltimore the day after the heaviest snowfall in a decade, a bright January afternoon. I was in town with my sons, who were sitting for entrance examinations at a local boys’ school. While they speed-penciled the bubbles, I would look for our new home. I had grown up with two people who held real estate licenses in Maryland, but I didn’t quite think of them. I would be looking in another part of town.

I found the realtor, a trim, energetic,…