“It will give you skin cancer,” said Doctor Blank.

“I don’t want skin cancer,” said Albert Samson.

“So don’t go in the sun,” said Doctor Blank.

“I like the sun,” Said Albert Samson.

“Do you like cancer?  Do you like chemotherapy?  Do you like death?  Stay out of the sun.”

“What if I sit in the sun for an hour a day?”

“Well, there’s no specific amount of time, you know, that determines whether or not you actually get the disease…”

“What about two hours?”

Dr. Blank’s tongue flailed about in his mouth as he ransacked his mind searching for a simple way to explain the unpredictability of cancer to Albert.

“What if I go in the sun for three hours?”

“Don’t go in the sun.”

Thus, Albert Samson only sat in the sun for two hours and fifty-seven minutes each day.

Albert Samson’s house had been infested with spiders for a while now.  He had always thought them a disgusting nuisance, but they usually kept to themselves so it was relatively easy for him to ignore them.  He was pretty sure that the majority of them hid in the attic, where he disliked going anyway.  Because of this, Albert Samson was easily able to live his life separately from the spiders.  Today, however, one of these spiders had crawled down from its attic haunt and invaded Albert Samson’s sacred space.  Rather than bat it away with the swift flick of his finger, though, Albert Samson did something that he hadn’t done in a long time.

He watched the spider.  It fiddled about trying to construct its web, secreting the silk as carefully as possible to build a network so intricate and so perfect that it could sit contented in its center for the rest of its life, growing fat on flies and sunlight and not worrying about the cancerous effects of ultraviolet radiation.

When Albert Samson sat on his porch he read sometimes.  Usually it was the newspaper, but sometimes he would bring out a play to read.  In the previous April he had read The Death of a Salesman, and the January before that he read A Doll’s House.  He never had the patience to read an entire book.  Three years ago he attempted to read Walden, but after reading the first five chapters he had to put it down.  He felt that novels, especially ones with literary merit, weighed him down.

When he wasn’t reading he would watch the landscape of the desert.  He would watch the lizards scuttle across the road.  He would watch the rattlesnakes slither towards the sun, which straddled the horizon line.  The rattlesnakes would always go towards that horizon, but Albert Samson never knew if they reached it or not.  They never came back to tell him.

He watched the spider.  The light easterly wind detached one of the web’s strands.  The spider, sensing a threat to the web, rushed to the spot of detachment and patched up the wound.  Albert Samson thought that the patch was not as pretty as the original strand had been, but it served its duty and kept the web aloft.  The spider returned to where it had been previously working.

It is Saturday, and Albert is invincible.  He is still lying in the endzone, clutching the football, soaking in the stadium lights and the babble of the exiting crowd, when his coach tells him that he is unstoppable, his parents tell him that he is their life’s pride, and his friends tell him that it is time to get drunk.  That night he conquers the castles of Ashley, Laura, and Evangeline, three fair maidens who are all thankful to have surrendered to the most heroic of the West Desert High Rattlesnakes. It happens the next Saturday too.  Each Saturday, he is presented with the charms of three lovely maidens.  This season, Albert is sitting contented upon his throne carved from pigskin.

One time he conquers the castle of a maiden who does not want to be conquered.  She surrenders begrudgingly.  He apologizes afterwards, handing her a box of chocolates and kissing her on the cheek.

He watched the spider.  A fly flew into its net.  For a moment the spider quit its work to tightly wrap the fly in a silk prison.  After the final strand was tied around the fly, the spider returned to the part of the web that it had been working on before the interruption.  When that section of the web was finished, the spider crawled back to the encapsulated fly and ate it.

Albert sits cross-legged against the tall oak in the middle of the field next to the university quad.  Delia lays out the red-checkered blanket and unloads the sandwiches that she has made.  Albert picks one up and engulfs it in so few bites that it is as if he has unhinged his jaw and swallowed the sandwich whole.

“You really weren’t that hungry, were you?” she asks with mock sarcasm, smiling at the way that Albert rubs his stomach with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, allowing the rays of the noontime sun fall onto his face.

“Nope,” Albert says, “But if there’s one deli whose cooking I can’t resist, it’s you.”  Albert still has his eyes closed.  Delia reaches over and runs her hand like the legs of a spider through his long, thick hair.  She kisses him lightly on the lips.  They lie together in silence for a few moments, absorbing one another.  They listen to chirps and rustles and breezes and heartbeats.  They listen to the erratic thumping of footsteps, and can no longer hear the heartbeats.

“Samson!” says a deep, rumbling voice. Albert and Delia open their eyes to see offensive tackle Ernie “Cruncher” Potter and tight end James Butcher looming above them, blocking out the sun.

“Let’s go man.  We’ve got practice in an hour and we’ve got to buzz our heads for the big game.”

Delia looks with concern at Albert, and at his long locks.

“Don’t cut your hair.  Plenty of people play football with long hair.”

Albert looks at the guys and back at her.  He says nothing at first, unsure of what words will leave his mouth.

“Don’t worry baby.  It’ll grow back soon.”  Albert kisses Delia on the lips again and walks off with Cruncher and Butcher.  Delia sits for a moment alone in the sunlight.  She slowly puts all of the picnic items in the basket and walks silently back to her dorm.

He watched the spider.  Albert is six.  His father shows him a football and tells him that he is going to be a West Desert rattlesnake.  Albert Samson is excited.

“Is Allan going to be a rattlesnake too? And Agnes? And Marie? And Davy?”

“Yes, yes, they’ll all be rattlesnakes too.  But they won’t be the type of rattlesnake that you will be.  You will be the most powerful rattlesnake in all of West Desert.  Your rattle will be heard above all others.  You will be more known than the rest.”

His dad throws the football at him.  It is as if Albert’s hands had been perfectly molded to hold the football, as if the football has always belonged in that space between his palm and his curled fingers. Albert feels that this first touch of the football has filled the empty spaces in his psyche, completing that which is naturally “Albert”.  He grips the ball, and feels its smoothness.  Albert throws the ball back to his father, and admires the upward motion of the spiral that he has thrown.

Albert Samson removed his hand from his bald head.  Yes, it was smooth, but he felt nothing.  The spider didn’t say anything.  It no longer remembered where the web had started.

Albert Samson had just turned fifty when he went to the West Desert Pet Shop and purchased Companie.  Companie was a grey mutt with mottled hair, and she walked with an obvious limp.  On top of this, she was blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and had lost nearly all of her sense of smell.  His main reason for purchasing Companie was her name; he thought it comforting to have Companie around.  The second reason was that Dave Daniels, the owner of the pet shop, had told Albert Samson that Companie was useless as a rattlesnake hunter.  Dave had disclosed this fact in an attempt to get Albert Samson to purchase one of the more expensive dogs, so it was not surprising that Dave was perplexed by Albert Samson’s decision.  When the two men were standing in aisle three picking from many different types of bags containing the same type of dog food, Albert Samson noticed the downturned corners of Dave’s lips and Dave’s loss of salesman’s enthusiasm.

“I don’t want dead rattlesnakes around my house,” Albert explained.

Albert hesitates.  He does not understand why football and Delia are mutually exclusive.  He races through potential futures: himself waking up in a mansion with the Vince Lombardi trophy next to him in his bed, himself waking up next to Delia in the house he grew up in,  himself waking up in a mansion next to both Delia and the Lombardi trophy.

He does not see the distinct pasts that have brought up the question: the way he missed her birthday party because Coach held an emergency team meeting, the way he arrived at her sorority’s formal with his sweaty and muddy cut-off shirt beneath his suit, the silent stares of her parents when he showed up at dinner thirty minutes late, rambled the entire time about his up-and-coming football career, and ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

“I want you,” he says.  She smiles.  She enjoys him all night.  In the morning, he gets up and goes to practice.

He watched the spider.  Companie stumbled out onto the porch like a drunkard and limped over to Albert Samson.  Albert Samson made no motion towards the mutt as she staggered around on the porch, as Albert was too enveloped in the spider’s story to think about Companie.

Albert struts into her room grinning like a used car salesman, holding some flowers in his outstretched arm that he had plucked from the rose garden behind the dorm. Delia is lying on her side, her head propped up on an unorganized mountain of white satin pillows.

“You picked my flowers, you son of a bitch,” she says.

“What use are flowers if you can’t pick them?” he asks her sweetly.

“That’s always your damn philosophy.”

Only the humming of her refrigerator fills the room.  He has no idea what she means, but he stops smiling so that he can pretend that he understands perfectly.

She does not say a word.  She just stares and waits.  He can tell that his lack of a smile is transparent.

Albert sighs.  He knows that this is going to take a whole lot of effort on his part.

“Look babe…I know that you don’t like that I spend my days practicing and my nights hanging out with the guys.  I know you don’t like that I play a sport where I could hurt myself any day and never be the same again.  I know that you don’t like that I spend more of my time with football than I spend with you.”

She continues glaring at him.  Albert can faintly detect that she is trying hard to hide her hopeful playbook from his prying television cameras.  Regret begins to seep slowly into the forefront of his thoughts as his mouth begins to move, but he is unable to stop the motion.  Albert’s voice and his mind have lost their connection to one another.

“But football is where my life is heading.  Coach says that I’m going to be the face of the NFL some day.  Hell, you know that without football they’d kick me out of this school based on grades alone.  I don’t even have to get into the fact that I wouldn’t even be able to afford this school without my talent.  I can’t give it up.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” she says in monotone.

He watched the spider.  It was almost done with its web.  He thought that if spiders had human mouths instead of those pincers, whose technical name he had long forgotten, that the spider would be grinning with excitement.

Albert is pulled aside by Coach Comett after practice.  He can tell that Coach is eager to say something by the way that the usually stiff, disciplined, ex-marine is shifting from foot to foot.  Coach Comett’s poor attempt to maintain his usual behavior mannerisms makes him look like an elephant trying to hide in a picnic basket.

“You played excellently today Al.  That catch you had by the twenty yard line was exactly the kind of catch we need in order to win games.  You show up like that tomorrow and Northern University will be waving the white flag after your first touchdown.”

Albert nods through the small talk so that he can find out the more important news.  Coach Comett realizes that Albert knows that something is up, gives one more nod of approval, and begins to speak.

“Al, I’ve been notified that there will be some NFL scouts at the game tomorrow.  Rumor has it that they want you in the combine next year, and that after the game they’re going to try to persuade you to join the draft class.  Their coming to the game is just a matter of ceremony.  Just show ‘em the shit you always show and you’ll be gone in the first round before you know it.  Congratulations!”

Al’s smile stretches into a wild grin.  He had known that this would happen sooner or later, and feels content that it finally had.  When Comett finishes speaking, he stretches his arms to the side for a hug. Al ignores the gesture and reaches out his hand for a handshake.  Coach Comett awkwardly switches positions and grabs the strong hand. Albert pulls away and struts to the locker room.  With his peripheral vision, Albert sees Coach Comett look down at his hand, his smile faltering for just a moment.  For that moment he looks rejected, but before this look registers in Albert’s consciousness Albert is in the locker room, thinking only about his glorious future.

Albert Samson watched the spider.  It was inches away from completing its web.  Only a minute more and it would finally be able to bathe in the glory of its hard work and achievement.  Then Companie stumbled into the hammock that was the anchor for the spider web.  The hammock swung wildly with this sudden addition of weight, and the web was ripped to shreds.  The spider was thrown off, and Albert Samson did not see where it went.

The next three weeks are a blur to Albert.  He vaguely remembers meeting the NFL scout before the game, and telling him to “get into your bunker ‘cause Samson’s coming to blow you away.”  He remembers the stadium lights, the first touchdown, the second touchdown, the ball in the air, the diving catch…the hit he doesn’t even remember.  Waking up in a hospital bed with pain everywhere, but especially in his head, thigh, and shoulder.  The doctor telling him that he can’t ever play again.  The scout walking out of the stadium and into the oblivion of could-have-beens.  The financial aid office revoking his scholarship money.  The registrar telling him that he has one semester to pull up his grades or he is out.  The sinking feeling.  The sinking feeling.  The sinking feeling.

Thanking the Lord that he isn’t paralyzed.

Cursing the Lord that he is.

At three twenty-seven Albert Samson got up out of his chair. He knew that the spider, if it survived the fall, would not ever try to rebuild its web.

Albert Samson sits in the lecture hall, fiddling with his pencil and staring up at the ceiling with bleary, bloodshot eyes.  He has to pass this class to stay in school, work hard, graduate, and get a monotonous desk job that won’t pay a quarter of the salary he would have made in the NFL.  He stares back at Professor McCloud, but does not listen.  Who the fuck needs philosophy anyway?  Waste of fucking time.  Philosophy is bullshit.  He can bullshit his way through philosophy.  Then he will get a fucking A+ for his bullshit, and the registrar will let him stay in school, work hard, graduate, and get that desk job that won’t give him the immortality that NFL stars get.  Fuck that boring life.  Fuck the fact that his parents offered to pay the rest of the way through school.  Albert Samson doesn’t give a flying fuck.

“That Thoreau had to eventually give in and return from his trip to Walden seems to support the old adage that claims that no man is an island.  However, if you look at contemporary society, there is a lot of evidence that suggests most men are peninsulas.” says Professor McCloud with a glint in his eye, gesturing towards the audience of students.  Albert Samson thinks that Professor McCloud is pointing at him.  Albert Samson looks away.

Albert Samson watched the place where the spider had been the day before, hoping that his intuition was wrong and that he would find the web fully intact.  Deflated, he began to accept that nothing was there.

An unmarked van pulled up to Albert Samson’s house.  A young man with an oddly graying moustache got out of the van.  As he walked towards the porch, Albert Samson examined the young man.  He examined his work boots.  He examined his grass-stained jeans, his plaid logger’s sweater, and his hunting hat.  He examined the man’s skeletal appearance, and his mirror-like sunglasses.

Albert Samson stood up to greet the visitor.  Before reaching out his hand, Albert Samson brushed off his chair’s seat cushion, which was embroidered with the logo of the “West Desert High Rattlesnakes”.  The stitching had been slowly coming out over the past five decades, causing the image of what was once an intimidating, vicious, football-crunching snake to be barely discernable.

“I have heard that there is a pest problem in this house,” the man said.

Albert Samson vaguely remembered calling an exterminator, years ago, when the spiders first came to his attention.  He hadn’t thought that the exterminator would ever show.

Before Albert Samson could welcome the exterminator into the house, the exterminator was through the doorway.  Albert Samson didn’t even notice the exterminator pass by him on the porch.

Albert Samson walked up behind the exterminator, who was standing in the foyer staring at a black-and-white painting of the desert that hung on the wall.

“The spider infestation is mostly in the attic.  They don’t usually come down here.”

The exterminator nodded silently and continued to stare at the picture.

“The entrance to the attic is on the other side of the house,” said Albert Samson.

The exterminator nodded again.  After another moment examining the painting, he began to stroll down the hallway.  Midway down the hall, however, the exterminator veered off into the living room.  He began to examine Albert Samson’s couches, lifting each cushion into the air and peering into the spaces between them.

“The spiders are in the attic,” said Albert Samson, “not in the living room.”

Again, the exterminator nodded.  He put the seat cushions back into their proper places on the couch.  He then began to examine the living room’s fireplace.  After pulling his head out of the chimney, the exterminator walked out of the living room and into the kitchen without any show of emotion.  He opened all of Albert Samson’s kitchen drawers, scrutinized all of his rusted utensils, and then returned them to their drawers.  He opened the oven, stuck his head inside, and looked around.

Albert Samson wanted to shut the oven door on his head and turn up the heat.

“The spiders are in the attic.  They are not in the kitchen.”

The exterminator pulled his head out of the oven and nodded again.  The exterminator exited the kitchen.

For the next twenty minutes, the exterminator continued to walk slowly throughout the house, absorbing every detail of every room.  Albert Samson followed behind, impatiently waiting for the exterminator to do something besides treat his house as a museum.

Finally, they arrived at the door to Albert Samson’s bedroom.  Exasperated, Albert Samson grabbed the exterminator by the shoulder and spun him around.  The exterminator stopped moving.

“Sir,” said Albert Samson, “The spiders are—”

“Show me into your attic,” said the exterminator, cutting him off.  Albert Samson pointed at the ladder at the end of the hallway.  As the exterminator walked towards the attic, Albert Samson remained behind. The exterminator turned around and ruffled his mustache.

“Come with me.  I’ll need your help,” the exterminator said.

Albert Samson cringed.  He hadn’t been into the attic in many years.

“Please come with me,” the exterminator said again.

Albert Samson didn’t want to go, but he had a great difficulty saying no to the exterminator.  He obliged.

When they reached the attic, Albert Samson turned on the light.  He could hear a multitude of spiders scurry across the floor to escape the flood of luminosity, but his eyes only actually saw one of them.

As Albert Samson gazed around the attic, he tried not to look at all of the memorabilia from his football days: the high school jersey, the college helmet, his father’s football, and the newspaper clippings.  However, they were the first things that the exterminator placed his fingers on.

“You were some football player once, huh?” he asked, smacking his lips together.  Albert Samson noticed the cadaverous thinness of the lips of the exterminator.

“Yeah.” said Albert Samson, looking away.

“It seems you were a pretty damn good one.  These newspaper clippings show some incredible stats.  You scored forty-six touchdowns your freshman year.  That’s quite incredible.”

“Thanks.” Albert Samson said, barely audible.

“What happened?” pressed the exterminator.

“Injury.” Albert Samson was uncomfortable.

“You could have probably gone to the NFL with a record like this.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

The exterminator grinned, his gossamer lips extending an uncanny length and revealing a mangled set of gumless teeth.  He put down the newspaper clipping that he was gripping in his gnarled fingers and strutted with his chest in the air towards Albert Samson.  He moved so quickly that Albert Samson could have sworn that he was hovering.  They were touching chest to chest, and the exterminator was looking directly into Albert Samson’s eyes.  The exterminator was still wearing those reflective sunglasses, and as a result Albert Samson found himself staring into his own eyes as well.

“I know where the pest that plagues this house lies,” whispered the exterminator.  Albert Samson felt the exterminator’s cold breath as the wispy, invisible vapors wrapped themselves around Albert Samson’s head.

Albert Samson is finally done with his physical therapy.  After a year and a half, he finally feels well enough to function.  He struts with his chest in the air, waving adieu in his mind to the familiar sights of the hospital.  Goodbye ugly white walls.  Goodbye grumpy receptionist.  Goodbye maintenance closet with the busted doorknob.  As he waves goodbye to the list of recently admitted patients, he sees something that makes him feel disoriented, like a dancer pushed over in the middle of a pirouette by a mischievous child.  Albert Samson changes direction.  Hello maintenance closet…

When he walks in Delia is pretending to sleep, but as soon as she senses that he is about to touch her shoulder she bolts upright.  At first she says nothing.  She stares at him with exasperated, bloodshot eyes that remind Albert Samson of the cornerbacks in whose faces he used to gloat after breezing past them.

“I heard that you were hurt,” she says.  That is the only thing that she is going to say to start the conversation.  He looks into her eyes.  He has not seen them in a long time, since before his injury.  He regrets not speaking to her in all of this time.

“Yeah,” says Albert Samson, rubbing the back of his neck and looking past her at the whitewashed walls, “I have to talk to you about that.  Since I’m done with football now, I was -”

She interrupts him with a chuckle.

“You’ve missed your chance, but gave Derek Stephens his.” Delia coughs, rolls over, and falls back asleep.  Albert Samson, remembering the name, runs back into the hospital hallway and stops one of the nurses.

“Why was the girl in that room admitted to this hospital?”

The nurse answers him curtly and attempts to smile.

This retroviral reality is a crippling blow to Albert Samson, making his cheeks burn, his head smolder, and his heart freeze.  He wants to run back into her room immediately but his legs will not let him.  Albert Samson, stunned and slouching, staggers back to his car.

He followed the exterminator back down the ladder.

Albert Samson’s tests return negative.  Like a police dog following the scent of a criminal, the exterminator moved quickly and briskly through Albert Samson’s ramshackle house.  He did not stop to observe anything this time; rather, he simply drifted as if in a trance towards Albert Samson’s bedroom.  The exterminator pulled open the doorknob.  Albert Samson opens up the door to her hospital room.  Without faltering, the exterminator ripped the sheets off of Albert Samson’s empty bed.  Without faltering, with tears streaming down his cheeks, Albert Samson rips the curtain away to reveal her empty bed.

Albert Samson wails.  She is gone, and the exterminator stands above the bed pointing down.

“There’s your pest!” the exterminator exclaimed.  In the bed was a dead rattlesnake, its noisemaking tail severed from its body and nowhere to be found.  Albert Samson cries into her pillows, searching for her smell, for any hint of her still being alive.  Averting his eyes from the spectacle in his bed, Albert Samson turned to the window of his room and saw Companie running off like a cheetah through the monochromatic desert, her limp gone and her fur pristine.  As she disappeared on the horizon, Albert Samson looked back down gravely on the dead rattlesnake and began to breathe heavily.

He cries on her empty hospital bed, and the tectonic plates move, and he is no longer attached to any land mass.  Albert Samson’s tears stream down the bed, soak into the sheets, and surround him on all sides.  Albert Samson, now hyperventilating, stared at the rattlesnake, and stared into the reflective glasses of the exterminator.  Albert Samson rushes out of the hospital, feeling trampled by his guilt and suffocated by his isolation.  He feels a terrible pain in his heart.

“Let me remove this old, dead rattlesnake for you,” the exterminator cooed, putting his hand on Albert Samson’s shoulder.  Outside of the hospital, inside of his room, Albert Samson clutches at his chest and, curling up like a spider, falls at the bare, bony feet of the exterminator.

Dad sits in a beach chair under an umbrella, chain smoking, and John and I on a blanket a few feet away.  “Hopefully this time he won’t have an angry streak or be black,” Dad says, gesturing at the man who’s carrying my sister on his shoulders, throwing her into the waves.  He laughs, sputtering a bit on his beer.  I pick up handfuls of sand, let it sift back out between my fingers, forming little molehills.  I don’t, have never had, the energy to contest him.  I’m a marvel of apathy, a superhero for the modern age.

We’re all at the beach because my sister Angie is getting married again in two days. Her last marriage ended with her on our parents’ couch saying, “I’m starting a new fashion trend. Whaddya think?” her eyes droopy behind two Xanax and five beers.  In a fit of domestic fervor, bleach had been thrown on everything she owned.  She’s got the resilience that only slightly stupid people have, but me, I’ve got none of it.  Instead of throwing punches, I stare sort of dumbly into the sun, asking when, when?  When Angie speaks about this wedding, she says half-candidly, “Third time’s a charm.”  Resilience.  Me, I look away when she says these things.  I stare at the corner of the room where the wall meets the floor.

My brother Jay sits on the sand next to us, and he puts more sunscreen on his daughter Sofie.  “If she gets sunburned, her mom will never let me hear the end of it,” he says.

“When will the arrangements be finalized?” Grandma asks, as she turns a page.  She’s half-reclined reading People magazine, and doesn’t bother to look up.  Jay says he doesn’t know.  He’s got his face in his hands, he’s crying again.  It’s pathetic and we’re all mourning it and feeling sour about it except Grandma, who is an idiot and doesn’t know what she’s done.

“Hey Sof,” I say, “I’m kind of hungry,” and I pretend to gnaw on her little chicken wing of an arm.  She’s squealing at me, but she’s also in love with me.  She’s beautiful and perfect, and the only one of us who appreciates absurdity on a religious level.

“Will you watch Sofie?” Jay asks me, and I say, “Of course I will, of course.”   He goes to take a ride on Dad’s motorcycle so we don’t have to look at him and feel our insides seizing.  I imagine he rides with the wind in his face and thinks about how things were before he had to move back home, to live with Dad, all loud, stomping through the house on his bad leg, forgetting his naked pictures of Mom on the bathroom counter for everyone to stumble upon.  More likely he thinks about sweet nothing.

Sofie yells at me, “Auntie Grace, Auntie Grace, I’m a doggy! yip yip yip!”  I keep my eye on her as she runs out towards my other brother Tim, who’s fishing knee deep in the surf.  She’s obsessed with his black lab.  I can see Tim mouthing the familiar, “Pet him nice, Sof, you’ve got to be nice.”  She barely touches the dog, like she’s patting a ball of cotton candy.  Tim’s a year older than me, looks like me, but with a sharper jaw.  He teases Sofie, lifts her up and pretends to make her ride the dog like a horse.

All four of us haven’t been at the beach together in years.  I always come, because I’m the youngest and have no excuses.  Tim moved out of our house in the ninth grade to drink and live in a fishing town on a cape jutting out into the gulf.  He raises clams for a living and rarely comes inland.  Jay and Angie had been married, were busy.  When we get together like this, a festive wonderment hangs in the air between us.  We stand around, smiling at each other dazedly, amazed, as if we just crawled out of a mangled car on the side of the freeway.  We’re happy that we’ve survived.

I’m watching Sofie make pratfalls into the tiny waves lapping way up the shore when Dad turns to me and says, “You’ve got quite a little belly on you now, don’t you?”  He’s laughing again.  It erupts into a hacking cigarette cough, and for a brief moment I imagine him a desiccated old man, alone.  He’s drying up, shriveling, dryer and dryer.  Finally, without anyone to life-suck he’s turned into a handful of sand there on the seat of his wheelchair.  Because people expect you to respond when they talk to you, I say “Ha!” loudly and dryly.

John’s got his mouth near my ear, he whispers “You’re a beautiful person,” which brings an interesting mix of solace and humiliation.  I steel myself and focus my eyes over Grandma’s shoulder at her magazine of beautiful people doing mundane things.  I’m good at drumming up absurdity for consolation.  Stars, they’re just like us! They take shits!  I squint my eyes and light a cigarette.

Mom comes up from the ocean.  “Hey honey,” Dad says, giving her a kiss on the lips.  Mom’s stomach is flat from doing aerobics videos in our living room, and her hair is yellow, a stripe of grey roots crowning her.  Dad helps her color it, sitting at the dining room table, his fingers fumbling in plastic gloves.  “How’re the waves?” he asks.

“Oh they’re wonderful,” she says.  “Amazing.”  Dad makes a point of coming here every year, but hardly ever goes in the ocean.  He’s got this bad leg, but he seems to enjoy himself when he hears Mom using this voice.  She gets quiet and emphatic.  “Ahh-mazing,” she says.  Living with Dad and scrubbing shitters for a living must be a magical potion for self-actualizing, because Mom is more well adjusted than anyone I know.

She turns to John and me and tells us about the book she’s reading.  It’s about reincarnation and hypnotic regression.  “I must have been a water creature in a past life,” she says, “because of how much I love the ocean.”  It’s too heart-scraping, hearing her talk about this with her eyes wide and earnest.  I know I should be happy that she is happy.  But I don’t want her to have to use these stories to console herself, I don’t want her to have to clean up other people’s messes.  I want a big fat wad of money between her and the constant abrasion of life.

“I need to go cool off,” I say.  I jump into the waves like someone who’s been to the beach many times and knows the secret.  If you dive straight through you’ll come out on the other side, smooth and placid.

*

When we pack up our things and come up from the beach, the hotel manager is waiting outside Dad’s room.  He’s fat and bald, with a surly countenance.  I sense the disaster welling up behind us when I see him, like the chokingly sweet smell of ozone that rolls in before a hurricane.  I’ve always been a bad psychic, sensing everything but telling my family nothing, and escaping when I got the chance.

“I was getting complaints about one of your rooms,” the fat man says.  Mentally I try to will him to admit he’s a messenger from disaster, to come clean, but he keeps talking.  “Sir, your son has done extensive damage to the room.  There is dog shit and broken glass everywhere, and you will be held responsible as the room is in your name,” and then there is some more repetition of some more bad things.  I can’t blame the fat man, because this is his job, being a messenger from disaster and all.  But I am growing weary.

Dad’s arm shakes on his cane, and I think about his heart disease that requires blood pressure medication and a Zoloft, daily.

“Tim,” he says quietly to the carpet, though Tim is not here.  “Tim,” he says again, louder.  The prodigal son, he was always the favorite.  He looks just like Dad did in all those pictures from Vietnam, when dad’s face was small and square and clean shaven.  Dad’s arm won’t stop quaking on his cane.  It’s slipping off.  “Tim! Tim!” he screams.

*

“Nice outfit Grace,” Dad says. “Must be the Polish in you.” He’s snickering, rasping at me from the hospital bed, and I’m not listening to him.  I’m much too saturated to absorb anything more.  I stare at the painting above his bed, a painting that yells NICE at me in big block letters.  No, this is not nice, I repeat over and over in my head.  I realize there’s a beach scene on the painting.  It’s talking about Nice, France, and the painting above the other bed says MALIBU and presents a similar ugly pastel wave hitting an ugly pastel shore.

Dad motions to Mom, “Get me some water, Kris.”  Mom sits beside me reading a book with a poorly Photoshopped cover titled Lives Between Lives, by Rick Chorman, PhD.

“Here, drink this,” she says, handing him a can of Ensure, mother’s milk for the ancient and afflicted.

“I don’t want that shit,” he says.  Mom’s eyes are open, but they’re glassy and unaffected, and her brain is somewhere else.

“Can I smoke in here?” he continues.  “Where’s the ashtray?”

I look out the window.  We’re up high, and I see the line of the ocean a few blocks away, where it all ends.  The sky is dark now, plum-colored with afternoon rain.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” I say limply to the parking lot below.  Because I’ve inherited Dad’s weariness, I can’t hold it against him.  Smoking is a habit for people who have a realistic idea of the slim cushion between them and disaster.  Dad and I are linked arm in arm, we see it there, waiting in the wings for us, and together we say, so what, come and get me, I know you.

I wonder where Tim is.  No one could reach him.  Maybe he’s sitting on the beach with his dog, a beer in his hand.  Maybe he’s getting another tattoo. Dad and Tim love and infuriate each other so much because they’re the same.  They both believe their actions have no consequences for anyone else.

“Our family,” I want to say to Dad and Tim, “is fragile like an old woman’s bones.  There are no reinforcements of luck or money.  Any stupid thing you do breaks all of us.”

But I don’t say that.  I pick up the can of Ensure and slowly pour it out into the trash can, while looking at Dad.

“Now you don’t have to drink it,” I say.  He doesn’t speak.  When he’s quiet and still, Dad’s tooth and bald head make him look like an infant, tired and helpless, momentarily genuine.

He reaches for the remote, smashes the quiet.  “Video Vigilante!” the TV screams.  “Citizen uses personal camera to catch prostitutes in action!”

I put my forehead against the window, all thoughts shrinking away in the noise.  John stands beside me, rubbing my arm.  He’s the only one around making sure blood is still flowing to my extremities.  His eyes are an opaque brown, the light reflecting off them in big white squares.  I wanted to somehow tell Dad that John holds me up by the arms when I start folding into myself, but all Dad could say about him is “He’s vegan? He doesn’t drink milk?”

I’m listless and John looks down at me and asks, “How can I help?”  I look up at his glass spheres, his opaque reflectors.

“I’m fine,” I say.  “Did you know that you have marble eyes?”

Outside, the plum-colored clouds keep rolling in, and it’s just an afternoon thunderstorm.  I wish it were the tails of a hurricane whipping us. In Florida there’s weather, lots of it, and it makes you think about the body.  It reminds you that you are corporeal and small.

We were all here as kids once, at the beginning of a hurricane. The sky was bruised, and the waves swelled, three times their usual size.  Dad let us stay on the beach until the last possible moments, when the lightning started zipping down. Angie and Jay took their surfboards out, yelled excitedly over the rough water.  Tim and I swam further than we should’ve, let the waves pull us under, throw us against the sand.  It felt apocalyptic, but in an electrifying, almost funny way.  Tomorrow was going to be different, but we were going to survive it.  When we left the beach, the water kissed the grass at the top of the dunes, threatened to spill over its designated bounds.

The hurricane crashed down while we slept.

The next morning we hurried out to see the aftermath, the new world.  We found wildness flung all over the sand; trash, pieces of people’s yards, driftwood, palm seeds from Africa.  Tim and I decided to build a sandcastle, an indestructible one.  We filled the middle with storm loot, glass bottles and two-by-four’s, plastic bits.  We packed sand on the outside and picked sea oats to put on top, wheaty little flags blowing in the wind.  When we finished, I made triumphant declarations to everyone.

“If anyone kicks our sandcastle, they’ll kill themselves.  They’ll break their foot!”

“This will always be here,” said Tim.

A monsoon was coming and I bent into the hot wind as trees bent away from it. Buses and taxis and chauffeured black cars whined and putted past, their lights coloring the water that pooled and stank wherever the pavement dipped. The top of my head lead my progress up the hill, so I didn’t see the woman crossing my path until she was on the ground, the contents of her handbag rolling down the sidewalk.

I tripped over my feet and my apologies as I scrambled to retrieve the fallen items, trying to avoid looking at her long legs.

“Shit, my brand new Prada,” the woman cursed. “I’ll never get the stains out.”

I offered her a hand up and saw her face clearly for the first time. “Is it—Auntie Angela?” I spoke in English: I knew it was Auntie Angela—Auntie Angela who had always insisted I speak to her in English because that was the only language of any value, literally. She looked the same, even after eight years.  My impressions of her had always been tinted by the red of her spiky hair, her dark eyeliner, her protruding collarbones. My mother coined her in an acerbic three-word explanation—“She’s a socialite.” I had never heard the word before, but when my mother said that—“She’s a socialite”—I knew exactly what it meant, and I knew we did not approve.

Auntie Angela staggered to her feet and swayed on her stilettos, grabbing my shoulder for support. I caught whiffs of cigarette smoke, perfume, and what could only be alcohol. “Is that Miriam’s boy back from Eton? John? Haven’t I always told you it makes me feel old when you call me Auntie?” she peered into my face.

“No—it’s Sheldon—it’s Patricia’s son.”

“Oh, my actual nephew. I suppose you have to call me Auntie. And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see Patricia didn’t teach you any better than to run people over.”

I felt I’d betrayed my mother.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said, and she was, all over the sidewalk. I breathed through my mouth only and stared only at the apartment building before me. It stretched higher into the sky than any of the surrounding skyscrapers.

“As long as you’ve caught me in a situation of utter indignity, you might as well help me up to my apartment. I live here.”
I had no idea how my classmates managed to get into clubs or buy bottles of booze, much less how to deal with people once they’d consumed significant quantities of alcohol. Even if Auntie Angela had been sober, I would have had zero idea about how to deal with her. I hovered a hand over her shoulder and held her oversized red handbag in my other. Together we stumbled into the building’s lobby in a caricature of a pas de deux.

All ritzy apartment buildings place a uniformed concierge inside the front doors, ready to call a taxi for a tenant or eject suspicious looking persons. I prepared to explain my identity, but the concierge didn’t flatter me with a second glance. He turned to press the button for the lift.

Propped up against the elevator wall, Auntie Angela considered me. “Sheldon. God, what a truly terrible name. I told Patricia so, but she’s always had just the worst taste—names, clothes, men.” The scent of alcohol mixed with expensive perfume was exotic and surprisingly light. I imagined it moving through the air like smoke from the long cigarettes she always used to carry.

I abhor my name. “It’s not too bad,” I said, my defensiveness surprising me. The elevator passed from the twelfth to the fourteenth floor, propelling us to the thirty-third floor, into the urban canopy of Hong Kong, where all the city’s dramas unfold.

“How about Shel,” said Auntie Angela. “Shel. That’s a name that you could work. Feminine enough to be unthreatening, but the one-syllable nickname is always sexy. Sheldon, I christen you Shel.”

If I hadn’t roused any suspicion as an adolescent male accompanying an obviously intoxicated tenant clad in stockings with garter straps, I didn’t have a hope of working the name Shel.

The elevator doors opened and we spilled onto the landing. “Don’t you dare touch the walls,” she warned, fumbling with the keys. “They’re silk-paneled and water stains silk. I had Justin bring me all this silk from Bangkok.”

I supposed vomit would stain silk as well and that I was implicitly not supposed to let her touch the silk walls either, but she staggered down the passage to the bathroom before me and left some on the second panel.

“It’s been ages since I last saw you—I feel so old.” She threw herself before the toilet. I busied my eyes with the shadowed splendor of the apartment’s interior decorating and tried—unsuccessfully—to plug my ears with the distant sound of traffic.

“Eight years now, isn’t it?” She looked up from the toilet bowl. “It’s not that I have anything against you, Shel. Of course it’s not you, not really.”

“No—I mean… I know.” I felt a little bit sick myself and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the little chunk of vomit clinging to the imported silk, silk that had come from Thailand just to impractically panel a passage to Auntie Angela’s bathroom. All I knew about Bangkok I knew from my mother: it was dirty, there were a lot of forward whores with venereal diseases, and the looms there spun the most beautiful silk.

“What do you know?” Her voice narrowed to a dangerous point; she held it, threatening, between my ribs. “Tell me what you know.”

I knew my mother looking like she’d just stopped crying, and from behind walls my father’s sharp, “Patricia, can’t you just deal with the fact that she doesn’t care about you at all? You know she only cares about clawing her way to the top.” I remembered the last time I saw Auntie Angela: it was eight years ago and she took me to high noon tea at the Shangri-La as she did every week. She didn’t get me a bag of chocolates from the waitresses she knew by name, but sat tapping her foot, ignoring me completely. I sat as still and as quietly as possible, waiting for her to notice my goodness—or at least to notice me enough to launch into a monologue the importance of improving my English. She didn’t speak at all until my mother came to pick me up. She sprang to her feet and pulled her away and whispered furiously with her before clattering down the stairs, yanking a box of cigarettes out of her handbag as she pushed through the doors. She left her umbrella.

“No—I don’t know anything—I just know it’s none of my business—it has nothing to do with me.”

“That’s right,” she said forcefully. “It’s everything to do with your mom and your dad and this dysfunctional, dysfuctional family.”

I thought my immediate family seemed pretty functional, on the whole.

“Shel.” She sat cross-legged in the middle of her expensive tile, in her expensive clothes, looking like a ravaged movie star—still glamorous, despite the vomit. Her gaze was clearer and steadier now. “A sweet kid, really. Don’t worry. Girls will start to like you soon. You have very serious eyes. You have my father’s eyes; deep, intelligent eyes. I have those eyes. Margaret does too. Patricia never did. You won’t tell Patricia you saw me.”

“Of course not.” She didn’t have to tell me.

“Good boy. And I suppose the thing to do now as the rich aunt is to hand you an obscene stack of money and send you on your way.” Her eyes focused on my face again. “But you look an awful lot like Patricia, aside from the eyes, and I won’t give her anything, nothing at all.”

She played a rhythm on the toilet bowl with her fingernails.

“There’s—I think a spot—on the wall,” I said.

“I’ll have to repanel them. Ochre would be nice. I’ll have to tell Justin.”

“Well—goodbye, Auntie,” I said, hovering at the end of the hall.

“Goodbye, Shel,” she said from the floor.

The elevator dropped through storeys and storeys of blinking, flashing city. Shel. I christen you Shel. I passed the concierge, who didn’t bother to look up from his paperback. I thought I might like it if I were able to come back. I thought I’d like to learn more about Shel and my intelligent eyes and the girls who would like me and silk walls all the way from Bangkok. I thought I’d like to know what bad decisions people made on Friday nights, only I looked like my mother.
I wanted to go back eight years to the Shangri-La and pitch a tantrum.

Thirty-three floors up, the lights were on in just the one unit. “Oh, it was no problem taking care of you.” My voice shrilled, high and sarcastic. “No thanks needed, really.” My friends would tell me I was acting like a girl if they could hear me, and anybody else would think I was insane if they saw me. I stuffed my balled fists back in my pockets for the walk home, hoping the occupants of the looming glass high-rises around me were looking up at the ominous, moonlit cloud cover instead of down at the street.

“Where were you?” My mother asked this every time I walked in, automatically, tonelessly, without expectation—knowing full well I didn’t have the courage to make bad decisions.

I looked her in the eyes, noticed how they were not like mine, how they were flatter, how they were smaller, how common and bland they were. My hands were shaking with a strange energy; I trembled with it.

“Nowhere.” The belligerence of the word felt dangerous, powerful on my tongue.

My mother lowered her magazine and stared at me. “Shel—” How could she know, she couldn’t know, I was overexcited, it was only her stammer—“Sh—Sheldon. You do not speak to me in that tone. I don’t care where you were; you are grounded.”

As my voice rose in practiced incredulity, as it began complaining about the unfairness, as her voice and mine competed for volume, I grasped for comfort in the argument I knew she would win, in my mother assuring me—I was Sheldon, and I was grounded.

Now, she should’ve known that messing with Luke Shepherd was a bad idea. You know what they say about the pastor’s kids. In Sunday school, they’re running around the sanctuary, spilling fruit punch on the pews. In middle-school, the pastor’s son is chasing after girls, flipping up their dresses, while his sister smears on lipstick and glittery eye shadow that makes her look like a harlot, Sister Esther says, as she drags her by the crook of her arm to the sink. In high school, the son is hunched in the back pew, texting his latest girl, and the daughter is not in church because she is being felt up in a bathroom stall by the new boy, who is quietly unrolling the nylons her mother insisted she wore because ladies didn’t show their bare legs in church.
They say the pastor’s kids are always the worst ones and it’s especially true when it comes to Luke Shepherd, that masterpiece of a man. Light-skinned with loose curls, brown eyes, full lips. Yep, we could’ve told her to stay away from him.
Like she would’ve listened anyway.

Nobody knew when or how it’d all started because they refused to publicly acknowledge it. But we could tell there was something there. We could, anyway. It was all in the little ways they looked at each other and touched. Like when Luke would stroll into our young adult meetings, always long after they’d started. He’d drum a rhythm on Nadia’s head as he passed her chair and she’d throw him an irritated look over her shoulder, secretly smiling into her hand once she turned back around.
They were probably in love, but nobody knew because they wanted to keep it a secret. Or Luke did, anyway. He said it was because of his dad. When your dad was a famous pastor, your life was different. This was where Nadia would roll her eyes and say she wasn’t asking him to take her on a park bench, she just wanted to go out to dinner sometime.
“Because someone will see us,” Luke always said.
“And…?”
“And tell my parents.”
Here she’d fold her arms across her chest. “Why don’t you want your parents to know about me?”
He’d shake his head again. “You don’t know how they are.”
They’d been through this a few times before. Eventually she told him she understood, but she never did. His brother Kaleb didn’t have to hide. He and Aubrey could take pictures together and hold hands and attend events where they were complimented on their collective cuteness and cooed at when they nibbled off of each other’s plate.
We all had high hopes for Kaleb. At twenty, he was a saved, Spirit-filled child of God who could quote scripture and tell you what it meant too. He’d been with Aubrey, Nadia’s roommate, for three whole years, and in that time, they had never had sex. And considering this, he had only cheated on her once, but it was just head, so it didn’t really count.
Still, Nadia tried to ignore the fawning over Kaleb and Aubrey. She pretended it didn’t bother her. And she saw Luke at least once a week, in the beginning. Sometimes she would cook for him. Macaroni and cheese with tortilla chips was his favorite. He would smile across the kitchen table, dipping his chips into his bowl of mac and cheese. She didn’t see how he could eat it, but he’d laugh with a mouth full of broken chips and say it was better than nachos.
Sometimes he’d undress her as soon as she answered the door. Sometimes he wanted to hurt her. She could tell from the hungry look in his eyes when he stared at her, or the way he flipped her over onto all fours, yanking her hair.
Sometimes he was gentle, kissing her before he even reached for her zipper, whispering things to her, sweet things. He told her she was beautiful and she knew she was, everyone did, but it was different when he said it. He didn’t call her beautiful like the dozens of boys who came before him, who thought it was the password. He always said it afterward, when they cuddled in her bed or when she was hurriedly re-clasping her bra because Aubrey was on her way home, he’d stare at her and say, you’re beautiful, like he was awe-struck and thinking out loud, saying words not meant for her to hear.
Sometimes he disgusted her. He wouldn’t answer her texts or calls, or he would respond with one-word sentences days later. Other times she wouldn’t see or hear from him for days and weeks. She should have expected this. All pretty girls think they can nail down their man, but they can’t, because there’ll always be some other pretty girl who’s willing to spread her legs for him, and that’s a fact. Still, Nadia told herself she didn’t care about his whereabouts, she wasn’t that wide open, and it wasn’t like they were married or something. He could do what he wanted and so would she. But whenever he sent her a random note or appeared on her doorstep after his absences, she would forget he was ever gone.
Sometimes she disgusted herself.
The last time she’d seen him was on a Sunday, when he texted her at noon, said he had a dime, and he’d be by in a little. It was the first time she’d heard from him in over three weeks.
“You brought it?” she asked, when she answered the door.
He dangled the dimebag in front of her face, pinching the plastic as he passed the olive green blur in front of her eyes. Then he stepped inside, wrapping an arm around her waist and squeezing her to him.
“That’s the first thing you gotta say when you see me? Did I bring the weed?”
He was smiling down at her, a teasing smile, and she wrenched out of his grasp, pushing past him.
“No,” she said, shutting the door behind him, “it’s why the hell haven’t you called me in the past three weeks?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I like your first question better.”
“You’re not funny.”
Her arms folded across her chest, she stared him down, wanting him to look her in the eyes and tell her why he thought it was funny to hurt her. He ignored her glare, planting his hand on her shoulder and squeezing it. She swatted his hand away.
“Are you fucking somebody else?” she said.
“What? Where did that come from?”
“Let’s see,” she said, “you disappear for three weeks, don’t even pick up your damn phone—”
“Are you fucking somebody else?”
“Yeah. All your friends. Happy?”
He grinned. “You gonna let me watch?”
“Get out.”
“Yo, I’m jokin’, I’m jokin! Calm down.”
“Get out. Go.”
She grabbed his wrist, pulling him toward the door. She knew that once Luke planted his feet, she wouldn’t be able to pull him anywhere. Still, she yanked at his arm and he watched her struggle, his smile fading.
“Baby, no,” he said. “No, I’m not seein’ anyone else. It’s just you, okay? It’s been you, for the past three months. Okay?”
Then he pulled her close, burying his face in her neck as he planted kisses behind her ear. When he pulled away, he gave her waist a final squeeze.
“Now let’s light this shit up because you need to relax,” he said, fishing in his pockets for a lighter. “I thought you were gonna rip my head off right then. Is it that time of the month or somethin’?”
She didn’t realize it until later, after he’d slipped out her door and she was lounging in bed, still buzzed. She thought about what he’d said while he carefully licked the rolling paper, glancing over his shoulder as he told her, I know how you get. Last time you went crazy on my ass. It was only then that she stopped to think about how long ago last time had been.

Later, they lay together entangled in her sheets. Their bodies were sticky, damp, but they lay with their legs intertwined, Nadia tucked into the crook of his arm. She watched him as he snored, her arm wrapped around his chest, fingers spread on top of his ribs, when she heard the front door slam.
“Nadia, I’m back!”
It was three o’clock already. Of course Aubrey’d be back from church by then. Nadia wriggled out from under Luke’s arm and yanked opened a window, trying to let some air in to dilute the smell. Luke watched her, his head resting on his arm, a smile forming across his face. He watched her struggle to hide the distinctive smell with the light breeze blowing in through the window screen and he laughed.
Nadia put her hand over his mouth to shut him up, but it only made him laugh harder. He laughed and kissed her palm, making her giggle too.
“Nadia?” Aubrey’s voice sounded louder. She was standing right in front of the door
“Yeah?” Nadia’s hand was still clamped on his mouth.
“Um, is something burning?”
Aubrey was hesitant, bless her heart. She wouldn’t even acknowledge what her own nose smelled.
“No,” Nadia said. “It’s just incense.”
Now he really started howling. She covered his face with her pillow to muffle his voice, feeling his chest heave under her arm.
“Oh okay,” Aubrey said. “Just be careful with that.”
Nadia heard her footsteps diminish as she walked across the hallway and disappeared into her room, closing the door behind her. She removed the pillow from Luke’s face and he smiled up at her, his breathing slowing. She pressed her hand to his forehead, pushing back curls.
“We have to be quiet now,” she whispered.
“I don’t care. I don’t care if she hears us.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t. Not anymore.”
She kissed him to shut him up. It was better than hearing his lies.

You would think that it was the test that stunned her the most, but it wasn’t. That little plus sign that appeared in the magic window couldn’t compare to the moment she received the check.
She didn’t discover it in her mailbox or at the post office front counter. Instead, it was hand-delivered three days after she’d first told him the news, inside a white envelope with her name written across it. She found it wedged under her door and as soon as she held the envelope up, she saw the tan slip inside and she knew what it was.
The check really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her. Maybe she didn’t think Luke was capable of such heartlessness—not just because he gave her the money, but the way he delivered it and fled from her doorstep. You couldn’t really blame him for giving her the money. Still, he could have given her the check to her face, no one disagrees with that.
Somebody should’ve known what was going on, but nobody did. Well, somebody did but not the right somebody. Of course Luke knew, but he was the one who told her to do it in the first place. And everyone else who could’ve helped her…well, no one really knows when these types of things are happening.
Aubrey would have stopped her but she was clueless. Too heavenly minded to be any earthly good, like the old folks always said. We thought that she would have known something, but she told us that the morning that it happened—or supposedly happened—Nadia seemed fine. When Aubrey asked her how she was doing, she just shrugged, not looking up from her cereal as she smashed Cheerios she didn’t intend to eat flat against the side of the bowl.
Yes, Nadia was quiet but she was like that sometimes. Now that she thought about it, it was strange that when she told her that Kaleb would be staying over that night, Nadia said nothing. The very first time they’d had that conversation, Nadia, who was sitting at the kitchen table wearing blue-checkered boxers from an old boyfriend, her foot perched on the chair next to her, stopped in mid-scoop, her spoon clanging against the bowl as she leaned back in her chair, a smirk spreading across her face.
“I see you, Aubrey,” she had said, nodding her approval. “Damn. It’s about time. I was about to say—”
“Whoa, whoa,” Aubrey said, waving her arms in front of her like she was trying to swat down Nadia’s inference. “We’re not—it’s not like that.”
Nadia’s smile melted away, her eyes narrowing as her lips pressed together in a look of sheer skepticism.
“So you mean to tell me,” she said slowly, “that he’s spending the night, but you’re not gonna fuck him?”
Nadia wasn’t shy about her conquests. On mornings when she returned around nine or ten wearing the same slinky dress from the night before, she’d flash a smug smile at Aubrey, daring her to ask about the recently unfolded events; and when Aubrey was too uncomfortable to bite, she’d tell her anyway, practically stretching out on the countertop and smoking the post-coital cigarette when Aubrey tried to eat her oatmeal.
“No,” Aubrey said. “We’re not.”
“Wait. So he’s gonna spend the night…and you’re just going to sleep.”
“Exactly.”.
Nadia just shook her head. “How long ya’ll been together?”
“Two and a half years.”
“Three years, and you haven’t had sex once?”
Aubrey shook her head.
“No you have, or no you haven’t?” Nadia asked.
“Haven’t.”
“Damn. Is he gay?”
“No! He just respects me.”
Nadia shrugged, pouring more cereal into her bowl. Aubrey waited, expecting another one of her snappy comebacks, but she seemed to have moved on, more engrossed in her breakfast and the drama unfolding on MTV than in Aubrey’s intimate relationships. Then, once Aubrey placed her empty bowl in the sink and started toward the bathroom, she heard Nadia behind her say, “He’s gay.”
But that morning, Nadia barely reacted. She replied in monosyllable to Aubrey’s conversation starters and even her declaration about Kaleb received no response, no suggestive raising of the eyebrows or embarrassing innuendo.
Nadia was like this sometime. Some mornings, she didn’t want to be bothered, ignoring Aubrey’s attempts at conversation or avoiding her altogether. Some days she retreated so far into herself that it was just easier to let her be, rather than to drag her back into the land of the living. This was one of those days.
Aubrey had returned to her Biology textbook, ripping apart pieces of toast and dipping them into a glob of jelly spooned on her plate, when Nadia stood, dumping her bowl into the sink, waterlogged O’s splayed in the basin.
“Do you think you could give me a ride somewhere?”
“What time?”
“An hour.”
“Can’t. I have class. You can take my car though.”
Nadia hesitated a second before she said, “Okay.”
Aubrey unhooked her car key from her key ring and slid it across the counter toward her. Nadia reached out for it, her hand slowly raking it off of the countertop.
Half an hour later, Nadia emerged from the bathroom, wearing skinny jeans and pointy-toed heels, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail, large sunglasses obscuring her eyes. Slinging her large purse over her shoulder, she walked past Aubrey to the front door, pausing with her hand on the doorknob. Then she glanced back at her and said, “I’m going out.”
“Have fun,” Aubrey had called after her.
We asked Aubrey if Nadia seemed upset when she returned that night, but she said no, she just wasn’t feeling well. Female problems, you know how that goes. When she walked through the door, she did look a little unsteady on her feet, so Aubrey told her she should sit down. She kept saying she was fine, she was fine, she was fine. It was just cramps, she said, clenching her fists and breathing slowly, waiting for them to pass. It was painful just to watch, Aubrey said.
“Want some Midol?” she asked, putting an arm around her. “Or I could make you tea—”
“No. I’m okay.” Nadia paused, her fingernails digging into her palms. “I’m just gonna go lie down.”
She rose to her feet, clutching her purse in her hands, but she didn’t turn to walk toward her room. She was staring at the couch, where there was a splotch of blood on her seat. She cursed, and when she returned from the bathroom, she blinked back tears as she sprayed the cushion with stain remover and scrubbed.

Nadia discovered the thing about the check later. It was still sitting on her nightstand, preserved in its clean white envelope. She hadn’t spent his money. She hadn’t even opened the envelope.
After staring at it for a minute, she finally reached for it, sliding her finger under the envelope and pulling out a tan slip of paper. Her name faced her in small, bold letters. She glanced at the date. Last Tuesday. A day after she told him the news. The check was for a thousand dollars.
Her eyes fell to the bottom, to the part she dreaded, where Luke decided to sign off everything they had because she was a problem he needed to get rid of—but his signature was not on the line.
John Shepherd had endorsed the check.

In the end, everybody found out anyway. All it takes is one person to overhear a snatch of conversation or to see something that doesn’t look quite right and it’s over. You know how church folks can gossip. Mrs. Gaines, the pastor’s secretary, told us that one afternoon, a hot-to-trot female marched up to the front desk, demanding to meet with the pastor. When Mrs. Gaines explained to her that the pastor was a very busy man, you can’t just walk into his office, you have to make an appointment first, the girl flashed a check in front of her and said that the pastor knew who the fuck she was, she wasn’t making a goddamn appointment, and he better see her now. She looked so crazy Mrs. Gaines was half-afraid she’d reach into her purse and point a revolver at her forehead. Thank God the pastor was not in. The girl said she’d wait. She was young and beautiful, Mrs. Gaines said, who knew why she was so angry? She was a pretty thing but she had way too much attitude, Mrs. Gaines said, cursing like that and taking the Lord’s name in vain. Have mercy.
The only reason why we didn’t believe that she was the pastor’s young mistress, like Sister Robinson claimed, or even worse, his lovechild, like the head alto suggested, was because we saw her and Luke together.
We were leaving mid-week Bible Study when we stepped out into the parking lot and saw the two of them. They were sitting on a bench beside the church, and we probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all if we hadn’t heard her voice cutting through the evening’s stillness. Then we saw her, hovering over Luke, who sat hunched on the bench, his head in his hands.
“You lied,” she said, “you lied.”
He moved his hands from his face and looked up at her, starting to say something, when she punched him. Once, twice, three times, then she grabbed his shirt and shook him, yelling that he lied, he lied, he fucking lied. We watched, not knowing what to say. Luke was silent too. He sat there, taking it all until she’d had enough, until she shoved him and turned to walk away. Then he reached for her hand and she yanked hers away as she started toward the rows of parked cars. Luke sat slumped on the bench, his face back in his hands, shoulders shaking.
When she neared us, she narrowed her liquid amber eyes, her face twisted into a sneer.
“What the fuck are you bitches looking at?” she said.
We were too stunned to say anything, but she didn’t wait for our response anyway. She stormed past us, car keys in hand, not looking back, refusing to look back. For a moment, we had nothing to say. Of course we didn’t know then what we know now. So at the time, the only thing we could think was that Nadia Turner was still beautiful even when she was a complete bitch and wasn’t it unfair to all of us nice girls.
Later, Aubrey told us she still didn’t believe any of it. Nadia and Luke didn’t even know each other and besides, if something was really going on between them, don’t you think that she, the roommate, would have known? Aubrey also doesn’t believe that Kaleb cheated on her once with that girl at the party, so her opinion doesn’t matter much.
For a while, we thought things might explode, but they didn’t. People whispered about it for a few days. Ladies talked about it in the bathroom as they reapplied lipstick and lotioned their hands in front of the mirrors. The old folks discussed it in between rounds at bingo. Then Sunday came, and the pastor delivered a sermon about the power of positive confessions that brought the congregation to our feet. We let the Spirit move us, joining choruses of amens! hallelujahs! let Him use you! and take your time, Pastor, take your time. We harmonized with the choir, clapping our hands, swaying during the solos and dancing during the organ riffs. With the music coursing through us, we duked the Devil and stomped on serpents, our shoes crashing into the wooden floor in time with the drums.
By the end of the service, we were folding the church bulletins into fans, sweating with the rest of the saints.

I spoke first to Mac Trueba, the founder of the town’s abstract realist photography collective. He was living with three friends and his wife in an apartment in the Colonia.
“San Expedito’s just grown too large, Mac,” I said. “We had the write-up in Coastal Homeowner’s, and then in Pacific Living, and it’s just gotten so popular that we’re too big for the zoning board.” I gave him two thousand dollars, a train ticket to Angangueo, and forty-eight hours to pack up. He was probably going to have to leave some of his bigger photos – the ones where he took pictures of bookshelves and stacks of things and then covered up bits with black cloth to just leave bands of color.
“You don’t like my photography?” he asked, and I explained that it was great, not really my thing, but great. “Is it because I married Clara?” was the next question, predictably, and although Clara was very beautiful (she had a small scar on her right cheek where her brother had shot her with a BB gun as a child that gave her a single, asymmetric dimple) and I had dated her in high school, that was not the reason, and I told him so. He said, “OK, Earl,” and was gone the next day.
That was good, I thought. That was very easy, and I checked back to see if Clara was there, but unfortunately and, in retrospect, predictably, it turned out she’d left with Mac. So I expelled his three friends as well and let the Valenzuelas next door expand into the vacant apartment. They had seven in an apartment that size, plus two seniors.
Then I spoke to Woods, out on Libertad and Hurley, and told him the same basic thing – Coastal Homeowner’s, Pacific Living, overpopulation, two thousand dollars, the whole deal – and he said, “Why do the yuppies get priority, Earl? I’ve been living here as long as anyone else.” Woods ran a kind of nude writers’ commune down there on the Crest, and it had gotten pretty popular in recent years, especially with the women.
“The yuppies aren’t the problem, Woods,” I said. “Hell, I hate the yuppies as much as the next man, but they aren’t exactly flocking to the city center, or San Expedito proper, even. The yuppies drop themselves out in the suburbs, and looks like Ralstonville and Boscovia’ll be absorbing most of them. The real issue these days is the city center, and what I would call an infrastructural problem.” Woods agreed that there was an infrastructural problem, but wanted to know what to do about the rest of the commune. I just kept staring at his eyes when he said this, because the rest of him was notably tan and I was having trouble taking that for too long at once. “Call them all together,” I said to Woods. “Offer them all the deal. Obviously the more we can take out the better.”
“Obviously,” he said. Forty-eight hours later, the commune was gone, and I was feeling so accomplished that I took a day off and watched a couple of ballgames I’d taped.
In the four days after that, I expelled two thousand three hundred and fifty four more, mainly from artists’ collectives where people were living five, six, seven to a room, and this, plus the eighty-seven in the colony and the four folks in the apartment and a reported death (old age), left San Expedito with a population of nine thousand eight hundred and ten. Nine thousand eight hundred and ten was just fine, and I called Vern at Coastal Homeowner’s to apologize about the message I’d left him when his article first came out, something about not looking forward to the attention this would bring us, we already knew we were a “nice little town with a creative spirit,” so we weren’t getting anything out of the write-up, something like that. I’ve known Vern since high school, and he’s always done right by me, but I think I lost my temper when I saw that article, thinking about the city center. Now that it was alright, I wanted him to know.
“Earl,” he said when I called. “I’ve already got a man on it.”
“Got a man on what?” I asked, and told him about the two thousand four hundred and forty or so folks I’d sent to Angangueo, saying I was sorry about that message.
“Well, it’s alright, but that’s just the thing, Earl,” he said. “They aren’t in Angangueo. As I understand it, they’re somewhere in Ralstonville, forming a kind of posse. We’ve got a writer on it now.” I told Vern I’d call him back, and walked over to Ted’s. Ted Saxton was chief of police, had been for years, and he told me more or less the same thing.
“They spent the two thousand on rifles and leaflets,” he said, and smoothed a poster advertising the school district’s Ceramicist of the Year award. “None of them went to Angangueo.”
“Is there any way we can call them?” I asked.
“I don’t see why not,” he said, and turned to the phone. He typed in two digits, then turned back. “Don’t you have Woods’s number?”
“I suppose I do,” I said, and called Woods.
“Woods,” he said.
“Woods,” I said. “How’s Angangueo.”
“Well, it’s fine, Earl,” he said. “How’s San Expedito?”
“Woods,” I said.
“Earl,” he said.
“Why did you all stay in Ralstonville and buy rifles?”
“Angangueo doesn’t want us,” Woods said. “So we’d like the nudist colony back, and so on.”
“What are the leaflets for, Woods?”
“Some of the boys put together some real nice protest poetry,” Woods said. “And a couple other folks threw some woodcut caricatures on there, too. The abstract realists have a photo series planned out.”
“And you got those rifles.”
“And we got those rifles.”
“Can I talk to Clara, please?” I asked.
“Who’s Clara?”
“Clara Trueba.” There was some shuffling on the other end of the line.
“Earl?” Clara said.
“How come you broke up with me?” I said.
“That was thirty years ago, Earl,” she said.
“Oh, OK,” I said, and I turned to Ted and told him we’d just have to let them back in. There was no way we could defend against two thousand hundred forty or so rifles and God knows how many leaflets.
I don’t expect them to make a statue of me when it’s over. We’ll have to apply for extra funds from the state if we don’t want to end up condemning some buildings, especially in the Colonia. Even if we aren’t going to get the yuppies’ tax dollars, they’ll want to visit, sure enough. So that’s a couple of difficult truths that doesn’t lead to popularity right there, plus I’m an ugly man on top of that. There always has been a bias against making statues of ugly men, and I can’t say I blame them. I have a weak chin and a paunch. Some biases make sense, is all. Maybe it isn’t the kind of town you’d want a statue of yourself in, anyway.

My mother had grown up in the South wearing pearls and attending debutante balls before she up and left for California and met my father, a successful insurance salesman in San Francisco. She did not know what she wanted to do, but her greatest dream was to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in all four seasons, and for that, she was willing to sacrifice the Ionic columns and sprawling yards of her family’s estate. Only after she arrived did she realize that she had miscalculated; San Francisco only had one season, foggy and grey. So she created fallacies, productions of white snow drifts swirling furiously around the jaunty red bridge. One hung in my room. It was so real that I couldn’t imagine the scene was not drawn from life. The small huddled frames of people shuffling across the bridge so vivid that it was impossible that they did not live in this snow-covered world. But to her, the art was preposterous. She had come to see snow; she had come to see summer leaves turn to rich oranges and reds and float to the ground. It had been her understanding that these things happened on the coast, but she must have been thinking of the wrong one. She admitted to me once as she peeled an onion in the kitchen, giving her an excuse for tears, that she tried to paint the bridge as it was, cloaked in fog so thick that one could only see half of it at once, but she could not. She had meant to find the seasons and had made it to the wrong side of the country instead.
Then she met my father in a bar downtown and fell in love and stopped painting altogether because she had finally found her purpose for being there in that fog cloaked city. And besides, he told her, it was very confusing to paint a California bridge in the midst of a New England fall. And after a year of dating, she accepted his proposal and followed his dream of growing wine two hours north of the city to Dry Creek Valley, where I was born a year later.

That winter, my father gained twenty pounds and it snowed in San Francisco for the very first time.

Standing now on the front step of our home, my mother seemed hopelessly out of place. She was tall and stately, her back perfectly straight and arms limp by her side. She would have looked at home among Eucalyptus trees, fragrant and willowy but among the squatty vines with their twisted branches and thick middles, she was an oddity, a snowflake falling softly on the streets of San Francisco. She folded her arms, now, across her chest. I watched the back of her head, waiting for movement, convulsions of tears, any sign of life at all, but she looked unflinchingly forward. What she thought during the time that elapsed, perhaps three minutes, I do not profess to know.
Without bowing her head, she removed the simple gold band that she had received fifteen years before and cast it into the vineyard. It arched gracefully through the air, the metal catching the sunlight as it returned to the earth, an act of great significance and passion resulting in some tiny unseen crash. One day, perhaps, it would be implanted there and grow into something horrible, a vine with rotting fruit and withered leaves. She turned back to the screen door and for a moment we stood there, examining each other through the glass window. I searched her blue eyes for some form of shared experience or pain, but she looked into my face with neither acknowledgment nor recognition. I would later try to imagine the depth of pain, the absolute bleakness and despair that must have motivated that look, and I would try to forgive her for it.
The moment passed and she turned now, moving through the front door, through the common room, where I sat, and into the kitchen. She walked directly to the metal wine rack in the corner of the room. The rack held twenty bottles, all ours, each sorted according to year and type. It was as close to a scrapbook as our family had ever produced. She reached out and took a bottle off the shelf. She ran her fingered over the beveled paper as if it were the skin of a newborn child, delicate and pure. Today, I knew, a crew was coming to rip every last disease riddled vine from the ground. There would be no new wine for several years.
Perhaps she wondered if he had planned this, plotting his own escape to coincide with the destruction of the vines in hopes of creating some greater metaphor. Perhaps she felt deceived by him and was furious with herself for miscalculating the sort of man he was. Or perhaps she had known what sort of man he was all along and simply hadn’t done anything. Her body language, her gracefully curled spine and impassive stance, revealed none of these possibilities. And the ambiguity of the situation, the lack of definitive emotional response, was terrifying.
Without warning, she flung the bottle to the linoleum floor with such force that the cork popped and wine burst from the bottle. Her body became fluid again, and it must have felt good to create that type of crash. The wine flowed outward from the point of contact, soaking the white floor in burgundy. Examining her work, she took another bottle and hurled it against the wall, grunting with exertion. The wine burst in a tremendous arc and coagulated in a puddle filled with shattered glass. She reached out to the wine rack again and again, her arms moving gracefully as a dancer as she reached across her body to retrieve another bottle and flung it outward into the space. I was crying now, but I did not say a word. I was not really there. Like a wedding or a funeral, I could not claim ownership over the events that were transpiring, and so I bore witness.

Twenty bottles, in sum. My mother stood barefoot, surrounded by a sea of crimson red. She was a sea goddess, her legs smeared with wine and her sallow cheeks full and alive with color, the passion of the moment igniting her very being. The curlers had distended, unraveling tangled tresses of long brown hair that had, in recent years, become tinged with grey. She was fiercely gorgeous, a savage woman shown on the cover of National Geographic. I could have imagined her hunting down caribou or migrating across deserted lands. She could have painted the Golden Gate Bridge in a typhoon and no one would have questioned her vision.
I cried harder now, and I was shocked to discover that my cries were not silent. I, in fact, inhabited space in the same scene as she. My mother caught my eye and held my gaze for a second. And though her blood was coursing with adrenaline, though her stance was that of a warrior, stiff-legged and brazen, her eyes showed only fear in its most basic form. It was the fear of the unknown, the fear of time passing without any logical sequence at all. It was the same fear of the savage woman in uncharted lands and the same fear that I had experienced when my mother told me as a young girl that Clancy, our Golden Retriever, was dying. It was a fear that one learns to suppress when it is no longer appropriate to ask questions such as “Where are we going?” or “Is there a God?” anymore.
“Don’t cry.” It was neither a command nor a placation.
I nodded once as she turned her head and walked unflinchingly through the puddle and down the narrow hallway, leaving perfectly formed red footprints of wine and blood on the cream carpet.

In such a small space, there is no room for chaos or calamity. Everything must be contained, compartmentalized, controlled. Spills were cleaned immediately because there was no way to avoid them, surfaces kept tidy because one could not work around them. Now, with my father’s absence, there was suddenly room for disaster, and the house seemed empty for the first time I could remember. Slowly, I set my feet down on the floor. They had been coiled tightly under me, and now they were numb. I tested each leg, putting a bit of pressure on it followed by a bit more. Finally, I stood and got a mop from the kitchen closet. It was solid in my hands, the feeling of wood between my fingers telling me that this was real. This is a mop I thought to myself I am holding a mop and I am going to clean the kitchen. I knelt down and nicked my finger on a piece of broken glass. I watched coolly as a small bubble of blood formed and ran down the length of my index finger. I brought the finger to my lips and licked it off. This is blood. This is blood and that means that I am alive.
I righted myself and dropped the mop into the center of the wine, sending ripples through the placid lake. I moved the mop to the left, which merely extended the puddle outwards in that direction. I moved the mop to the right, but this created a similar phenomenon on the opposite side. I had never mopped before, but I knew that this did not happen when my mother did.
I pushed the mop franticly now, swinging it from left to right, and with each movement the mess seemed to grow in size, becoming more and more impossible to contain. I stopped. I dropped the mop and sunk to my knees, alcohol seeping into cuts and scrapes with a tingling burn that feel prickly and good. The shorts I wore had been white but were now turned a deep crimson. They would never be white again, but I didn’t care; the line between tidiness and disorder seemed too solid, and we had crossed from one side of it to the other. Everything in this house would be stained now, somehow.
Cupping my hands, I brought some of the wine to my lips; I wanted to taste what rage felt like. I had tasted wine all my life, and I had come to finally appreciate the taste, the undertones and blending of flavors that not only set each bottle apart, but each sip apart. Everything about a good wine, my father had once told me, changes. No sip should ever evoke quite the same response. The pooled wine tasted strongly of decay. I took another sip and could taste the disease, the acrid taste of death which would soon be all there was. Surely the taste of rot had been there for years, growing with each successive crop, waiting to be discovered. A good wine changes, but it does not decay.
I lay down in the warm wine. Fruit flies buzzed hungrily around my arms and legs, and I watched as one rogue fly dipped down into the mess and became caught, its wings growing heavy with wine until it sank slowly, inexorably to the bottom.

Perhaps I dozed off then, or perhaps I was conscious, the boundary between the two so dissolved that it hardly mattered. Consciousness, as I understood the term, was the state of understanding your surroundings and affecting change through action. By this definition, I had not been conscious at all that morning. Now, lying in the pooled wine, the burn of my skin becoming duller, more distant by the moment, I was not sure that I had been conscious for a very long time. Perhaps the last night I was conscious was when I was ten, a girl in pigtails whose favorite hobby was running between the winding rows of grapes with arms outstretched in either direction. I would grab at the leaves as I flew past, tearing them from the vines and clasping them like wings. My father would see me from the bedroom window and yell at me to stop, but I would not. I would flap my wings until I could felt as though I could take flight. Perhaps that is how it is to be truly awake: exhilarating and a bit destructive, always at someone or something’s expense.
Was the girl in the passenger seat of the Buick alive? Did she feel as though the driveway held infinite possibilities at its end? More than my father, I thought of her. I would be haunted for years by her blank expression and wonder if whether, as an adult, she would wear her hair in a side ponytail if only to bring back the fleeting feeling of how she was as a girl. I wanted more than anything to have seen her face as she drove away and know if she was happy, if she was sorry, if she was conscious.

I was roused by the sound of footfalls. The oven clock told me that and hour had passed, though I could not believe it. It had been days since he had left. Soon, my mother stood in the doorway. Her hair had unraveled, the pink curlers bobbed uselessly at the ends. Her eyes were wide but vacant, and in her hand was a cigarette, which she moved methodically in and out of her lips. There was something sinister about the forcefulness of her inhales, the slight quivering of pleasure as she released a white curlicue of smoke. The sight of my mother with a cigarette was as incongruous to me as would be the sight of our land without vines.
My favorite memory of my mother was when we went to the lake one oppressively hot summer weekend. We were on the edge of the boat with our big toes skimming the surface when, without warning, she rose and swan dove into the lake, making no splash at all. She was under for so long, diving deeper and deeper, seconds passing with no sign of her. And just at the moment when it first crossed my mind to worry, the very instant when some reflexive fear began to kick in, she came to the surface, treading water and laughing to herself, her face radiant in the reflected sunlight. “Come in!” she said and I jumped in and swam to her. I had never been more thankful to her as I was for knowing to surface at the exact moment I began to panic. The very act solidified my trust in her and my certainty that she would always care for me. I did not know, now, how to reconcile this water goddess with the woman who stood before me, oblivious to my tremendous need.
She brought the cigarette to her lips once more and I looked away, ashamed to have seen her in such an intimate act. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck, sizing up my jaw line and determining how much it resembled his, how much of him was still in this room. “Did you know I smoked?”
“No.” There was silence. She was waiting for more, perhaps an admonishment or some statistic about the consequences learned in sixth grade health class. She stood waiting for anything she could fight against. “When did you pick it up?”
“Years ago.” She waved her hand in front of her face to illustrate this. “I promised your father I’d quit, but I guess neither of us paid much attention to our vows.”
“Does Dad know you smoke?” I said this, I think, to hurt her. Does he know, not did he. He wasn’t coming back.
She shrugged. “What does it matter now?”
“I was just wondering if you lied to him.”
Her mouth contorted in pain. “I never lied to your father, Lindsay. There are private matters and there are lies and you should damn well know the difference.
“Which was the girl?” I wanted to take back the words as soon as I spoke them.
“You shut your fucking mouth.” She looked as though she could have hit me, and I started back a little on instinct. But she stood perfectly still, the muscles in her neck tense with rage.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt the sting of tears coming to my eyes, and in a way it was comforting to feel such a familiar response to pain.
She sighed and extended her arm down to me, but the act was just a gesture, an indication that it was time to rise; she put no effort behind the outstretched hand, and I pulled myself up from the ground, my legs trembling under the weight. We stood very close now, my eyes hitting the top of her chin. She released my hand and flicked her cigarette into the puddle of wine. She began to walk down the cream hallway towards her bedroom, and I followed. “Pretty dirty, huh?” She said of the carpet with a sort of reverence, as though she herself had planned those footprints.
Upon entering the bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her nightstand and took out a carton of cigarettes, placing it on the bed. The nightstand had been a wedding gift from a family friend, and in the corner was a painted grape leaf with the wedding date written in elegant white letters, “June 4, 1980.”
Surely she must have tried harder at some point to hide her cigarettes, maybe burying them outside or shoving them in the ventilation ducts. My father may have been oblivious to her transgression, but more likely, she stopped trying to hide it from him because it ceased to matter either way. It must have been tragic for my mother to abandon the elaborate plan to hide her secret and instead, place it beside the bed she shared for her husband to find or not find. And yet, however crassly and indifferently she hid her secret, I did not know.
She reached for a fresh box and opened it, pulling out two white cylinders. One she put between her pursed lips, and the other she extended towards me, raising an eyebrow in invitation.
My heart lurched as I examined the cigarette held between her trembling fingers. Had she acted out in grief or rage, I would have forgiven her, but all I knew in the pit of my stomach was disgust. “No,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
“I know you don’t.” She smiled as if to say that I was incapable of such secrecy. “I’m asking you if you’d like to try.”
“Why?”
“You don’t have to.” The cigarette bobbed like a pendulum in her mouth counting off the rhythm of her words. “It’s just I’d like a little a company and, well, who the fuck am I to tell you anything anymore?”
“You’re my mother.” I tried to put as much weight behind those words as I could, but even I could feel them dissipate into nothingness.
She took a lighter from the pocket of her robe and brought it to the tip of her cigarette. The end glowed red and smoldered. She closed her eyes for a moment as if contemplating the validity of my previous statement; was she?
I reached out and took the cigarette, which was still extended towards me. It felt too light, too insubstantial to be anything at all. Shouldn’t the manifestation of fourteen years of deception be heavy? This felt no more harmful than an autumn leaf, yellowed and crackling on the ground; I could crush it if I wanted to. I rolled it over between my fingers, and I could feel the heat from my mother’s hands. I placed the cigarette between two pale lips, leaned forward, and waited while she lifted a purple plastic lighter to the tip.

The first inhale burned my lungs like a fire poker and I couldn’t suppress a wave of coughs. My mother cocked her head in bland concern, and I blushed. I brought the cigarette to my lips again and this time, took a tiny, tentative puff. The taste was bitter but a bit sweet, and I let the smoke eddy in my mouth for a moment before releasing it, trying to taste the different undertones as I had been taught to do with wine.
I walked past my mother to the bedroom window. It was noon, and outside, the migrant workers were beginning to descend upon the barren grapevines, rolling into the base of the driveway in pickup trucks with windows down and Mariachi music blasting. Pretty soon, there were about twenty of them clustered at the left-hand corner of the vines, far enough that I could not make out individual features, dark skinned and dressed almost identically in torn jeans and flannels. One stood in the middle of the group, gesturing towards the rows behind them. On command, the group split apart and each man grabbed a pick ax from the back of a white pickup truck and approached a separate row of grapes.
The destruction process seemed sadder, crueler somehow, when meticulously organized. Each man started at the closest vine and, raising a rusted pick ax overhead, cast it down onto the vine without any ceremony. It took three strikes, on average, to uproot each vine. After these three, it would topple to the ground, pulling up an intricate system of roots, thick and pale like gnarled appendages. The worker would then move onto the next, leaving the felled vine in the dirt to await the arrival of a white pickup truck that would take it away.
And in this way, carefully, methodically, rows of once fleshy vines became battlefields, the forms of fallen soldiers unresisting to the Mexican who hopped out of the passenger side of the pickup truck and scooped their lifeless bodies into the back.
I brought the cigarette to my lips once more, this time filling my lungs with the sour smoke. I could feel my mother’s presence behind me coming closer to the window, and my body tingled with the foreignness both of the chemicals and of her. She came to the window and we stood shoulder to shoulder. “What are we going to do?”
“About the grapes?”
“About everything.”
I shrugged.
“Everyone’s going to know.” Our simple country house on the hill, our small happy family, all this would be revealed as a fraud; my mother could go into town with a cigarette in hand now, it hardly mattered anymore.
“Did you know about Dad?” I asked suddenly, surprising myself.
She stood still for a moment, her cigarette suspended in midair. She turned to me, and for the first time, looked at me. She opened her mouth tentatively, as if debating the correct word to use. “Yes,” she decided on.
I began to cry softly, not for her, but this time, for myself. Misdeeds, indiscretions, bad habits: the Marlboro box hidden in my mother’s nightstand, the nights my father spent with the blonde girl, all these things had been there, visible, all along, and I was the only one not to know.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I failed you.”
I watched as the rows of grapes outside peeled back to reveal their secret, the barren ground below. “Do you remember Sonoma Lake?” I asked.
“What about it?”
I wanted to tell her about the time she rose at the exact right moment. I wanted to tell her how I had trusted her so wholly and how I hadn’t been afraid since then. “Nothing.” I said. And then, “You should paint the vineyard.”
She shook her head. “The plot will be empty soon.”
“You always painted what wasn’t there.”
She considered this for a long moment, eyes staring unflinchingly forward.  Her hand trembled as she put the cigarette out on the windowsill.