Chapter One
Vienna

The smell is sweet, and when I was younger, I had a hard time not thinking of pickles.  Oblong, green. Floating in jars of brine. And that’s what pops up now when I look down and take account of Parker’s five tiny fingers. Little gherkins. It’s a mistake looking at his hands.

I throw up a small puddle at my feet as my father walks in, and discontent pulses between us. He leaves and comes back with the mop and bucket and streaks through vomit while Parker watches.

“I told you not to have the tuna,” he says. “You know how she loves her bargain basement mayonnaise.” I nod and pretend it’s the mayonnaise, and he looks at me looking at Parker.

“Don’t get too attached. Into the fiery pit with this one.”

“You can’t be serious,” I say. I glance at my father’s mopping hands that are a red sort of raw from the saccharine formaldehyde. The salty streaks at his temple tell me he’s getting older, and I have a “When did this happen?” moment. Just a few hours ago I was twelve and standing on the curb at the Manor Market, the squeal of wet tires stinging my ears. And now we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, peering into the casket of a dead boy. 

“It was in the notebook.” The leather-bound book on my father’s desk—the one Loretta calls “The Death Bible” —is stained with notes about impending wakes before they’re logged into the computer. I’ve checked it like always, but the details blurred with the truth of Parker’s combed strands of doll hair.

“Picked out a nice mantle urn from what I remember,” he says. He taps out the organ beat piping through the speakers with a mop-free hand, and I watch his raw fingers ravage the wood. 

He leaves me to dump the dirty mop water in the guest bathroom, and the nausea doubles with the image of Parker’s mother with her boy in a jar in her arms. 

“You ready to lug this thing to the back?” He walks to the opposite end of the casket carrier and gives it a little push while I take one last look at Parker’s alabaster face. 

I feel the second wave of vomit rising before I can even lie and say yes.

#

“HE WASN’T BAD, WAS he?” Rosa walks softly up next to me in the break room. She’s in her socks, a pair of black patent heels in her hand. She wears the cream pantsuit Loretta fished out of one the church charity boxes, hand-tailored now to fit Rosa’s curvy frame. Even though she’s spent hours in the morgue, she looks like she’s just gotten dressed. 

“Not at all. Very natural. You keep at it, and I’m afraid the Clinique counter will snatch you up from under us.” Dad chuckles at a joke that isn’t a joke as he pours his millionth cup of coffee. It’s a reference to my mother, who once landed a three-day stint as a Clinique lady when I was eight. I had thought she was a scientist in her white, lab-inspired smock, and I stupidly told everyone that at school. I also remember how Heather Hammel told our class that my mom was fired for storing emergency booze in empty perfume bottles just a few days later. Dad catches my eye. He can see I’m not smiling.

Rosa grinds the ball of her foot against the ground, the sound lost in her white sock.

“Well, I’m not going anywhere. Not with Maya still at home.” My father begins to bob his head. 

“Hmm, well, tell Maya we love her, and I’m still counting on her to be here Friday. I know we have a few things to teach the new graduate.” He glances at me, but I refuse to meet his eyes. 

“Oh, and your check will be in the office if you want to stop by tomorrow. Vienna will let you in,” he says. I always let Rosa in. I’m the one who cuts the checks, and oils his desk, and burns my hand changing his light bulbs. I’m the one who says he isn’t available whenever my grandmother rings and calls me a “a liability by association.” I’m the one who looks out his window when he sneaks off for afternoon trysts with Loretta, his longtime girlfriend who I love, even though she’s insisted on me calling her “Mama Lo” for the past seventeen years and knows full well that it will never happen. 

But when it’s my father’s turn to speak, none of this is relevant. It’s his office. His money. His routine that would send the stars searing through the heart-stopping dark if it were ever allowed to flounder. 

“All right, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Rosa says and bends down for a hug, her forearms traversing the small estate of my back. The wet heat swells against my lids again so I shut my eyes. 

“And let me know the schedule. Keeping the old bats happy at the senior center this week.  Or at least I’m supposed to be.” Rosa speaks into the hollowed cave of my ear, but Dad is the one who nods and says “certainly” as my best friend carries her shoes, her purse and makeup kit to the foyer.

I breathe out as the front door clicks shut.

#

I’M NOT CATHOLIC, BUT Rosa is. We used to play confession at Rosa’s house when her mother was wrist-deep in a bowl of Cheetos watching one of her telenovelas. In my best friend’s room, I could feel the quiet smoothing over every raw nerve even as Jaime and Victor would be running up and down the hallway outside the door. Their naked feet would slap against the hardwood floors and gather speed until they propelled themselves onto their mother’s floral bedspread, the headboard having words with the wall.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” I’d say, and Rosa, wearing her mother’s pink terry cloth robe would play priest, anointing my head with two fingers she dipped into her glass of Coke. A few years ago, Rosa told me there’s no anointing during confession. She just wanted to see if I would let her soak my hair in soda, but it didn’t matter then whether we played by the rules or not. What mattered was ringing my soul dry like a dirty washcloth.

“What’s on your mind, daughter?” Rosa would say, sitting Indian style, the soles of her feet peeping from beneath the robe. They were moist black from smacking the hard earth in her chained off backyard. 

“My mom. I’m afraid she’s going to die.”

“That’s not a sin, you freak. And besides, you say that every time we play.” A shoestring of sugary candy would wind its way through Rosa’s fingers, and then she’d smile.

“But I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe that’s the sinful part.” 

The last time we played confession was in the sixth grade. Summer vacation was just two days away. So was my mother’s death.

Rosa wouldn’t let us play anymore after that. She said it was bad luck. “Mala suerte,” and I knew she meant business when she dipped into her mother’s Spanish. But I had needed it, the comfort of Rosa’s room and the opportunity to watch my world soften and submit to the force of her hands. Talking to my grandmother on the phone, I could use it now.

“Louise was Satan.” Gram’s voice is bacon in a pan, snapping hot oil against my ear. She calls a handful of times nowadays, but today is the anniversary of my mother’s death, so I’ve been expecting her call since eight this morning. She’s four hours late.

“A thousand times, Fran, Frannie, can I call you Frannie?” I ask.

“No.”

“A thousand? Maybe a million times we’ve been over this. My mother isn’t Satan, wasn’t Satan. She was the victim, okay?” I pause, careful not to taste my words because I don’t feel like reminding myself who the culprit is. Yesterday evening was hard enough with my back against the morgue door knowing what my father was doing on the other side with Parker. So, I don’t let my brain function this morning. I simply answer the phone and stare at the computer screen. I listen to Gram’s labored wheezing. 

“You know she had nothing to do with your situation or even Granddad’s for that matter. And you know how hurt and sorry I’ll always be for you, for the position you’re in...”

“You know jack about my position.”

“What about the doctors’ bills? The leg medication? Granddad refusing your visits?” I sizzle right back, and I can practically hear Gram’s skin beginning to scar. I hate when it gets like this, when she drags me down to her level, and I realize it’s not even that far of a drop.

“He doesn’t refuse them. I do.” I don’t say anything. I sometimes read Dad’s emails from my grandfather at the prison, and I can sense Granddad’s unhappiness with Gram, but I never thought my grandparents would let their wounds fester at the same time. They always loved each other too much for that. 

“What are you doing right now?” Gram asks, and I know it’s because she’s lost the urge to fight. I look up and watch the afternoon sun unabashedly leak its stream across the office floor. The chips, the nicks, time scraped perfunctorily into the wood. Dad too cheap to fix any of it. 

“Manning the fort while your son’s off playing.” I hear her snort, and the old Gram appears before the mahogany desk—barefoot, skirt swirling in sherbet shades of color. Her finger still ringed with gold. 

“Still with the other ‘Lo,’ huh? You think he stays with Loretta because he’s trying to replace her?” I know Gram means replacing my mother, and I swallow the lumpy truth of it. I play piano on the top of the desk to keep from looking at the framed oil painting of my mother nailed in the wall across from me.

“Nah, Loretta’s nothing like mom.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Clipped and sharp, her words are at my throat. In the past, it hurt when Gram would call. Age thirteen, fourteen and onward, my grandmother phoning, hurting me with words, me callusing over to protect my core. Rosa asked me once why I kept picking up the phone. I changed the subject and asked her if she uses the same makeup on the old biddies at the senior center as she does for the dead. She answered with a smile.

“He’s back,” I say, the door near the driveway creaking so it isn’t a lie.

“Tell your father to go take a hike off a tall cliff for me,” Gram says. I nod through the phone, knowing full well I won’t. 

“And you. Eat something, okay?” Gram’s words are awkward, heavy. I’m taken back to when she would watch me and my brother in the afternoons at our house when our mother was curled up asleep. Gram would force feed me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tell me that my mother was sick, that I wasn’t fat, that I wasn’t a nothing. She must think I’m still a slave to my mother’s words even all these years later. 

She’s absolutely right. 

“Gram?  Do you think—”

“No, I don’t think. I know. I can’t see you, Vienna.  It’s too soon.” Gram doesn’t know the times I’ve seen her in Blythesville—the town over from Burling Gates—sitting alone in the food court at the mall with a cup of coffee in her hand, or at Roper’s Family Diner sitting alone with a freshly filled plate, or once at the gas station, a trip that resulted in an accidental splash of gasoline down my pale green skirt. I hid, each time, not because I wanted to but because I was worried Gram would hurt me harder than my grandfather, Deluca, had ever hurt her. 

“It’s been fifteen years,” I whisper. My mind is searching for Dad and Loretta, the beats in my heart navigating their route to the office.

“Too soon. Now eat something. Please.” The click is soft. I’ve never asked that before. To see her. 

“Why so grim, slim?” my father asks. They shift in quick through the doorway like slips of paper, Dad’s yellowing stationary to Loretta’s neon post-it note. They’re so wrong for each other, it wouldn’t be right to witness them apart.

“You know why.” I don’t ask them where they’ve been. Loretta’s black sequined dress is still hitched up, revealing the controlled part of her panty hose, and Dad is lightly dusting off cat hair from his jacket. They were making out again in the back closet of the cat shelter, the image permanently burned in my retinas after reluctantly volunteering there once under Loretta’s insistence only to make a very unwanted discovery. As much as my father hates leaving the home, hates leaving his responsibilities, I often think he hates leaving the security of that closet even more. 

“All hot air, my mother. Let her squawk. We’re happy, and that’s all that matters.” Dad grabs Loretta’s waist, and she squeals, her plastic, triangular earrings shaking in a fit of pleasure. Years ago, Loretta had shown me the donation boxes in the basement of Burling Gates Baptist where she volunteers her time on the weekends organizing the clothing closet for families in need. Her “personal closet” as she put it one time, picking her way to an asymmetrical sheath dress she changed into behind a floor plant. Sections of skin peeked through the fronds, surprisingly taut for someone whose face reflects the whole world over. I almost saw it in me to forgive her for her after hours shopping with abs like that. I can’t, however, forgive her for the earrings.

“There were other calls. A Mr. Eckhart. Needs to come by and make arrangements for his mother. Tobey asked about refilling the Cadisol supply. Told him we’re all set. A few vendors called about setting up booths for the open house,” I say, watching Dad’s lips worm into a frantic knot at the phrase “open house.” It’s his first year hosting for the Burling Gates Business Society, and he’s already spent a surplus of moments bellyaching over the cost of food and drinks for the event that’s still a few weeks away. And Loretta’s been no help, offering to showcase a few cats from the shelter to “keep the crowd in good spirits.” 

“Oh, and Rosa came by and picked up her check.” I think of the card Rosa gave me. She’s done this every year since we’ve worked together—gives me a card on the anniversary of my mother’s death and scribbles a meaningful quote that makes the day suck a little less. This year it’s, “Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.” 

I look up, and Dad is nodding his head, but I can tell his mind is still cavorting amongst Loretta’s caged cats and prices for sandwich trays. He hums along with the nauseous tune that’s constantly leaking through the overhead speakers. “Sets the tone for prospective clients,” he had claimed when he first popped in the elevator music. I had silently argued they’re already suffering enough.

I turn to get up and take lunch in the break room, but my father stops me. “Look at you. You look like a dump truck backed over you.” His head is cocked, and Loretta is nodding her own in agreement, her earrings swinging their noisy concession.

“What do you mean?” I say, although I already know what he means.

“I’ve been worried about you lately, Vienna. Loretta, too.” Loretta nods again, and I fear her whole head will take flight with the volition of her earrings. “Take off the rest of the day. Loretta can help me get things in working order around here.” I fight the urge to let him know things are working perfectly as is.

“I’m fine.”

“Oh, honey, no, no you’re not fine. You look like a cat is clinging to the bags under your eyes.” Loretta pokes out from behind Dad’s shoulder and makes a clawing motion with her devil red nails. I know they’re right, and if my father is willing to let me off early, then I really must look like death. I need a break, I need...something. But I’m no longer sure where I can go to find it. 

“Maybe visit her.”

“Okay,” I say, but I know I won’t be going by the cemetery. The seventeenth year, like all the other ones, won’t change a thing. 

“Need my car?” Loretta asks. Mine’s still in the shop from hitting our mailbox. I claimed I was swerving so I wouldn’t hit a squirrel, when in reality, my heart squeezed tight. Panic attacks suck.

I tell Loretta no, that I could use a little fresh air but don’t mention it’s because the weight of Parker’s cremation is still burdening my mind. I grab my bag that I always keep next to the desk, and I drop the card Rosa gave me in it. I watch as it settles amongst my wallet, the worn and torn University of Chicago pamphlet I keep to remind me that the world doesn’t stop existing past the Burling Gates exit (right smack in the middle of Missouri), and the bottle of pills I’ve ignored for the past three months. I walk outside and head quickly down the porch stairs only because I know Dad and Loretta are probably spying on me through the dark wooden slats of the office window. When I’m out of view of the home I stop, my wrists grazing my short floral dress, the sun bursting the brush of color into flames. I grab my cell phone and call him because there’s nobody else left. 

#

WHEN I THINK ABOUT my brother, the first image I always get is his fingers twisted in our mother’s hair. One time, when I was eight, we had found our mom out in the front yard, and Troy had looped his fingers through so hard, her eyes ballooned through their sockets. My brother had been folding coagulating piles of socks and underwear, and I had been working on my drawing project, sprawled belly flat on the living room floor. My second-grade art class had been given the assignment of illustrating different stages of our day, and because drawing was the only thing I could do to quell my daily bout of anxiety, I had gotten pretty good at it. The picture I had been sketching while mom was supposed to be sleeping was named “The Wake-Up Call” and featured a girl being woken up by her mother for school. The mother was beautiful and looked like mine, except the sketched version wasn’t attempting to jump on a mini-trampoline partly naked in her front yard. 

“Should we call Gram?” I yelled, scrambling to catch up to my brother, who was already out the front door. Gram had just left earlier after washing our clothes, making our lunches, preparing dinner for us. She was the one who always got our mother to bed, and usually Mom would sleep straight through until evening until she’d get up to either sit with Troy and watch TV or drive around and pretend she was going out with friends. Dad was working and going to mortuary school because he had finally heeded Gram’s advice to start living for himself for once instead of that “bleach blonde devil,” so Gram grumbled about the arrangement but never outright complained.

“No, just wipe her up real quick. We’ll get her inside.” Troy had swiped the “drinking towel” from one of the laundry piles before heading to the yard, and it slung around his neck like he was preparing for a round of boxing. 

“Let me jump!” Mom yelled outside, and Troy grabbed a fistful of her hair. At eleven he was already tall but lanky, and each time our mother bucked forward, I thought she’d send him to the ground. Mom’s face was slick with sweat and tears. I wiped it cautiously, careful to avoid her snapping mouth. 

I looked around the lawn strewn with weights, an exercise band, the mini-trampoline. Her bedroom window was propped open, and I marveled at how she managed to get everything out without us hearing her. She must have found the emergency booze Dad stored in the footlocker in his office. Before our father came home from his late-night job at Manor Market, Troy would always measure out our mother’s morning and afternoon doses if Gram wasn’t around. But even at eight, I knew there was a hunger in my mother that played through her veins like anxiety always played through mine, and no matter how often she filled it, it still gnawed away, unsatisfied.

“I did it for you, Vienna. You can lose weight. I saw it on the TV,” our mother gagged before Troy stuffed the towel in her mouth to shut her up. I glanced at the trampoline, wanting to bounce straight into the sky. 

“Open the gate.  Open it,” Troy shouted. 

“It’s locked.”

“Snap out of it, Sausage. It’s fine, I’ll take her through the front.” I shook my head and started breathing the way Troy had taught me to do whenever my chest began to feel tight. I began cleaning up the yard by carrying each weight in both hands and straining them up the house’s dirty blue shingles back through my mother’s window. 

Troy manhandled mom through the front door, his hands jammed against her spine. I tried not to watch my brother’s vein pumping out against his skin as I dragged the trampoline up the crooked stone steps and forced it into the entry where Troy’s upper body heaved with breath. He collapsed onto the tile floor and cradled our mother on his lap with his fingers back in her hair. 

“What do you think our time was?” he said, smirking at me, and I began to laugh as the exhaustion, the typical madness, ravaged my lungs. 

Our mother. She started laughing too.

This is what I think about so I don’t have to think about time and what it’s most likely done to Troy, who’s waiting for me at Mason’s.

“I didn’t peg you for one to meet a scuzzy hobo for a drink at a bar,” Troy says as I walk from the bright outside into shadow, his arms wrapping around my shoulders as smoothly as his words. It’s been over a year since I’ve seen him last. He only lives twenty minutes from Burling Gates in Blythesville—the same town Gram now calls home—but he’s made it a habit to avoid his past. Unlike me.

“Usually, I’m not one to meet anyone for a drink anywhere.” I smile slow and shy at him.  Dirt and time have made their beds in his pores. The lines in his forehead look like they have been sliced with a knife, and these details remind me that he doesn’t have the power to calm me anymore.

“Why is that, Sausage? Why don’t you get snockered more often? Why don’t you get a little blitzed with a new friend?” He raises his eyebrows at me and wiggles them. I want to say, “because you’ve cornered the market in getting snockered with strangers,” but I don’t because he struggles out a Dixie cup from his pocket, and his dried, bloodied spit on the side of it tells me there’s nothing funny about the truth.

Instead, I run my fingers over the slick wooden counter and say, “Not much for getting blitzed. Never have been.” 

“Here’s to changing that policy.” Troy winks a glassy eye at the female bartender, who nods at him. We did the same thing the year before, met at a pub to shoot the breeze and talk about everything our parents had done to ruin us completely. But the last place had been cleaner—I could see through the windows, and the air didn’t smell like the sleeping bum at the end of the bar, farting in his sleep.

“So, how’s the swindler? Burying the dead, making the bread?” The bartender brings a glass of bone-chilled vodka—straight—and I can tell she’s trying to ignore the Dixie cup on the counter with its red smears around the lip. Troy devours the liquid in one swallow, then wipes his wet mouth with the back of his hand. This gesture, his clean nail beds, our mother’s eyes conjure up his younger self, and not even the deep red patches on his cheeks or his dirty jeans can snatch the image away from me.

“The same. Dad doesn’t change much. Neither does the arm candy.” I swallow a cold gulp of Bud on tap—nothing fancy, no frills because it’s bad enough I’m feeding into Troy’s addiction as is. It’s bad enough I’m drinking period. But I don’t get to see him often, and if I didn’t drink with him, I’m afraid all we’d share is the same genetic strain of grief.

“How is luscious Loretta? Still cat happy?”

“Quite. She’s trying to convince Dad we need a funeral cat—black, of course—to strut through the legs of the grieving. I actually think it’s quite creative on her part.”

“A kitty for the inconsolable. Well, it seems like I misjudged Loretta. I’d offer to take her out to one of my local haunts, but I have a feeling she’s still sore over the last time we caroused.” Troy laughs too loud, and I swig another bitter swallow of beer. “The last time” is indexed in a locked file drawer in my head, nestled safely between the time I threw up in front of my sixth-grade class on a field trip to downtown Kansas City and catching my father feel up Loretta to the tune of unrestrained meows. 

“Even if she may—emphasis on the “may”—have looked a bit like a sideshow tramp in her Christmas get up,” I say, “you didn’t have to mention it.”

“Woops,” Troy says, and I smile at him despite myself. I know he’s masking his hate for Loretta with a joke because he can’t love the woman who shacked up with Dad after mom died. I’ve long ago forgiven Loretta. She helped me a lot growing up and Troy, too, before Dad kicked him out.

“I wish you were around more, you know.”

“I know. I miss you, too, Sausage.” He makes a show of slapping me on the back. I try not to get hung up on the name Heather Hammel generously gave me back in the sixth grade and stuck long after she and her evil cohort, Amber Fritch, transferred to the all-girls high school. Troy’s called me “Sausage” ever since, and when I had burst into tears the day I turned fourteen and told him to cut it out, he told me he wouldn’t until the name meant nothing to me and neither did Heather Hammel. I can feel the tears coming again, so I stab my thighs with my fingernails.  I try not to picture what Heather is doing at this very moment so my heart doesn’t go hysterical.

“Do you think it would be different if Mom were still alive?” I’m tackled down to the evening my mother died as I ask it. The beer has failed me because there in the corner where the bum sits, I see a younger version of me at the Manor Market, accepting my mother’s arm, then pushing it against her until I can feel the wind between us.

“You always ask that,” my brother forces through a burp. The farting bum snorts but resumes his snoring. 

“But do you think, maybe...maybe it wouldn’t suck so much?” The world is under water when I blink. I watch that night at the Manor Market drown. 

“I suppose I’d at least have a drinking buddy,” Troy says. He turns to me, and I expect to see him smile, but he doesn’t. “Amy left. I mean, she kicked me out. I guess that means I’m the one leaving.

“Where will you go?” 

He shrugs, and the bartender notices his glass is empty. He nods at her for another.

“I’d offer you my place, but you’re not exactly fond of my roommates,” I say.

“Tell me about it.” He’s straining now, trying to get the bartender’s attention, even though she’s blatantly ignoring him. I spy the feathered scar on his neck from the time he flipped off his skateboard in front of the house. It shines when he turns his head.

“What about Gram?” It doesn’t feel right to suggest it, considering if Gram isn’t a last resort, I don’t know what is.

“That crazy troll? I’ve got enough insanity going on right here, thank you very much,” Troy says, pointing at his skull. I don’t argue with him. “But maybe. I need to do something quick.” He takes counsel with his empty glass. “What about Rosa?” he says. 

“You can’t, Troy.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Maya. Rosa can’t have you around her daughter.” I wait.

“Mine, too,” he says on cue. The bartender brings his second round and glances at me. I shrug, not knowing what the woman wants me to say or do. If I did, I would have done it a long time ago.

“Here. For a hotel tonight,” I say. I make a show of fishing for bills in my wallet, the secondhand leather one Loretta found in the charity box and gifted me on my last birthday. I ignore the sequestered lump of money in my bank account. It signifies making a move with my life that ventures beyond deciding which brand of toilet paper to stock the bathrooms with (the cheapest one, according to my generous father). Even though I feel guilty keeping my savings a secret from Troy, it’s the only thing that has the potential to separate me from the town I was born in, the town I can’t seem to shake. 

“I don’t need your money,” Troy says as his hand reaches out to grab the three, freshly pressed twenty-dollar bills. He grasps on a pair of imaginary suspenders and looks at me above his imaginary glasses saying, “Well, I don’t know, Portia, should I charter a yacht or take the family to the villa in Paris?” 

“It’s all I’ve got,” I lie. 

“Then it’s all I’ve got, too.” He winks at me, his cheek freezing a second too long as if he’s wincing.

“To Louise,” he says, pumping his glass into the air.

“To Mom,” I say, glancing at the corner near the bum again. There’s nobody there.

We drink one more before Troy mumbles, “Now, time to get back on the bus before I’m stranded in this sorry butt town. No offense.”

“Minimal taken,” I say.

“See you around then, Sausage.” I watch as he pounds down his fresh glass of vodka. He hugs me, hard this time, my right shoulder squeezing tight into itself until the shock of pain rights the buzzing in my head.

I hope he’s right.

Troy walks out, and the bartender hands me a second beer and a shot of tequila as the door swings shut. 

“On me,” she says, shaking her head, and I know she’s thinking Troy’s a handful. I stop myself before filling her in on our mother. Instead, backside soldered to my barstool, I think of something I’m no good at forgetting. 

I was eight, my brother, eleven. It was a few days after we had shoveled Mom back into the house after the trampoline incident. We had been playing hide and seek as Friday evening neared midnight because Mom was “out on the town,” as she’d often put it, and we were tired of listening to our father make the usual phone calls to see if she was dead somewhere on the highway. Our breathing bodies stayed tightly sardined in the coat closet beneath the stairs until the front door cracked open, and our mother sang her arrival.

“You know what, Elbert? You know what’s wrong with you? You don’t live, you don’t live like no one’s watching. You’re an...uptight...a closed for business...nun of a man,” our mother had gagged in the foyer, grasping her buckling knees that glimpsed beneath the short hem of her blue polyester dress. It was an outfit she had sewn during a sober moment, and even though it was a decade out of fashion, it at least stayed zipped and fully covered her five-ten frame. With each hard jerk of her angry arms, the shoulder pads in her jacket nestled against her cheeks like they were comforting her, and I remember being glad that at least something was. 

“Louise, the children can hear you. Why don’t we go to the bedroom and talk about this?” The cordless phone roamed with Dad’s words, looping a wide figure eight in his hand. My peeping eye surveyed the scene through the crack in the closet door and rested on my father. His hair—seeming to have grown two inches that evening alone—was pleading with his wife, his locks outstretched like lonely pairs of arms. He was crumpled, an adjective I frequently paired with him. Worn house shoes with holes near the toes, the hair on his feet poking through the pencil thin cavities. Green striped cotton pajama bottoms with a mysterious stain near the crotch. Matching top with two buttons missing at his neck. His eyes, confused. Misplaced maybe, like they had traveled off course and ended up on the wrong face. 

I hadn’t lived long myself, but I figured my mom was right that my father was pretty lousy at it. 

“See, there you go. Telling me what to do, not wanting me to make a scene. Well, too bad so sad, Elbert. I made a scene all over Burling Gates with my girlfriends tonight so stuff that in your pipe and spoke it.” Smoke it, I had thought as my mother wheeled around on her blue pumps, reenergized by announcing her girls’ night out. In reality, our mother didn’t have any friends except for Margaret Turnbull, Wyland’s mother, who probably took on her friendship as a charity project. Margaret was a real estate agent’s wife whose idea of a nice evening out was wearing her pearls to Gypsy’s Steakhouse, not drinking a forty in the dumpster behind the Manor Market in a dress she sewed herself.

“Mom’s cracked,” Troy said in the soft light of the closet. He turned his head into the shadow. I could only make out his ear lobe in the dark as he stuffed the arm of our dad’s overhanging windbreaker into his mouth. I kicked at the pairs of unwanted shoes that grew in our closet with each passing year and tried to ignore the breaking within me, a sadness that jimmied the clefts between my organs and cut them loose. 

Looking up through the crack again, I was just in time to see my mother sway an intense shade of blue and stumble over her high-heeled feet. Mom hit her head against the entryway table, and my stray organs gave way as she slowly tripped to the ground. The side of Troy’s face stared horrified while I vomited all over the galoshes I hadn’t worn since kindergarten, but nobody had the sense to throw out.

Dad made use of the phone again and called the ambulance. He shuffled Troy and me into the station wagon once we had tumbled out of the closet, and Troy swiped the drinking towel from the downstairs bathroom. 

We had waited while mom lay prostrate on the operating room table. I couldn’t stop clutching my brother’s teeth-worn sleeve until a nurse told us Louise Oaks was alive and would be discharged in three days. The nurse then took me to her station and cleaned me up with tissues and alcohol wipes, removing the last traces of vomit that had defied the towel.

The car ride home that night was the one that all future car rides would be measured against. The three of us, snug as supine bugs, arms melting into our sides except for our father’s, whose knuckles locked around the steering wheel.

“That one, that one’s called Louise,” he had whispered, playing one of our usual games, naming a bloodied cat in a puddle of light beneath a streetlamp. His face recognized what his mouth had just said, and the tears came because he was in no shape to stop them. 

Troy cried with him so hard that I thought the force of his shaking would kill me. I remember wishing it would. 

“You okay?” The bartender invades my vision. The woman’s face is round, freshly scrubbed and her cheeks remind me of thick peaches. She’s too pretty to wear that much make up. But I like her. I like her lips and the way they refrain from closing. The dark slash between them is inviting, like a warm place to sleep.

“You need me to call you a taxi?” The bartender asks. I wonder why my hand feels funny when I notice my fingertips have plunged into my beer. I look around for Troy, remembering he’s already left, but I can still smell my brother. The scent reminds me of Mom.

“No, I walked here.” I remove my fingers, cold and wet and tune into the painful rumble of my hungry belly. I grab my purse, strap it to my shoulder, and walk a blurry line out into the afternoon sun. I place a hand on my stomach—the bud of life inside of me—and pray the drinking has washed my sins clean.