Bush v. Gore

I had a boyfriend, sort of, a med student who spent his nights studying at the coffee shop where I worked. He always sat at the table closest to the counter, several books splayed open in a horseshoe around him, so everyone standing in line to order could see what he was working on. Most of his books were atlases of human anatomy—hundreds of pictures colored in bright, bloodless pastels. The bodies were always in the same position, arms held at their sides, palms turned up, the heads turned to the right. Depending on the purpose of the illustration, you could see the major arteries running through the body or the bones settled in their places. Sometimes there were large pictures of just a single appendage or organ, an ear or a kidney or an eyeball, disembodied, presented first in full and then in cross sections. Whenever I walked past the med student’s table, I was troubled by the notion he knew something I didn’t—something about me, personally, what was hidden beneath the surface of my skin, how I functioned and, eventually, how I would stop functioning. Some of the pictures, the worst ones, were taken from real bodies—close-up shots of unidentifiable lumps, pink and swollen, glistening, edged with fat. A chill went through me every time I saw one. I was an English major. When we talked about the inside of something, we were talking about the soul.

This boyfriend of sorts, Jack, was tall and thin, with curly dark hair. He had a long, thin face with a large nose set at a slight angle. There was something Roman about him, as if he’d descended from a race of conquerors. From his very first visit to the shop, he had paid special attention to me in a way that suggested he wished to conquer—not me particularly, but every person he interacted with, as if for sport. We went so far together, I suppose, because I resisted him so much. I was a quiet person to begin with, but around Jack especially so. I answered his questions—what I was studying, where I came from, what I wanted to do when I graduated in the spring—with as few words as possible, and often after a measured pause during which I scowled, or turned away to attend to some meaningless task, such as brushing off one of the espresso machine filters. Occasionally, Jack would find an inroad, such as when he saw I was reading Othello and told me about a race-swapped production he’d seen in DC the summer before. It was sort of a theatrical double-header, he explained, Othello followed by a production of Hamlet in which the prince, stylized as a college dropout, spent the entire play shuffling around the stage in a pair of polka-dotted pajamas and pink bunny slippers. I laughed out loud when I heard that.

Jack started staying until closing, then after, helping me shut things down, carrying the tubs of dishes back to the kitchen, filling the sink with hot water and plunking in the detergent tablets, which he’d never seen before and liked to watch as they fizzed and dissolved. I washed the coffee mugs and he dried them. He kept asking me questions—the kind of questions he thought he needed to ask before asking me to sleep with him. What my parents did, whether I had any siblings, where I’d traveled, which movies I liked, which bands. I answered the questions vaguely, partly because I was still resisting him, objecting to his general approach to human interaction, and partly because what there was to tell, I didn’t want to tell him.

After we finished the dishes, we wiped down the tables and put the chairs up to make it look like I’d mopped, though I almost never did—the floor was so old and scratched you couldn’t tell whether it was clean or dirty. Then we’d leave through the back door and I’d padlock it, then unlock my bicycle, which I’d chained to the door handle of the dumpster. I’d get on my bike and he’d watch me ride away. After two weeks of helping me close, Jack started inviting me back to his apartment, so our routine became: I’d unlock my bicycle and he’d put it in the back of his car, a Volvo wagon with Texas plates. He was the kind of rich kid, I gathered, who drove his parents’ old cars. Then we’d go back to his apartment—he had a two-bedroom all to himself, the nicest apartment I had ever been in—have a beer and a cigarette, and go through a bit more pretense before having sex. Then I’d get up and go home. He always offered me a ride, but I said I preferred the bike, liked riding down the middle of the road at night. In truth, I didn’t want him to know where I lived—I didn’t want him to know anything about me.

 

I lived then in a basement apartment east of campus, in a blue-collar neighborhood, a mix of senior citizens and young families just starting out. It was a neighborhood like the one I’d grown up in—a small, crowded enclave of three-bedroom ranches and Cape Cods. There were a lot of foreclosed and abandoned homes, with broken windows or boarded-up doors, overgrown grass. But the other homes were painstakingly maintained, tended to by retirees who seemed to be taking the decline of the neighborhood personally. They were always out raking, bagging every leaf as it tumbled from every tree, watering and trimming their lawns, clipping the hedges and sweeping the cuttings into a pan, as if these rituals alone would maintain the neighborhood’s property values, would keep crime at bay.

These neighbors, these footsoldiers of dignity, liked to decorate for the holidays. They speared flags in their lawn for Memorial Day and the fourth of July, set out pumpkins for Halloween. During the season I was getting to know Jack, there were turkeys pinned to the doors in observance of Thanksgiving, and then replaced the very next day with wreaths and Christmas lights. Many of the neighbors went so far as to stand life-size Santas and reindeer figurines on their lawns, some of which were electrified and glowed from within. My favorite display was a giant inflatable sled perched on one of the rooftops, lit with a spotlight, Santa in the front seat, his arm raised in greeting.

The family I lived with, the McLains, didn’t have time to decorate, because it was all they could do to keep their lives running. They worked all the time—Mr. McLain as a firefighter, with part-time gigs painting houses and landscaping, and Mrs. McLain as a nurse, four shifts a week and sometimes overtime—but still, they were always broke. I was part of their effort to keep the lights on, paying two hundred dollars a month to rent a section of their basement. My room was only half finished. It didn’t really have walls, just curtains hung from the ceiling, like those sheets separating beds in emergency rooms. The McLains had put down a large remnant of olive-green carpet, the kind made out of boiled wool, pressed so that its surface looked like a topographical map, marked with undulating lines and grooves. Off in a corner, they had installed a toilet and shower head, again, without proper walls, just a plastic curtain you could pull closed. Whatever privacy was carved out in the house was an illusion that never lasted long before it was broken—I could hear everything the McLains said to each other through the floorboards and I suspect they could hear my every move, as well.

Almost every night, Mrs. McLain, whom I was supposed to call Judy but could never manage to, came down the basement stairs carrying a laundry basket, saying “Knock, knock!” as she descended. “Do you mind if I put in a load?” she’d ask. “I’m sorry it’s so late.” I didn’t mind, because Mrs. McLain’s life struck me as so pitiable. She worked all day, then picked up her son from day care, came home and cooked dinner, put her kid in the tub, tried to get him to sleep, all of this alone, because her husband was either working or asleep. So I always said it was no problem, even if it was eleven at night. I’d fall asleep to the sound of the wash churning, and if I was still awake when the cycle finished, I’d put the clothes in the dryer and fall asleep to the sound of zipper pulls clacking against the barrel. Often as I lay there, I felt a chill, as if I had only narrowly escaped the disaster of the McLains’ life, as if I had been standing right next to a person who had been felled by a stray bullet. The fact was, the McLains were only a few years older than me. But because they had never gone to college—they’d gotten married and joined the workforce right out of high school—they seemed much older. In Mrs. McLain’s wedding pictures her hair was blond and fell in curls across her shoulders, but now her hair was straight and brown and cut just below the ear. She hadn’t lost the weight she gained during her pregnancy, and all of her clothes were too small, the fly coverings on all of her pants pried open by her stomach. Though her face was pretty—her features were dainty and symmetrical—she had dark circles under her eyes and looked stricken with some kind of chronic illness. I saw Mrs. McLain as a cautionary tale, and worried sometimes that I might yet still turn into her. If I wasn’t careful, if I didn’t make the best of the chance I’d been given, it could happen.

The McLains’ little boy, Buddy, was three years old, blond and blue-eyed, chubby, cute. Part of my living arrangement was to watch Buddy five hours a week. Ostensibly this was so the McLains could go out on dates, but they never did, and so Mrs. McLain cashed in her time in small increments on the nights I wasn’t working at the coffee shop, sending Buddy downstairs to get him out of her hair while she made dinner, and then again after dinner so she could clean the kitchen and make his lunch for the next day. Then, when she was finished with that, she sat drinking a glass of wine and watching Wheel of Fortune, a small ritual that must have been, I imagined, the only thing keeping her from losing her mind.

Whenever Buddy came down to the basement, he messed with all of my things, stuck his feet in my shoes, scribbled in my notebooks. He pulled all the books off the shelves I had made by stacking planks of lumber on top of cinder blocks. I had an electric typewriter he liked to mess around with, and a harmonica, and a handheld tape recorder I sometimes used to capture my thoughts—I wanted to write poetry and was under the impression I did my best thinking at night, in the dark, so I recorded myself as I was drifting off to sleep. But more often than not, when I listened to those lines later, or when Buddy was messing around with the recorder and played them back, they were unintelligible.

After Buddy went through my things, he’d ask if we could watch TV. I’d say no at first, trying to interest him in a book or a game of catch, but eventually he would wear me down and I’d agree. I had an old black-and-white television set atop my bureau, at the foot of the bed. It didn’t get any channels, but I had a VCR and some old Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes episodes on tape. As soon as I turned on the TV, Buddy would drag my suitcase from its place next to the bureau—a giant hard shell case, black with brass fixtures, which my grandmother had brought over from France when she’d emigrated as a child—and set it on the floor next to my bed. He’d open its lid and settle his blanket inside, then curl up on top of it and pull the lid closed. Then he’d prop open the lid with his foot and peek out of the opening. I had no idea why he liked to do this but had stopped asking him questions—he was three, and even when he could explain what he was thinking, it almost never made sense.

Buddy’s favorite episodes were the ones detailing the epic battle between the coyote and roadrunner. We watched them so many times we memorized and came to anticipate every blunder waiting to befall the coyote: the cliffs he would run straight off, the blocks of dynamite that would detonate in his face, the pills that would explode after he swallowed them, the boulders he would attempt to launch from catapults, but which would collapse onto him instead, crushing him flat. We knew it all before it happened, but this never stopped us from laughing when it did. Buddy’s laugh was muffled as it emerged from the suitcase and sounded as if it were coming from another world, like the laughter of the gods.

Then Buddy would go upstairs for his bath, and his mother would put him to bed, but just about every night, around 1 or 2 a.m., he would open the basement door, a shaft of light would break into the room, and I’d hear his slow, clumsy footsteps on the stairs. When he made it about halfway down, I could see him rubbing an eye with one hand, his blanket clutched in the other—it was a blue fleece blanket patterned with white whales. Once he was down the stairs, he’d run to my bed and climb in with me, always testifying to some remnant of the dream that had woken him—another boy at day care pushing him or taking a toy away. He’d settle himself next to me, muttering and wriggling around until he got comfortable. He still wore a diaper and smelled vaguely of pee, but he was warm, and his hair was very soft, and I didn’t mind. For a while, he’d breathe heavily through his mouth until finally whatever was bothering him drifted away and his breathing calmed and he fall asleep. I suppose one of the reasons I always left Jack’s apartment to come home was that I didn’t want to let Buddy down. I imagined him making his way down the stairs and finding nothing. He was too young, I thought, to be disappointed.

 

I was surprised when Jack asked me one night if I wanted to come with him on a trip to Houston, where his family lived. He had an interview, he said, in Galveston, an island city off the coast, where he was planning on doing his residency after he graduated medical school in the spring. I wasn’t sure what to say. When he asked, I was closing down the register, counting out bills, pulling them out of one hand and into the other, and I lost track. “I don’t know,” I said. “I have work to do.”

“Finals are over,” he said.

“I still have to work.”

He made a face, looked around critically at the shop, as if trying to decipher how it might possibly be worth anyone’s loyalty.

“Ask for a few days off. Just switch with someone.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s warm there.”

Well, he had a point. It was unusually cold where we were, in Virginia. A dense cover of clouds, heavy and gray, had been hanging around for days. I’d grown up in New England and knew when weather had settled in, when snow was coming. I said OK.

In the intervening week, I thought of little else but what to pack and how to tell Mrs. McLain I’d be leaving for three days. Even though I was twenty-one years old and could do whatever I wanted, I felt bad about it. I waited until the night before, when she came down the stairs with her laundry, to tell her. Something came up, was how I phrased it.

She asked where I was going and I told her. There was a boyfriend, maybe. A trip home.

“Ooh,” she said. “He’s taking you to meet his family!”

“It’s not really like that,” I said.

“Of course, it is.”

“He’s a med student, he’s moving away when he graduates. I hardly even know him.”

“A doctor!” she said.

“Well, he will be soon, I guess.”

“You have to go,” she said. She clutched my arm. “You have to impress the family.”

“It really isn’t like that. I don’t even think he knows my last name.” Really, I couldn’t name a single thing Jack knew or liked about me, other than that once, after sex, he’d told me he liked how quiet I was, how I was such a good listener. “All the med students I know,” he said, “like, never shut up.”

“Wait,” Mrs. McLain said, and held up a finger. She dashed up the stairs to her bedroom, right above us. I heard some rummaging. Then she reappeared with something clutched in her hand. “Look,” she said, and opened her palm to reveal a St. Christopher medallion on a length of black ribbon. “Take it,” she said, and put it over my head. Like my family back home, the McLains were Catholic, and not just nominally, but deeply so—there was a statue of Mary on their front lawn, her head bowed and her hands raised. On the living-room wall was a picture of Jesus looking heavenward with an expression of longsuffering, an expression I associated with my grandfather, who looked toward the ceiling whenever my grandmother nagged him about something, which was multiple times a day. “Christ,” he always said. And my grandmother would follow with, “Lord and Savior, help us.” Then she would cross herself, transforming his curse into an earnest plea for Christ’s mercy.

“This is your ticket,” Mrs. McLain said, adjusting the medal, then pressing it against my chest. “Your whole future happiness is at stake. You have to take it.”

 

I told Jack to pick me up at the coffee shop and sat waiting for him at the appointed time, watching out the window. He was late enough that I began to consider going back home—maybe he’d changed his mind, or maybe the whole invitation, all the time we’d spent together, was just a joke, the kind rich people played on poor people. But then I saw his car pull up, and I stepped out to the parking lot. There was a moment when our eyes met, and he smiled and waved, and I waved back, and things seemed like they were going to turn out OK, but a second later, Jack noticed the suitcase I was carrying—the giant case in which Buddy liked to entomb himself while watching television. The expression on his face was some mixture of confusion and disgust. I looked down at the case and had to admit it was more of a trunk—you could practically fit a Doberman in there. It was only a three-day trip, and a reasonable person, I realized, could have figured out how to fit what she needed into a carry-on, but I wasn’t a reasonable person. Or maybe the problem was that I just didn’t know better. I’d never gone away for the weekend. I’d never even been on a plane.

Jack got out of the car to help me—he was from the South, after all. “That’s quite a piece of luggage,” he said. He took the bag from me and stumbled a bit, unsettled by its weight. Almost every article of clothing I owned was packed inside, along with, I supposed, the weight of my grandmother’s history—the metaphysical traces of her journey across the ocean in 1933, back when her last name was Boulanger. She and her mother and little sister had crossed together, just the one suitcase between them, packed with everything they owned, as well as provisions—wheels of cheese covered in black wax, crackers, strings of sausage. They had booked a third-class passage and spent most of their time in a small room shared with another family. There was nothing to do, my Grandmother said, whenever she recalled the trip. In the suitcase was a small prayer book—which my grandmother had since inherited and then handed down to me, and which I’d packed in the case, returning it to its rightful place—and since she was the elder child and the only one who could read, my grandmother had been compelled to recite prayers mornings and evenings, or whenever the waters were rough, or when one of the children in the other family was sick with fever.

I wasn’t particularly religious but my grandmother’s Catholicism—its mysteries and symbols, the way unleavened bread transmogrified into flesh, wine into blood, the way God resided in three persons, one of whom was a ghost, the way spirits and saints hovered over us at all times, invisible—had informed my thinking and understanding of the world. I was the type of person who imagined things were heavier than they actually were, or lighter, according to mood and history. I thought that places and objects had souls, souls whose weight could be measured and felt. So when Jack stumbled, what I saw was a prince buckling under the weight of the proletariat, the weight of their suffering. I imagined my grandmother back in France, a girl in a thin black dress and wooden clogs, scuttling by train tracks, plucking coal from the ground and gathering it in her apron, a smudge of soot on her cheek. I imagined how cold and hungry she was, that all of that hardship was now in Jack’s hands.

The suitcase caused us all kinds of problems. At the airport, we had to stop and check it—which meant we had to wait in line, which we otherwise wouldn’t have had to do, Jack explained, in a friendly manner that suggested he was educating me for next time, though I detected an undercurrent of grievance. When we got to the counter, I slowed things down again because I didn’t realize the bag needed a label, and both Jack and the woman behind the desk seemed impatient as I wrote my name out and the McLains’ phone number on a little paper tag, and fumbled while fastening it to the handles. Then Jack handed the bag to the attendant, who struggled to lift it onto a conveyor belt, which carried it off behind a curtain of vertical plastic slats. I felt suddenly anxious, like a young child separated from family. But there was no time for that, as we were running late and had to hustle through security. We were using tickets, Jack explained, that his aunt had arranged—basically we were flying standby. Jack’s Aunt Phyllis had worked as a flight attendant at the airline for forty years and was revered there, he said—she was basically one of the gods in the airline’s mythology. Still, the tickets she arranged were always provisional—there was a bit of a handshake quality to making them work, and it helped to be on time, if not early. But by the time we arrived at the gate, the flight was already boarding, and Jack had to go through some kind of protocol with the person at the desk, a short, stocky woman with the same hairstyle as the woman at the first desk—a frizzy mass of curls pulled back in a ponytail, with a puffy section of bangs at the front that was split in half, the top half teased upward, the bottom half curled downward, then set with hairspray until it was petrified. The woman at the desk had to call someone and seemed irritated. Jack was irritated too—he kept clenching his jaw. All because of the French suitcase.

We made it, though, and once we settled on the flight, in the last row, Jack ordered a drink, a Jack Daniels, which he said he always drank because his name was, in fact, Jack Daniel Fields. Things started to feel better, like they might work out. At one point a pretty stewardess, blond, with yet again the same hairstyle, wearing a lot of gold jewelry, stopped by and said: “You Phyllis’ boy?”

“Jack,” he said, and stuck his hand out.

“Oh, my,” she said. “I see the resemblance. Both so tall and good-looking.”

“It’s the family gift,” he said.

Jack had another drink and became loquacious. He spent the rest of the flight talking about his family as if I already knew them—as if they were Greek gods whose names and powers everyone had been made to memorize as children. There was a complicated history of grudges, smitings, and couplings I scrambled to put together on some sort of timeline. I grasped at bits of information, like one of those game show contestants shut in a tube with thousands of dollar bills flying around. What I gathered was that Jack’s mother had died of a brain tumor when he was ten. (“Poor me!” he’d said, as if joking, a line repeated no doubt hundreds of times, with a mocking tone to it, though there was a plaintive note as well.) His father was some sort of international man of business, who was never in the US for more than a few days at a time, and so after his mother’s death, Jack had moved in with his Aunt Phyllis—his mother’s sister. By now she was more of a mother than an aunt, was the point he wanted to make. Her home was his home. Her fortune would be his fortune.

Here’s where things got murky for me. Phyllis—who I’d so far understood to be working class, a flight attendant—was married to a man Jack referred to as Mr. Paul. Mr. Paul, I gathered, was at the center of everything—not only the life of Jack’s family but in fact, to hear Jack tell it, the whole country and even the world. He owned a pipeline company, the very company Jack’s father worked for. Most of their business was in China, which was why Jack never saw his father. The father had a mistress over there, maybe even a second family, Jack said. Which was why he wasn’t around when Jack’s mother was sick, wasn’t even in the country when she died.

But the important thing now was, Jack explained, Mr. Paul was old and sick and would die soon, and then everything would go to Phyllis and then to him.

“My Grandfather,” Jack added, as an afterthought, “he lives in the house too. You’ll meet him. He was my mom’s father. Phyllis had to take him in because after my grandmother died, he couldn’t take care of himself anymore. He stopped eating and the house was sort of falling down all around him. He and Phyllis hate each other. Always have. There’s a lot of screaming and you might even see someone throw a glass or a plate. Just ignore it.”

Jesus. I didn’t know what to say to any of that. I had been raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, in a small house with my mother and grandparents, and my life had been circumscribed to a half-mile radius, a short line between our house and the Catholic church down our street, whose bells we could hear tolling every hour—we were never out of their reach. Each morning, we got up and ate breakfast together at the table. Then my grandfather went to work—he was a union plumber—and my mother and I went off together to the Catholic school, which was attached to the church. My mother worked there in the front office. At the end of the school day, I went and sat in the office, plucking butterscotch candies and peppermints out of a small porcelain bowl on the corner of my mother’s desk, doing my homework, or drawing pictures, waiting for the five o’clock bell, her signal to close things down, to shroud her typewriter with its plastic cover. Then we walked home, where dinner was waiting. My grandmother was an old-world cook, and the meals she served took her all day to prepare. The whole time I was at school she was deboning meat, rubbing it with spices, peeling potatoes and carrots, pounding dough and letting it rise and pounding it again. We sat down to dinner at five-twenty every evening, prayed over the meal, then ate and told each other about our days, which never took long. My grandfather installed and unclogged pipes, my mother and I sat at our desks, my grandmother cooked and swept underneath beds and picked up the braided rugs off the floors and hung them over the railing of the back steps, then beat them senseless with a broom, and none of this seemed worth elaborating on or even mentioning. After dinner, we went together to the living room to watch Dan Rather, then reruns of Carol Burnett and All in the Family. Finally, we went upstairs, read for a while, said our prayers, and went to sleep. I was so accustomed to this routine that college had been bewildering. Those first months, as I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed, other girls were standing in front of the bathroom mirrors, putting on makeup, getting ready to go out.

 

The person Jack was most excited to see was Cesar, a longtime employee of Mr. Paul’s who had started out as his caddy and gradually worked his way up to a sort of consigliere position. Cesar had done so well with Mr. Paul—had become part of the family, Jack explained—because he understood Mr. Paul so completely. By this point, Cesar could read Mr. Paul’s mind, could anticipate his needs before they even formed as concepts or longings in Mr. Paul’s head and chest and groin. Just as, back on the golf course, Cesar had handed Mr. Paul whichever club he needed without delay, without Mr. Paul even needing to ask, Cesar now stood just behind Mr. Paul at the office, or during negotiation meetings, leaning forward to provide Mr. Paul whatever was necessary. The name of a colleague that had slipped Mr. Paul’s mind. A copy of a contract Mr. Paul wished to consult. Business plans. Schematics. Ordinances. The names of senators and congressmen. Gifts. Money for bribery. The takeout Mr. Paul was craving. Anything and everything—Mr. Paul had merely to turn his head. “Cesar is, like, the internet,” said Jack. “Anything you need in an instant.”

It was Cesar who had shepherded Jack through his teenage years—who had answered his questions about sex, who had purchased beer when Jack wanted to bring it to a party and, later, who had fixed the two DUIs Jack had been charged with. But Cesar’s chief function, Jack said, was to know everything about everyone who came into Mr. Paul’s sphere of influence. He researched their past, their professional and personal lives. “He probably has a file on you,” Jack said. “From Cesar’s point of view, you could be a corporate spy infiltrating the family’s inner circle.” I laughed out loud—a short, loud bark that drew the attention of the passengers in the neighboring aisle.

At baggage claim, I spotted Cesar right away. He was standing apart from the rest of the crowd gathered around the turnstiles, about ten feet behind them, like a secret service agent tasked with keeping control of the room. He was wearing green pants and a white guayabera, open at the neck, several gold chains piled underneath. His arms were covered with tattoos, most of them indistinguishable from where I was standing, with the exception of the large cross running the length of his right forearm. But his hair was what really caught my attention, the way it swept up in a wave and then crested back, how slick and shiny it was. He reminded me of Elvis, a little. Elvis if he’d grown up in Tijuana and been a minor wrestling celebrity instead of a singer.

Then Cesar spotted us. I watched his face as he registered Jack, then took me in. I felt a chill, as if I’d been scanned and understood in an instant.

Cesar cut a line directly to us and embraced Jack. I watched both of their faces while they hugged. Jack’s eyes were closed, squeezed shut—true feeling was coursing through him—but Cesar was inscrutable—he kept his eyes locked on me and his expression was blank.

“This is Mary,” said Jack, and Cesar nodded to me. He turned his attention back to Jack, put his arm around him. I wasn’t important, was the message.

Then came the painful part where we stood around waiting for my luggage. A loud buzzer sounded and one of the turnstiles started moving. I recognized a few people from our flight standing around anxiously, peering over one another’s shoulders. When their bags approached, they elbowed each other out of the way. It was as if everyone was convinced their bags would be stolen out from under them, and when they managed to retrieve their belongings, they felt victorious, prideful. A wave of disgust rolled over me. In the past year or so, since starting at the coffee shop, it had started to seem to me that all of humanity was characterized by greed and slothfulness. On top of which, everyone was getting fat, but didn’t seem to realize it, or hadn’t adjusted their wardrobes to the weight they’d gained. There were several people in khaki shorts, which had wedged in the cracks of their buttocks. You could see the lining of their underpants, even the dimples in their flesh. The foam heels of their sneakers were squashed and collapsing to the side.

Then again, I thought, I was weird-looking myself, overly tall and thin, with a long face full of sharp angles. I was broke too and didn’t dress well—at the moment, I was wearing baggy, faded jeans and a black sweatshirt. A pair of men’s loafers I’d bought at a thrift store. Who was I to judge? Why couldn’t I stop evaluating people, criticizing them? What was wrong with me?

We stood waiting until the turnstile emptied, then stopped, and my bag never came out, which felt like a personal failure. “What do we do now?” I asked Jack, and he looked at Cesar, clueless. “I’ll handle it,” said Cesar. He surveyed the room, then walked off toward a small office on the opposite end. We followed him at half pace—Jack’s steps were heavy with annoyance. We caught up just in time to hear Cesar berating someone in Spanish. I’d taken several years in high school but couldn’t catch anything he was saying. Whatever it was, it was angry. The employee was holding up his hands, as if at gunpoint, trying to show Cesar he didn’t have anything and wasn’t worth killing. By the end, Cesar was pointing furiously at the employee. I caught one thing he said, which was: Señor Paul.

Then Cesar emerged from the office, and put his arm around Jack again. They walked out the sliding doors, across a crosswalk to a parking garage, and I followed behind. We settled in the car—a black Lincoln Continental—Jack and Cesar up front, me in the back. I waited as long as I could before leaning forward and asking: “So is my bag, just like, lost?” I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I’d put in there. My grandmother’s prayer book. My wallet and toiletries. That’s how young and stupid I was. I didn’t realize you never checked those things.

“Your bag didn’t make the flight,” said Cesar, regarding me in the rear view.

“Oh.”

“They’ll bring it to the house later.”

“Oh,” I said. A whole different feeling came over me. I didn’t know the airlines delivered bags to people. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe it had to do with Señor Paul.

“Now we’ll be late for dinner,” Cesar said.

Jack shook his head. “Fuck.”

“You know Mr. Paul has to keep a certain schedule.”

“I know,” said Jack. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get you there quick.”

 

I stared out the window as we made our way through the streets of Houston. At first, the streets were dense with traffic, lined with strip malls, gas stations, convenience stores. The landscape differed from other places I’d driven through only because of the palm trees and the swampy heat, and one other curious detail: there were a lot of barbecue restaurants, several of them with large inflated pigs standing in their parking lots or on their rooftops. One of the pigs in particular was standing on its hind legs, wearing an apron and a chef’s hat, wielding a set of tongs, ready to cook and serve itself.

Eventually, the streets grew wider, more expansive. There were more trees along the roadside and fewer buildings. The car slowed and we turned onto a road, newly paved and lined with elaborate shrubbery. The road wound lazily up and over a few soft hills and then arrived at a gigantic stone sign, also bordered with shrubbery and enhanced with a small waterfall. Whispering Pines, it said. Next to the sign was a small white pavilion in which a fat guard sat sentry. Cesar lowered the window and nodded to the guard, who gave him a two-fingered salute, and then the iron gate swung open, slowly. We drove through. Coming the other way was a type of car I’d never seen before, silver, with a tall, harp-shaped grill. It looked to have driven straight out of the nineteenth century.

The road wound gently. Off to one side I saw the greens, dotted with ponds and sand traps, golfers and their carts. Then we passed what appeared to be a town center, with shops and restaurants, a grocery store, a playground. There were golf carts parked everywhere. Women were walking in groups of two and three, nearly all of them wearing bright track suits.

We drove past houses, white stucco with red tile rooftops, with three-car garages extending out the sides, circular driveways. We kept driving, and the houses grew bigger and farther apart until finally, set back into the woods, down a long, tree-lined private drive, we arrived at a white mansion with columns, basically Tara from Gone with the Wind. Cesar pulled into the driveway, which led to another driveway that looped back behind the house. This was where the staff parked, apparently—there was a mud-splattered landscaping truck with several trees standing up in its bed, and an eighties Oldsmobile station wagon with Minnesota plates that, I assumed, belonged to the maid.

We walked in through the kitchen door, to the sound of an ongoing fight in the next room. I followed Jack and Cesar to the edge of the kitchen—an industrial-size kitchen with the biggest appliances I’d ever seen, an eight-burner gas range, a refrigerator whose door was larger than the front door to the McLains’ house—and stood at the threshold of the house’s main room. A living room, I supposed, though in scale it was closer to the lobby of a hotel, with a soaring ceiling and a giant fireplace made from stacked stones.

The fight was between an older, but still stunningly beautiful woman, Jack’s aunt Phyllis, I gathered, and an even older man, her father, Jack’s grandfather. They were both tall and slender, and had the same hair—beautiful white hair that was shorn close at the neck and above the ear, but was longer on top, standing straight up. Phyllis was wearing a gold satiny pantsuit with a bright pink blouse underneath. Her face was dramatically made up—her eyes heavily lined with black kohl, the lids covered with a shimmering silver powder. Her lips and nails were painted bright pink to match her shirt. The grandfather was wearing a red flannel shirt and faded dungarees, thick eyeglasses in black plastic frames. He was leaning on a cane. The argument they were having had a strangely performative aspect to it, each of the players leaning toward the other, yelling with their mouths open wide. Phyllis was pointing her finger right in her father’s face, and he was tapping his cane against the floor for emphasis. They were standing close, facing each other, their bodies moving in concert. I was reminded of a mating ritual I had observed on a nature documentary about tropical birds.

A large television was running in the background, the volume cranked, just out of sync with the television running behind me in the kitchen. I tried to listen past the argument to the news, to find out what was happening. The fate of the Presidency was being decided by the Supreme Court and everyone in the world was waiting for an answer—whether George Bush or Al Gore would be President, whether the frat boy or the boy scout would prevail. It all came down to Florida. George Bush’s brother happened to be the Governor of Florida, which was making people nervous. There were televisions everywhere, dragged from people’s homes and set up in public spaces, perched on the countertop of the coffee shop where I worked and just about every other public space I entered. Televisions were even running in the front windows of shops; every so often I would stop on the sidewalk and join a cluster of people staring at a small television in the display window of a cobbler or butcher shop. All anyone was doing was watching TV. But I’d been on a plane for a couple of hours and then in the car. It was the longest I’d been away from the news for days.

Phyllis and the grandfather were yelling over each other, and it was hard to follow what they were saying. “Goddamn crooks,” the grandfather said. Kept saying.

“All you know,” Phyllis shouted, and repeated, stopping and starting, trying to land a blow in the space between the grandfather’s phrases. “What you don’t know could fill a goddamn book.”

They kept going. “You want more Bill Clinton,” said Phyllis, whose voice was deep and crackling, the voice of a lifelong smoker. “You want more of that pervert sticking his dick in everything that moves?”

“I’d rather have a fellow,” said the grandfather, his voice hollowed out with age, sort of airy, wheezy, “I’d rather have a fellow sticking his dick in a girl than, than sticking his goddamn dick up regular people, working people.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Phyllis. “You’re so old,” she said, “you don’t know your dick from your ass.”

“I know a couple of goddamn things,” said the grandfather. “You’re not too old, you’re not so old I can’t still paddle you.”

I had never in my life heard people talk to each other this way. My family seemed to be involved in some sort of contest whose only rule was to never discuss anything unpleasant. Central to this contest—the giant sandpit in the golf course of our lives—was the very fact of my existence. I had been conceived in sin, the product of relations outside of wedlock. My mother was a teenager when she had me. My name had more to do with Mary Magdalene than the Virgin, but we pretended it didn’t.

We stood and watched until, at some imperceptible cue, Jack decided to make his presence known. As he walked toward his aunt and grandfather, he set off a small animatronic Santa doll, controlled, apparently, by a motion sensor. The doll howled and I recognized it as James Brown’s iconic voice, recognized that the doll was, in fact, meant to represent James Brown, in a Santa suit. The doll started singing and dancing, bobbing up and down to “Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

There was a commotion as Jack’s aunt and grandfather turned and saw Jack, and stopped arguing, and sent up great cries of greeting and approval. The aunt gave him a series of exaggerated kisses on the cheeks, mwah, mwah, mwah, and the grandfather, after pushing the aunt out of the way, held Jack in a hug and slapped him on the back forcefully. I stood back, still mesmerized by the James Brown Santa, which made me uneasy. His features were exaggerated—his teeth bared and much too large, his eyes too big, and open too wide. Because his expression was fixed while he danced, he looked crazy.

Ever since I’d moved to the South, I’d noticed toy-size reproductions of black men everywhere—little jockeys speared in lawns, holding lanterns, black butlers in the form of salt and pepper shakers, in dark suits with white towels draped over their arms, smiling, as if pleased to be of service. I’d only read about these relics of Jim Crow in history books and was surprised to see them in person, out in the open. The theory I’d come up with was that they weren’t offensive down here, because they were on display as some sort of testament to the South’s complicated heritage. Whenever I saw one, I assumed it was some sort of agonized commentary on slavery—a means of confessing that we shouldn’t hide our history, shouldn’t pretend it never happened. But then again, it never felt like a commentary. The jockeys and butlers, and here the James Brown Santa doll, none of it seemed to be particularly self-aware.

“Ain’t no drag,” James Brown sang. “Santa’s got a brand new bag.”

Then, as if he had read my mind, the grandfather said, “That goddamn. That goddamn James Brown. I’m going to throw him out the goddamn window.”

“Oh, no you won’t,” said Phyllis. “You do that and see how long you get to keep staying here. See how long it takes Cesar to pack your bags.”

I’d forgotten about Cesar. I turned to see if he was still around, but he had disappeared.

Then Phyllis noticed me. There was a brief moment of animal ferocity when we looked each other up and down, sized one another up. We were well matched, and seemed to recognize it. We were both tall and thin, to the extent that our bodies had become, for each of us, an overwhelming feature, the thing that defined us in other people’s minds. It occurred to me I was involved in something Freudian, Oedipal.

This all took place in a flash. Then Phyllis’ personality transformed and she became the flight attendant version of herself. She smiled widely and put her hands on my shoulders, kissed my cheek, told me how excited she was to meet me, that she’d heard a lot about me—which couldn’t be true, the sum total of what Jack knew about me could fit in the shell of a walnut.

“I’m sorry about your bag,” she said. I wondered how she already knew. “They’re going to bring it as soon as it lands. They have a driver standing by.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“That’s not like our airline,” she added. “We’re ranked number one for luggage retention and being on time. I don’t know what happened.” She gave me a look, a raised eyebrow, that seemed to indicate my fault in the matter.

Then she was dragging me across the room, toward a giant, curved staircase. “I think I have something that will fit,” she said. “Let’s change. We’re due at the club.”

 

Phyllis led me up the stairs and through her bedroom, which was decorated in muted gold tones—gold wallpaper, gold curtains, a giant bed covered with a gold bedspread and about twenty gold satiny pillows—to her closet, which was bigger than the McLains’ basement. Clothes were hanging along all four walls and beneath them were all sorts of drawers and compartments.

“The club has a dress code,” she explained, looking at my clothes. “It’s lucky we’re almost the same size. You’re a little taller. But our waist is about the same. Though my waist at your age,” she said, sizing me up, “was even smaller.”

I could see her flight uniforms hanging in one corner, dark navy with gold stripes running along the shoulders. I imagined her in the uniform, younger, her hair longer, blond, pinned up in a French twist. I imagined Mr. Paul too—I’d never seen him before, so had to improvise. I imagined a silver-haired man in a brown suit, a wide-collared polyester shirt underneath, and a bolo tie, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. Then I realized I was basically picturing J. R. Ewing from Dallas. But whatever, it didn’t matter. The point was I could see how things had gone down between them. Her in-flight solicitations—the warm washcloths, the glasses of Scotch. I saw how Mr. Paul fell for her right away, the moment she appeared beside his seat. I saw them later, in a hotel bar in Hong Kong, the dim lighting, the red lanterns, the umbrellas in their tropical drinks, their heads thrown back with laughter, their teeth glistening, slick with rum and pineapple juice. And then—why not?—they’d gone up to his room. And after all that, something truly surprising: he’d fallen in love with her. He’d returned home to Houston and found himself haunted by memories, fantasies. He’d pursued Phyllis in earnest once he returned to the States, begged her to marry him. And so a humble stewardess had become the wife of a billionaire…

“These will do,” Phyllis said, holding a pair of slacks up to me. They were a dark navy, embroidered all over with bright pink crabs.

“And this,” she said, handing me a polo shirt. It was white and sleeveless, with a matching pink crab embroidered over the left breast. I stood there for a moment clutching the garments against my chest. “Well, go on,” she said. She intended for me to change in front of her, I realized. She would see my underwear, faded black cotton, and the fact that I wasn’t wearing a bra.

I turned away from her. Stepped out of my jeans, pulled on the pants. Then I pulled off my sweatshirt.

“No bra?” she said. “What are you, a hippie? Are you some kind of Communist?”

“No,” I said. “My bras are just, they’re all in my suitcase.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You can’t get on a plane without a bra. You should be wearing a suit and stockings on a plane, in my opinion,” she said. “Though these days no one would agree with me. These days people fly in their goddamn pajamas.” She was rifling through a drawer. “In my day, people wore a suit to fly. And hats,” she said. “Always hats. Here.” She handed me a strapless, lacy bra. I took it and arranged it, struggled to close it. “My god,” she said. I felt her hands take up the bra and hook it closed. “You’re about the greenest person I ever met.”

I didn’t really know what she meant.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’m going to help you.”

“OK.”

“You remind me of myself back in Minnesota. I came right off the farm to the airline, you know. I had to learn fast if I wanted to get the better routes. If I wanted to work my way up. I still remember the girls who helped me.”

“Thank you.”

She turned me around and started pulling up on the cups of the bra, then pressing them against my breasts. “You have no tits.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, you’re lucky that sort of thing is in style.” She adjusted the back of the bra, cinched it as tight as it would go. “That’s just going to have to do.”

I was wearing Mrs. McLain’s St. Christopher medallion, and Phyllis plucked it up, turned it back and forth.

“You’re Catholic?”

I nodded.

“We’re Catholic too.”

This surprised me. Jack had never mentioned it.

“I think Catholics should marry other Catholics,” she said. “It’s old-fashioned but there’s good sense to it.”

I nodded. I was just agreeing with everything she said. What did I know?

“Just don’t be afraid of the pill,” she said. “That’s one instance where I break with the church.”

“OK.”

“I don’t like anything that takes away a woman’s independence. That’s why I still fly one trip a month,” she said. “You need to keep your identity. You need to keep your independence.”

After a bit, she added, “It drives Mr. Paul crazy. You want to know how crazy?”

I nodded.

“He bought part of the airline,” she told me. “Just to keep a little control over me. Now I’m a flight attendant whose husband owns a third of every plane I work on.”

Phyllis offered me a pair of shoes—white patent leather, with an open toe and a dramatic heel I could hardly balance on—and she led me down the staircase to the hearth room, where Jack and his grandfather were seated on the couch, their heads bowed around a bowl of pistachios. They were the kind whose shells had been dyed red, for Christmas. When the grandfather looked up, I saw his mouth was circled in crimson.

“Wipe your mouth, Dad,” Phyllis told him. “You look like a Shanghai whore.”

“I look like a what?” he yelled.

“A Shanghai whore.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Your mouth,” she told him, “is red from those pistachios.”

“So what?”

“So you look like a painted whore.”

“I don’t give a goddamn,” he said. “I’m hungry. It’s past time for dinner and we’re just sitting here with our thumbs up our asses.”

“I had to find clothes for Mary. Our guest.”

“Why can’t she wear her own clothes?”

“The club, Dad. There’s a goddamn dress code.”

“That goddamn club,” he said, struggling off the couch.

“You sure do eat their food,” she said.

“I don’t eat half as good,” he said. “I don’t eat half as good there as I do in my room.”

They carried on arguing as we went out and arranged ourselves in Phyllis’ gold golf cart. All the way down to the clubhouse Phyllis and the grandfather argued about Highland Farms’ sausage-and-cheese baskets, the only thing he ever wanted for Christmas. He received five or six of them each year, and kept them in his room under his bed so he could fix himself snacks whenever he wanted, crackers with spreadable cheese and slices of summer sausage on top. He cut the sausage with his pocket knife, which he never washed, and with which he repeatedly cut himself—there were indeed several red scars in the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, I noticed. “You’re going to get gangrene,” Phyllis said.

To which the grandfather replied: “Good. I can’t wait. Everyone in this goddamn golf cart, everyone here knows I wish I was dead. I wish I died ten years ago with your mother. I wish I died holding her goddamn hand in that goddamn.” He struggled for the right words. “That goddamn Craftmatic adjustable bed we had set up there in the living room for her to die in. You never saw it,” he added. “Because you were flying all over the goddamn world and whoring yourself out.”

Phyllis didn’t want to talk about that. “And why we don’t already have rats in the house, god only knows.”

“He eats in bed and drops crumbs everywhere,” she turned and told me, not at all watching the road, “so the maid has to change his sheets and vacuum every day.”

“I don’t give a goddamn,” the grandfather said, “about those goddamn sheets. Just tell her to leave them.”

“You’d be sleeping on crumbs, Dad.”

“I know where you grew up,” he said. “I remember that little farmhouse even if you don’t.”

 

We parked in front of the club, just abandoned the cart in the circular drive, and were escorted into the dining rooms by a teenager in a tuxedo. Outside it was bright, and humid, and nearly eighty degrees, but the club had been darkened and chilled to the specifications of a tomb. I suppose the idea was to cool the environment to the point that the club’s diners—seated around circular tables covered with white tablecloths—could enjoy the fires crackling in the multiple fireplaces.

We arrived, finally, at the backmost room, which featured a row of windows overlooking the golf course. Our escort led us to our table, where Mr. Paul was already sitting, drinking a Scotch and reading the newspaper. I’d gotten him wrong when I imagined him before. He was more Winston Churchill than J. R. Ewing, in a conservative dark suit and a burgundy tie pierced with a gold pin. His head was enormous—bald, pink, and jowly—and his shoulders were broad. But when he rose from his chair to kiss Phyllis and pull out her chair for her, I saw that he was quite short, that all of his breadth narrowed dramatically onto short, skinny legs.

A handful of waiters bustled around us. When one asked what I was having, I said, “Oh, just water.” But then Phyllis spoke up. “You’re having Scotch,” she said. “Put it on the rocks for now,” she told the waiter. “But eventually,” she turned to me, “you want to get where you order it neat.”

“OK.”

“Dewar’s is fine,” she told the waiter. “She’s just starting out.”

There were menus, but we didn’t look at them. “You know what we want, Henry?” Mr. Paul said to one of the waiters. “We want lobsters.”

“I don’t want a lobster,” the grandfather said. “I want a goddamn steak.”

“Oh, Pa,” Phyllis said. “You don’t know something good even when it bites you in the ass.”

“Four lobsters and a goddamn steak,” said Mr. Paul.

Mr. Paul and Jack caught up about what Jack was doing in town, when he’d be finished with medical school and moving back to Houston. And why on earth he was sticking with medicine when he could come work for Mr. Paul instead—he’d make more money, see more of the world, and have a better time. There was an unpleasant moment when Jack said neurosurgeons had a sentimental value for him, and everyone remembered his mother had died of a brain tumor. “Well, I suppose they would, wouldn’t they,” Mr. Paul said. A grim mood had come over the table, and no one liked it.

Then, thank god, our drinks came, and everyone was happy again. I got drunk right away, just three sips down, and relaxed, forgot myself. I slumped back in my chair, stared out the window. A young man in a waiter’s tuxedo, probably my age, was sprinting across the back parking lot, as if he was a contestant in some sort of race. He got into a tiny red hatchback and sped away, his wheels screeching.

Past the parking lot, I saw a deer on the fairway, her neck bent to the ground. I’d only ever seen a deer once before in my life, driving one night with my grandfather. On summer nights, he often took me with him when he got an emergency plumbing call, so I could see what he did, what life was like outside our house. That particular night, he was driving me out to a suburb, to a small mansion with a flooded basement. We were on a narrow road cutting through the woods, when all of a sudden he stopped the car and backed up. “Deer,” he said, and pointed to the side of the road, into the woods. We just idled there, looking at the deer for as long as it let us. It stood transfixed for quite some time, its eyes glowing, before it turned and bolted. It was so unusual, so outside the norm of our life in the city it was as if we’d seen a spirit.

I felt Jack touching my arm. Mr. Paul had asked me a question and I’d missed it. “Mr. Paul wants to know what you’re studying,” Jack said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, nothing special. Just English.”

“What does that mean?” he said. “I mean, you already know how to speak English, I assume.” He laughed, and then everyone else laughed.

“Oh,” I said. “English Literature, I meant.”

“You mean Shakespeare?”

“Yes,” I said. “That sort of thing.”

“So you’re studying his plays and whatnot.”

“Right.”

“And then what?”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at but had a feeling he was cutting down to the quick, the central problem of my existence. For three and a half years, I’d been telling myself the study of literature was its own reward, training me to understand narratives that would prove useful in all sorts of contexts, but suddenly, I was five months away from having to get a job and wasn’t really sure what was going to happen, where I would go. My grandmother’s plan was for me to return home, to teach English at the Catholic school from which I’d just matriculated. She updated me, in her weekly letters, of the positions that were open, waiting to be filled. Middle school, tenth grade. In recent months, lying awake down in the McLains’ basement, I’d started imagining myself back in that house, in the small room next to my mother’s, lying awake there instead, listening to her snoring, the tolling of the church bells. What I said to myself in those moments was: That’s absolutely not happening. Though what I felt, underneath, was a dreadful certainty: That’s exactly what’s going to happen.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Maybe you can put on shows. You can be,” he said. He faltered, frowned. He inclined slightly backward and turned his head, wanting Cesar, I supposed, but Cesar wasn’t there. “You can play Hamlet’s girlfriend, whatever her name was.” Everyone laughed again.

“No,” I said, frantically waving away the idea. “Oh, no, I’d be terrible at that. I can’t, I can’t really stand up in front of people.”

“Then what are you supposed to do?”

“I guess, well, I guess I could teach.”

“Well, you have to stand up in front of people to do that,” Phyllis said. “I’ll tell you what, you’re probably going to scoff because you have a college degree and are too good for it, but I’ll tell you what, nothing prepares you for life, nothing prepares you for what you need to do to handle people, and run a tight ship, like working for the airline.”

“I don’t think I’d be very good at that either,” I said.

“Neither do I,” said Phyllis. “That’s my point. It trains you. It trains you for other things. You work a few flights and you’re ready for anything.”

“Maybe you should just find someone rich to marry,” said Mr. Paul. And laughed. Everyone laughed again.

“But she still needs to work,” said Phyllis. “She has to learn how to function or what the hell is going to become of her?”

We all seemed to have come to an agreement, in five minutes, on my general lack of competence and preparation for the world. Everyone was in on it, the problem of my existence. It was a crisis on the table in front of us. I felt understood for the first time in my life.

“Maybe I should just join a convent,” I blurted out. Mr. Paul liked that one. Everyone was laughing, showing their teeth, slick with Scotch.

“I should ask you,” Mr. Paul said, “Have you heard of a book called Who Moved My Cheese?”

“No, Sir,” I said. I couldn’t help it—he was just the kind of man you called Sir.

“It’s good,” he said. “It’s kind of a story about how business works. It’s a little mouse, there are drawings, little cartoons, and the mouse is used to getting cheese in the same place, but then one day, it isn’t there, and he has to find out where it went. He has to go sniffing around.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m not doing it justice.”

“No,” I said. “It sounds good.”

“It’s a story, but it sort of has a meaning underneath it, and you can crack the code of it, if you know what I mean. You can decode it and apply it to whatever business it is you’re trying to run.”

“Right,” I said. “I mean, that’s always the trick with books, seeing what’s going on, you know, under the surface.” I was getting excited. We’d struck oil.

“So, is that the kind of thing you read?”

“Sort of.” I was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the time and didn’t really know how to explain it. “Basically, I mean, that’s what all books are like.”

“Well, Who Moved My Cheese?, it really boils down what it’s like for a CEO. It’s good. You should read it. It might give you some sense of direction in your life.”

I said I would.

“I have a copy back at the house,” he said. “It won’t take you long. You could read it on the toilet.”

“I will,” I said.

The conversation moved off to something else and I stared out the window again. The deer was gone. Soon enough I saw the red hatchback pull up and the busboy jump out, carrying two plastic grocery bags. He’d raced out to get the lobster that wasn’t on the menu, I realized.

 

I was so drunk when we got back to the house I could hardly stand. We all collected for a moment in front of the television, which was still running—in fact, it was never turned off the entire length of my stay—though it had been switched to FOX. The feed kept cutting between the anchor and various reporters standing on courthouse steps in Florida and in DC.

“Cesar,” said Mr. Paul, and Cesar appeared from the kitchen. He had a small leather pouch in his hand.

“What’s the latest?” said Mr. Paul.

“Nothing, Sir.”

“Any calls?”

“No, Sir.”

Mr. Paul took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the couch, untucked his shirt. Cesar unzipped the pouch and pulled out a syringe and a needle and a small glass vial. He screwed the needle onto the syringe, then inserted it into the vial, tipped the vial upside down, pulled back the plunger. I watched as the syringe filled with a clear liquid. Then Cesar flicked the vial and solemnly bent to administer the shot into the flesh of Mr. Paul’s back.

Phyllis took me up to her boudoir, as she called it, and chose a set of pajamas for me to wear—white satin Doris Days, and a pair of high-heeled slippers with some sort of ball of white fluff stuck on top. There was also a white satin sleep mask. “I never sleep without one,” she said.

She handed everything over to me. “Well, go on,” she said. “Get in your jammies.”

I set everything down on a gold satin divan and took off the crab outfit. For the second time that day, I was practically naked in front of Phyllis. I felt like I was being hazed.

“I just think you should know,” she said. “Mr. Paul and I are close personal friends with the Bushes.”

“Oh,” I said.

“We’ve spent more than a few weekends out at their ranch, in Crawford.”

“Wow.”

“I’m just saying, don’t listen to my dad. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They’re the best people, the finest people you could ever want to meet.”

“OK.”

“And don’t believe everything you hear on the news,” she said. “Unless it’s FOX. They’re fair. Fair and balanced.”

“OK,” I said. I was dressed by then, draped in silk. I’d never felt better in my life.

Then Phyllis settled the sleeping mask over me and told me to hold out my left hand. I heard her digging in a drawer, then felt her sliding something onto my left ring finger. “Look,” she said.

I opened my eyes to find an enormous diamond on my hand—an oval stone surrounded by smaller round ones. It was preposterous, the biggest diamond I’d ever seen, even bigger than the one Phyllis wore.

“This was my sister’s,” she said. “Jack’s mom’s.”

“Oh.”

“She was very slender, very delicate. I thought this might fit you.”

“Wow.” I moved my fingers around a little, mesmerized by the light coming off the diamond.

“I have a good feeling about you,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Who knows,” she said, slipping the ring off my finger. “Maybe if you play your cards right.”

 

In bed, Jack explained he’d be leaving early the next morning, off to his interview in Galveston. His itinerary included a tour of the island’s prison hospital, where next year, with any luck, he’d be slicing prisoners’ heads open. That’s why he was really hoping for a spot in Galveston, he explained. “They let you do anything to prisoners. You can cut a dude’s brain in half on the first day, if you want.”

“Yeesh,” I said.

“Prisoners have, like, zero rights. It’s the best place to learn how to operate.”

A bit later he said, “You could come with me, but there’s nothing to do there, it’s a shithole.”

“OK.”

“All that’s there is, like, the prison hospital and a natural disaster museum.”

“Oh.”

“Galveston is the site of the largest number of Americans ever killed in a single event. A hurricane came in and wiped everyone out. Killed, like, a thousand people.”

“That doesn’t sound so great.”

“Besides,” he said. “You should stay here. I want you to get to know the family.”

A minute later, he was asleep. It had always amazed me how fast he could go under—sometimes within a minute after having sex. Meanwhile, I was already displaying the first signs of the ailment that would hound me the rest of my life. I had a hard time falling asleep and sometimes lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, trying to solve the puzzle of my life. I was always consumed by the feeling that I had missed something, or misplaced something valuable, or had just made or was about to make a grievous error. I could never see the way forward, could never tell what I was supposed to do. Everything was fogged over. I couldn’t fathom what good I might possibly do in this life. That year, it had started to seem to me I was just another waste of resources. I’d been given a chance but failed to make something of myself, or find a direction. Someone had decided to give me a scholarship to college, had passed me the ball, but I’d dropped it. I was supposed to be making connections and putting together a résumé to secure my future, but instead, I’d just loafed around reading books. The only reason I’d taken up with Jack was because I’d never done anything like it before, and was running out of time to do something different, reckless. Whenever I considered these failures, I always concluded the same thing: that my faults were the faults of my father, my mysterious father. I was sure that everything that was wrong with me was wrong first in him. But I didn’t know who he was, and couldn’t ask him how to fix myself.

That night, I wondered why Jack had brought me to meet his family, whether it was just an invitation he’d extended without much thought or whether he was trying to see whether I fit in, because he wanted to take me with him. He was the kind of person who couldn’t stand to be alone, I realized, and was now staring down the barrel of a six-year residency, during which he would be too busy to meet new people. He wanted to bring someone with him to that Godforsaken island, someone to come home to at night and have sex with before falling asleep.

I was angry for a moment. Why would he think I would do such a thing? What kind of person would follow someone she barely knew to a desolate, punitive island? Then again, I wondered, what else was I going to do? Go back to my grandparents’ house? I pictured our life there, pictured my grandmother’s daily routine, how she woke each morning and braided her long silver hair and then coiled the braid at the base of her neck and pinned it to the back of her head; how she put on a dress and a pair of wooden-heeled clogs and walked to the six o’clock mass; how she came home and put over her dress a smock apron that snapped up the front, and commenced cooking and cleaning; how, when she washed the floor, she got down on her hands and knees and cleaned with buckets of hot water and ammonia and rags and wiry scrub brushes; how she cooked in cast iron pans and made giant batches of soup in a black pot that looked like a cauldron. I remembered the long, specific conversations she had with the grocery store butcher, how she always brought home packages of unusual cuts of meat, which she then put through a hand-cranked grinder. I don’t know how many times I’d watched her turn the neck of a turkey into ribbons.

Then there was my mother, who was living out a life sentence, punishment for her teenage sins. Her mistake, at seventeen, might as well have been fatal. She had no life to speak of. Each day, she got up, walked to her job as the school’s receptionist, worked, then walked home. She seemed determined to take up as little space and make as little noise as possible—she even turned on the faucet carefully so that the water came trickling out, so the pipes wouldn’t jolt from the change in pressure. Later in life, I would recognize this quiet reserve as the mark of grief, the demeanor of a person mourning a loss she would never get over, but I didn’t know that growing up. I just thought she was dead inside, like a doll.

Then I thought of my own routine back home. In addition to the modest daily life I lived alongside my mother and grandparents, there was also my job at the church. To fund my education at the school, I worked at the church on the weekends, sweeping its floors and cleaning its bathrooms, cleaning up its banquet hall after functions, carrying around a pail and a mop, a broom and dustpan, like Cinderella. I spent most of each weekend there, cleaning the church on Saturday mornings, then attending the Saturday afternoon mass so that during Sunday morning masses I could prepare for the donut fellowship hours. At 7 a.m., while mass carried on overhead, I would be filling the basket of a giant percolator with Chock Full O’ Nuts and plugging it in to brew, squeezing cylinders of concentrated frozen orange juice into a vat and pouring water over it, mixing it together with a wooden spoon. I carried everything out to a giant folding table, set out Styrofoam cups and boxes of donuts, lined a trash barrel with a plastic bag and wheeled it out into the banquet hall. When the parishioners came down after mass, I stood serving coffee, and watched the trash bag fill with dirty paper plates and cups and plastic picnic ware, little containers of nondairy creamer. The priests floated in in their vestments and stood at the end of the table, their hands clasped in front of them. Their faces, at rest, wore expressions of distraction and loneliness, though when parishioners approached them to chat, their faces lit as if by a switch. One priest, Father Patrick, went out of his way to be friendly to me, but even still, I was afraid of him—there was something unsettling about the way he looked. His hair was dyed black and his lips always looked stained, as if he had just eaten a popsicle. As I cleaned up after fellowship, he would stand with his hands clasped behind his back, quizzing me on catechism, asking, for instance, what the purpose of the third petition of the Our Father was, to which I responded, almost robotically: to ask Our Father to unite our will to that of his Son, so as to fulfill his plan of salvation in the life of the world.

“And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” he asked, always, as his final question. A joke, I was pretty sure.

I was hundreds of miles away, in Jack’s bed in Houston, and was dreaming this dream of my old life, but soon enough, I feared, I would be back there. That would be my life again, and this would be the dream I was having. By then, the four years I’d lived outside the grasp of my family would be hardly more than a dream. I don’t know why I felt this way. I was young and could do whatever I wanted, but I didn’t know it. I had some idea that freedom was for other people.

The noise from the television was coming up through the floor, and I decided to go down and see what was happening. I wound down the staircase carefully. I could see the grandfather’s head of white hair sticking up over the back of the recliner, and a terrible feeling came over me. He was dead, I thought, and I was the person who had been driven from bed in order to find him. I stood and regarded the situation, imagined putting a hand on his shoulder and then, failing to stir him, pressing my fingers to his neck to find a pulse. And failing that, closing his eyes and then sneaking back upstairs. I wasn’t about to wake anybody up with news like that.

I crept toward him, stepping carefully, trying not to make any noise. Then all at once the James Brown Santa screeched and the grandfather startled awake and I startled, and the scream of a little girl escaped my mouth.

“Goddamn,” said the grandfather.

“Jesus,” I said. I was clutching my heart.

“That goddamn Santa, that goddamn Santa just about gave me a goddamn heart attack.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus H. Christ.”

I sat down on the couch and we both watched James Brown Santa dance until his song ended. Then we regarded CNN. Nothing had been decided, so people were still weaving theories about what might or might not happen, citing precedents, scrutinizing the previous opinions of the various Supreme Court justices. There was further discussion of the vote counts in several key Florida counties, the status of recounts when they were stalled, the number of absentee ballots and which party they were likely to favor, if counted. They kept showing the same picture, a still shot that the camera zoomed in on slowly. It was an image of a balding man conducting a ballot recount. He was holding up a hole-punched ballot and inspecting it through a giant magnifying glass, through which his eye was grossly enlarged. The expression on the man’s face was an almost clownlike exaggeration of intensity. He seemed to be investigating the very fabric of our democracy, considering its holes, aghast at the ragged seams he never knew existed.

“Well, I’ll tell you one goddamn thing,” the grandfather said. “It’s going to go to one of those goddamn fellows or the other.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Who’d you vote for?” he asked.

“Gore,” I admitted. There had never been any question. I came from Massachusetts Democrats, union members, Kennedy lovers.

“Goddamn right you did. I could tell just by looking at you.”

“Thanks.” That probably wasn’t great, I thought.

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said, “if you want to know how I feel about the Republicans.”

I said I did.

“They’re all a bunch of goddamn crooks, is the long and the short of it.”

I nodded.

“Back on the farm,” he started. And he wound his way into a story from his boyhood, during the depression, and Prohibition. His father had been making a living selling moonshine but was picked up by a Republican sheriff and sent to Leavenworth to serve his time. During the two years his father was away, the grandfather, who was thirteen at the time, had to go out every morning before school to shoot birds to feed his family. “You think we cared?” he said. “We ate pigeon, squirrel, whatever. You gave a scrap of meat to my mother, she boiled it with some potatoes, and by the time she was done it didn’t matter what the hell it started out as, you just wanted some meat, understand,” he said. I said I did. He said one morning, he was out shooting partridges and got picked up by the local police, again Republicans, for shooting without a license. “So then they kept me in jail there a few days,” he said. “To make some kind of goddamn point. They left my mother and little sisters without a man in the house. They picked up some kid trying to feed his sisters and put him in jail there,” he said. “Just for shooting without a license. Well, I’ll tell you, those goddamn crooks, if they were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on them.”

We sunk into a companionable silence, until the grandfather fell asleep, and then I fell asleep. I woke sometime later, during a commercial for an antidepressant. A cartoon blob slumped around the screen, a dark rain cloud hovering over him, no matter which way he turned. The grandfather was gone, so I went off to bed too. I didn’t turn the TV off. It seemed like the wrong thing to do.

 

Jack left early the next morning. By the time I made my way downstairs, still in my pajamas, as I had nothing to change into, everyone was in the kitchen yelling at each other, though in a friendly way. Cesar and Mr. Paul were talking business, Phyllis and the grandfather negotiating his breakfast. I sat on a stool next to the grandfather. I was disheveled. I still didn’t have my bag, hadn’t brushed my teeth or my hair. My head was killing me.

I’d only been downstairs a minute when the phone rang and Cesar answered it. “Yes,” he said. He handed the receiver to Mr. Paul, and everyone fell silent. There were certain rules in the house, I sensed, and keeping quiet while Mr. Paul was on the phone was one of the big ones.

I heard a man’s voice come through, gruff and kind of aggressive. “Very good,” Mr. Paul said. Then again, after a bit, “Very good.” He stabbed a button on the phone with his fat finger, then set the receiver down on the counter with a triumphant gesture. “It’s done,” he told Phyllis. “It’s over. We’re all set.”

“Really?” she said. She clasped her hands together. “Are you sure?”

“That was Piggy.”

“Oh my god!” she said “We get to go to the inaugural ball!” She jumped up and down, and then they embraced, kissed, patted one another on the back. “We did it!” she said.

“Did what?” the grandfather said.

“We won, Pa,” she said. “The court’s deciding in favor of Bush.”

“What?” he said. We all turned toward the television. Reporters were still standing around looking bewildered. “When the hell did this happen? I’ve been watching the goddamn television just like everyone else.”

“It’s not public yet,” said Mr. Paul.

“Then how the hell do you know?” the grandfather said. “If the goddamn, the goddamn court hasn’t even come into session, how the hell do you know?”

“He just knows, Pa,” said Phyllis. “This is how the world works.”

“You think you know before, before the goddamn cable news?”

Mr. Paul and Phyllis were dancing, slowly. She was spinning underneath his upraised arm, going in and out from his embrace.

“I don’t believe a word,” the grandfather said. He rose from his chair, tried to cut in on their dance. “You want to trust some fellow named Piggy; you’re taking his word? I’ll believe it when I hear it from the goddamn, from Piggy Goddamn Jennings.”

“It’s Pignataro, Dad,” she said, twirling away. “Piggy is just a nickname.”

They continued fighting, though Phyllis’ tone was light, triumphant. “You’ll see, Dad,” she kept saying. “In a few minutes, you’ll see.”

Mr. Paul went off to work, and Cesar and Phyllis drifted off somewhere. It was just me and the grandfather left. He just stood in the middle of the kitchen with his mouth open, looking confused and sort of helpless.

“Where’s my goddamn breakfast?” he said. He went over to the stove and peered into a large pot. It was filled with water, with a pale chicken carcass lounging in it. The burner wasn’t turned on—the chicken was just sitting there.

“Do you want me to cook that?” I said. “Or put it back in the fridge or something?”

“Just leave it,” he said.

“Well, OK.” I didn’t know quite what to say after that. When I took the job at the coffee shop, I’d been required to take a food safety class, and I knew you weren’t supposed to leave meat at room temperature. But this wasn’t my house, I was just a guest. “If you say so.”

“The hell with this,” the grandfather said. He drifted out of the kitchen, down the hallway. A minute later, he came back holding a boxed cheese-and-sausage set. He stood at the counter cutting a link of sausage with his pocket knife. His hands trembled. Each slice was an agonizing, wobbling battle. I was sure he was going to cut his thumb off.

“Sausage?” he said, and offered up a slice.

I didn’t want any but I said OK, cupped my hands to receive it.

“Body of Christ,” he said.

 

The grandfather and I sat in the living room all morning, in front of the television. Phyllis kept wandering in and out, stopping in front of the TV to see if the news was official yet. “Wait and see,” she kept saying. “Just wait another minute and you’ll see.” She kept bringing us Bloody Marys and pretzels and warm washcloths to wipe our hands. I was drunk and very comfortable, but even still, every few minutes, my heart would start racing, and I’d flush with a sense of righteous indignation. I felt like the grandfather and I were hostages trapped in a bank lobby while certain masked men held us at gunpoint, and others accessed the vault, bagged and stole all the world’s treasure. I wanted to let someone know what was happening.

I didn’t know who Piggy was, or what he had done to get the results of the decision before everyone else, but dark notions swirled around my head: bribery, threats, maybe even murder. “This thing goes all the way to the top,” was the kind of line that kept running through my brain. I was seeing it all play out like an action movie. CNN didn’t help. Adrenaline-inducing graphics kept running between each segment. Whenever they switched from coverage at the Supreme Court to coverage down in Florida, or to the White House, or the Bush compound, words came flying from a corner of the screen and then collapsed flat with a clattering metal sound. Electric guitars were grinding, electric drums beating. Synthesizers groaned in the background—the kind of noise you’d associate with the slow motion, anguished screaming of a giant, or someone falling down a mine shaft.

I thought about calling the police, but that didn’t make much sense. Maybe a Congressman? I didn’t know the name of my Congressman in Virginia, just the one from back home, in Massachusetts. But that didn’t help—he was in the Mafia and probably didn’t care about this kind of backroom dealing. I racked my brain. I couldn’t think who to call.

At some point, I remembered that Mrs. McLain’s brother was a reporter for the local newspaper. It wasn’t much of a paper—it got its front-page stories from the AP, and filled the rest with coverage of city council and school board meetings, descriptions of the occasional violent crime. The bulk of the paper consisted of comics and word puzzles, coupon booklets from grocery stores. But still, technically, Mrs. McLain’s brother was a reporter. Whenever one of his stories ran, she showed it to me, then left it out on the coffee table for weeks. She liked seeing his name in print, Farley, her maiden name. “He’s, like, way smart,” she told me once. “He’s too good for this paper. He’s gonna work his way up to The Post someday.”

A drunken delusion came over me—that I could call her, and she could call him and tip him off to the fact that the election was being bought by a secret gang of oil tycoons, one of whom was named Piggy. I told the grandfather I was going to get some water and pushed myself off the couch, made my way into the kitchen. The phone receiver was right where Mr. Paul had left it, on the island. I picked it up and turned it on, punched in the McLains’ number. Only then did it occur to me that if she was home—I didn’t know if it was one of her days off—she would probably be sleeping. I hesitated, almost hung up. But then I thought of what a big scoop I had, how great it would be for her brother. And the country! I couldn’t forget about the good of the country.

The phone rang a few times, and then Buddy picked up. “Hello?” he asked. Unlike adults, who answered the phone as a formality, Buddy seemed truly curious, excited to find out who was on the other end.

“Hey, Bud!” I said. I was suddenly overwhelmed, longing to see him.

“Hi, Mary,” he said, and laughed.

“How you doing, Bud?”

“Good,” he said. “Hey, where are you? Are you downstairs?”

“I’m on a trip,” I said. “I’m away but I’ll be back tomorrow. Listen, is your mom home?”

“Mommy’s sleeping,” he said.

“Can you wake her up?”

“I’m watching Tom & Jerry.”

“Oh, good. Good.” I said. “Wow. That’s neat.”

“The one with, the one with the turkey,” he said.

He meant the Thanksgiving episode, where Jerry takes in an orphan, a baby mouse named Nibbles, a little gray mouse in a diaper who appears on Jerry’s doorstep with a note: I am always hungry. So Jerry sneaks him out to the dining room, where Mammy Two Shoes is setting up the table for the holiday dinner. The whole table is full of food, a turkey with little paper socks, and every trimming you could imagine. Nibbles just buzzsaws through all of it. At one point, he swallows a whole orange, and his entire body becomes a sphere. Buddy couldn’t get enough of that part.

“You have to go get Mommy,” I said. “I need to tell her something. I need to get word to your Uncle Mike. Something bad is happening and it’s important. There’s an important, there’s a big…” I tried to think how to describe what was happening to a three-year-old. “There are some bad guys and they’re, they’re trying to steal everything. They’re, like, eating everybody else’s food and they’re not supposed to. And your Uncle Mike, he needs to tell the newspaper.”

“OK,” he said. I heard the phone hit the floor and waited. I could hear the TV running, then Buddy laughing. “Bud!” I cried. “Bud! Come back! Hey, Bud!” I waited and waited. Tried again. “Bud! Bud!”

Finally, I hung up. A minute later I called back, but the line was busy. It was no use.

I sat at the kitchen island with my head in my hands, despondent, my head pounding. Suddenly every aspirin commercial I’d ever seen made perfect sense. I was reduced to a little crucible of pain.

I startled when I heard the refrigerator door open—Cesar had appeared noiselessly. He had probably heard everything I said to Buddy. He poured some orange juice into a glass and set it in front of me. “Drink this,” he said. “Thank you.” I was truly grateful. I took a sip of the juice and it burned off the fuzz that was coating my mouth.

Cesar poured himself a glass and then sat beside me. “It can be a little overwhelming,” he said. “All this.”

“I’m not a drinker,” I said. “I guess I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

He shrugged. “Now you know.”

I sat rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms.

“I understand you’re a Catholic,” Cesar said.

I nodded.

“That’s good. That works in your favor. Jack has dated a lot of girls but none of them has been a Catholic.”

“Oh.”

“The other girls, they knew this world better, they were rich. But that doesn’t matter so much. Being raised Catholic is what matters to Phyllis and Mr. Paul.”

“Right,” I said. “I suppose it creates a certain type of person.” My head was in my hands again. I didn’t care anymore what I looked like.

“All I’m saying is if he’s going to go to a wedding someday, it’s going to be in a cathedral. Mr. Paul, he never talks about religion, but if you look carefully, everyone he surrounds himself with is Catholic. Always has been. Take me for instance. You see this?” he asked. He showed me his pinky ring, a gold signet engraved with the face of a saint looking heavenward.

“Wow,” I said. The saint appeared to be suffering some kind of torture. The detail, the expression, it really was impressive.

“Mrs. Paul,” he said. “Mrs. Paul gave me this, from her own personal collection.”

I admired it again.

“That’s a real lady,” he said. “Mrs. Paul is a lady with true dignity.”

After a pause, he added, “Phyllis never gave me anything.”

I was confused. “I thought you just said she gave you that ring.”

“I said Mrs. Paul,” he said.

I was still confused.

Then a wide smile broke across Cesar’s face. “You think Phyllis is Mrs. Paul?” he asked.

“Isn’t she?” I said.

He laughed, just a single, loud bark. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s a good one.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Mr. Paul is from Tulsa,” he said. Serious again.

“Oh.”

“That’s where he lives. That’s where his family lives. That’s his permanent address, as far as the government is concerned, if you know what I mean.”

I still didn’t, not really.

“Phyllis is Mr. Paul’s girlfriend,” he said. “Has been for thirty years.”

“But,” I said. I couldn’t think what. “But they’re married,” I arrived at. “He’s Jack’s uncle.”

“They use those kinds of family terms,” Cesar said. “But they’re not married.”

“But she has a ring.”

“But it’s not a wedding band.” He tapped his temple with his finger. I wasn’t looking closely enough, was the gesture. I wasn’t smart enough.

I supposed he was right. The ring Phyllis wore was fat, nearly an inch wide, with a large round diamond embedded in the center. And all around it, smaller diamonds, scattered like stars. I had never seen a ring like it. The reigning diamond didn’t rise up on prongs to announce itself, like the other engagement rings I’d seen. It was a large diamond, but it was buried.

I looked around. The house was so big—it was practically a plantation. But the way Cesar was talking, it was just a flophouse. A hotel Mr. Paul stayed in when he was away from home. I tried to remember the name of the redheaded madam Rhett Butler frequented in Gone with the Wind. Scarlett O’Hara had shunned her, but I’d always been sympathetic—she’d always struck me as a practical person doing what needed to be done. Plus, she was the one woman who’d understood Rhett, and cared for him without dragging him through the fire. She was crass, and took too much pleasure in things, and her hair was too brightly dyed and she wore too much makeup. But if you could overlook those things, she was just a girl trying to make a living.

Belle Watley was her name. I think I said it out loud. I’d fallen into a bit of a trance again.

Cesar plucked a peach from a bowl on the counter and started eating it. Between bites, slowly, he elaborated on the details of the contract between Phyllis and Mr. Paul. The first part was just as I’d imagined. They had met on a flight. Back in the late sixties, early seventies, Cesar said, Mr. Paul was back and forth to China every month. One afternoon, Phyllis had bent down to offer him a drink and that was it. He’d fallen for her in an instant and never recovered. She was blond back then, Cesar said, and very beautiful. Mr. Paul couldn’t live without her, but, being Catholic, neither could he divorce his wife in order to marry her. He proposed to Phyllis that he keep her as his mistress, his Houston wife, establish her in luxury, but they couldn’t get married, not until Mrs. Paul died, which she would, soon now—Cesar said she was very ill.

Part of the deal was Phyllis couldn’t have kids. That was just something Mr. Paul couldn’t do. He was Catholic, after all. That’s where Jack had come in. Phyllis had wanted a child and lo and behold, at the age of ten, Jack had arrived at her doorstep, practically an orphan, his mother dead and his father overseas or away in DC all the time, on Mr. Paul’s behalf. Phyllis had taken Jack in, started doing the things moms do, driving a Volvo, taking him to school and soccer practice, paying for elaborate birthday parties, and the fighting had commenced. Phyllis wanted Mr. Paul to coparent with her, to attend Jack’s school functions, his baseball games and Christmas concerts, his confirmation, high-school graduation ceremony, but he had resisted her. It was the only thing they ever fought about. Mr. Paul didn’t want Jack hanging around all the time when he was visiting—he thought Phyllis should get a babysitter, at least, while they went down to dinner at the club. They fought about Jack so much, he nearly ruined things for them. Phyllis had even left Mr. Paul for a time.

But what could Mr. Paul do? Cesar said. He was a man in love. To this day he was still infatuated; he loved Phyllis’ very person, her body, those long, slender legs, her beautiful silver hair. She was his silver fox. He’d looked all over the world and never found another woman like her. So he put up with her, did what she asked. Started treating Jack like a son. Setting up accounts for him, securing his future. Bringing him into the fold.

Cesar stopped there, shrugged. “That’s love,” he said. It was merely a matter of identification. The way you’d point to a dog and say, that’s a dog.

“I think Jack has the same condition,” Cesar said, finishing the last bite of his peach, sucking for a moment on the pit. He nodded to indicate my legs, which were indeed quite long and had never done me any favors before now—I was always falling over and bumping into things, not quite structurally sound.

“What you need to understand about men,” Cesar said, “is they are beholden to certain fetishes. And if the fetish is strong enough, they will do anything to quench it.” He pressed a pedal with his foot and one of the cabinets slid open to reveal a trash can. He threw the peach pit in the garbage with an angry gesture.

“Just so you know,” he added. “I’m telling you all of this because I think you’re a person who can be trusted. You have integrity, I can tell.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

“But we don’t go around telling secrets outside this family,” he said. His expression was stern now.

“Right,” I said. “Of course.”

“We value loyalty,” he said.

I nodded. “I get it.”

“I hope so,” he said.

“OK,” I said. Jesus Christ.

“What you heard this morning,” he said. “That phone call. That goes nowhere.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. OK.”

“I know you’re probably skeptical,” he said. “I get it. I used to be. But these people aren’t so bad. If you’re family, they take care of you.”

“But,” I said. I wanted to make some sort of protest. What if you weren’t family? What happened then?

“I’m trying to help you,” he said and rapped his knuckles on the countertop. Then he reached for something he was carrying on his back, tucked into his waistband. I thought it might be a gun, that he was going to show me what he’d do to me if I ever betrayed the family. But it was just a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? “Mr. Paul wanted you to have this,” he said. He took the phone off the counter and walked off toward the pantry, stepped into it. Then I heard him hissing into the phone. “We need that fucking bag,” he said. “We need it and you’re going to bring it.” I realized all of Cesar’s ferocity was being used on my behalf, and felt grateful. Tears welled in my eyes.

 

I spent the next few hours watching television and leafing through Who Moved My Cheese? For the first few hours, I was in the living room, where Grandpa, almost horizontal in his recliner, drifted in and out of sleep. Later, we moved to the kitchen and sat at the island, eating the grilled cheese sandwiches Phyllis made for us. There were more drinks too—at midday, she had switched us over to gin-and-tonics. The chicken from earlier was still sitting on the stove in a pan of water. It filled me with a simmering dread.

After lunch, the grandfather said he wanted to go down to church for confession. He hoisted himself up from his chair and stood gripping the countertop, as if he’d fall without it.

“What the hell do you have to confess?” Phyllis said. “What’d you do, jerk off to a picture of Dolly Parton?”

“None of your goddamn business,” he said. Then added, “Let’s just say I might have taken the lord’s name in vain a few goddamn times. Let’s just say I might have had impure thoughts. Let’s just say I can’t take the host until I clear my name.”

“If every Catholic who had impure thoughts skipped communion,” Phyllis said, “there wouldn’t be a goddamn soul in that line.”

“I don’t pick and choose,” he said. “I don’t make the goddamn rules and neither do you.”

“He does this every week,” she told me. “I have to haul his ass down there, and for what? He never even leaves this house.”

“That’s exactly my goddamn point,” Grandpa said. “This place is a goddamn,” he waved his hand, stammered.

“Your brain is pickled,” Phyllis told him.

“Well, I can’t think of the word,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean it isn’t true, what I’m trying to say. What I mean is, this is the kind of place your soul dies. This is the kind of place built on the blood of the innocent.” He had made his way to the other side of the island and was pulling open drawers and rattling them, shaking their contents about.

“For Christ’s sake,” Phyllis said. “When did you get so dramatic?”

“You should get out of here,” the grandfather told me, “while your soul is still intact. Get out while the goddamn getting is good. The minute I find my keys to the wagon, the minute I find those goddamn keys I’m going down to confession and then I’m going to drive straight back to the farm so I can be with your mother.”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Phyllis. “He says this all the time. Give him one drink and he starts saying the house is evil, he’s going back to the farm. Just ignore him. His brain is mush.”

“All I know,” he said, “is someone had better take me to confession or give me my goddamn keys so I can take myself. She’s always hiding my keys.”

“I have a hair appointment,” Phyllis said. “It’s the only time they could work me in.”

“You know perfectly well,” he said. “Tuesdays at three I need to clear my soul so I can meet your mother in heaven.”

“Don’t start,” she said.

For the next minute, they yelled the most horrible things at each other. Their dialogue was jumbled but I gathered the basics: that the grandfather had never once been kind to his wife while she was alive, had caused her nothing but misery, that this whole business of missing her and going down to confession was bullshit. “You’ll never see Mom again,” Phyllis said. “You’re going to burn in hell and you know it. That woman deserves to spend eternity in peace, away from your miserable soul. She spent her whole goddamn life trying to make you happy; she did everything for you, she even sprayed on your goddamn deodorant every morning, and you never had a single kind word to say to her.”

Meanwhile, the grandfather was saying, “Shut your goddamn mouth, you worthless goddamn whore, what do you know, you weren’t there, you have no goddamn idea what you’re talking about.”

“Why don’t you just leave her in peace?” Phyllis said.

“There’s things you don’t know,” he said. “You don’t know what things are like between a man and wife.”

Phyllis backed down. He had landed on her weak spot.

“I’m not even asking you to take me,” he added. “I’m just asking for my goddamn keys. She won’t give them to me,” he added, softly, pathetically.

“That’s because of what happened the last time you drove, Pa. He almost went into the goddamn pond on the thirteenth green.” They were talking to each other, then turning to me to further their case, wanting some kind of validation.

“How was I supposed to know they put a pond there right in the middle of the goddamn, the goddamn road there. Was I supposed to know that?” he asked me.

“It’s not a road, Pa,” she said. “It’s a goddamn walking path.”

“He drove over one of those little wooden footbridges,” she said. “I don’t know how the whole goddamn thing didn’t collapse.”

“She won’t give me my keys.” He was rifling through the produce drawer of the refrigerator now. “She hides them all over this kitchen. She won’t tell me where. All I want to do is go back to the farm. My wife is buried there. But if I can’t make it to the farm, I can at least make it down to church.”

“You’ll never find them,” Phyllis said.

“You ever seen a grown man treated this way?” he said. He was appealing to me earnestly. His eyes were magnified behind his glasses, wet and beseeching. I felt like he was on the witness stand in court. I had been brought into the house as a jury member, or maybe even a judge. I was here to decide things between them. Pronounce someone innocent and someone guilty. Someone good and someone evil.

“Tell me you’ve seen another grown man treated this way and I’ll shut up,” he said. “Have you?”

“No,” I said. And flinched. Phyllis would turn on me now, I was sure.

But then she didn’t. “It’s for your own good, Pa,” she said, softly.

Then she turned to me. “Take him,” she said. “I’d take him myself but my hair. Take the golf cart.” She disappeared upstairs.

 

I put on the furry high-heeled slippers and went out to the golf cart. I was still in my pajamas, but oh well, I thought, they were really nice and weren’t that far off from the track suits all the housewives were always wearing at Whispering Pines. We got in the cart and rolled down to the church, in the little town square. Efforts had been made to make the church look timeworn, and quaint, like a church from an old Spanish settlement, though there was something off about it—it was like a Disneyland version of a church. It was a white stucco structure with a steeply pitched clay tile roof, wide wooden doors that somehow, though, looked to be made of plastic. Inside, it was sixty degrees and dark. The church had a strange smell to it—or strange for a church, I suppose. It smelled like goods had been unboxed in there, like mattresses wrapped in plastic had recently been freed from their casing and were off-gassing. It smelled like a Kmart, basically.

A handful of women were seated in the back pews, outside the confessional. They were senior citizens in pastel clothing, golf shirts, and pants with elastic waistbands. Their breasts sat on top of their stomachs, which rested on their legs.

The grandfather whispered to me harshly, “Are you going in? You got something you want to get off your chest?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Well, you’d better go anyway. You need to be ready. Just because you’re young doesn’t mean you get a free pass. You could get hit by the next bus. It happens all the time.”

“Right,” I said. I hadn’t gone to confession since the last time I’d visited home, about a year ago. I wasn’t sure I believed in any of this anymore, or ever really had. I was starting to think there wasn’t a God, that the world was empty, that nothing I did or failed to do mattered. I was twenty-one, was the problem.

“I have to come every week because my wife was a goddamn saint,” he said. “If I ever want to see her again, so I can tell her I love her, I need to make sure my soul is pure.” After a moment, he said, “I never told her while she was here on earth. I missed my shot.”

Finally, it was the grandfather’s turn, and he disappeared into the confessional. He was incapable of speaking quietly, and I could hear everything he said. “I’ve had a few, what do you call them,” he said. “Impure thoughts. And I might have taken the lord’s name in vain a few times.” There was a moment’s pause. Then he said, “Thank you, father. You’re a good guy. You’re a regular guy.”

Then it was my turn. I ducked into the confessional and kneeled down. I fumbled for the words for a second—I was still so drunk. But they came. Of course they came. I’d been saying them my whole life. Forgive me father for I have sinned.

I couldn’t see the priest, exactly, but I could tell he was wearing a burgundy robe, and was fat.

“What can I help you with today?” he said.

“Well,” I said. “I’m not sure. I’m not myself at the moment. I’ve been drinking.” I was going off script.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s OK too. At least you’re honest. That’s a good sign. Being honest with yourself and others is the first thing you need to do to find your way back to the true path.” He had a soothing voice. Deep and calm, though there was something delicate about it too—he was gentle.

“The thing is,” I said. “I’m not so sure anymore that there is a true path.”

“Of course, there’s a true path,” he said. “That’s one of our central tenets. It’s our whole raison d’etre, to borrow a phrase.” I heard a little rasping sound and peered through the latticed screen. He was examining his fingernails, holding them up in front of his face, splaying his fingers. Then he started working a file at the edge of his thumb. He was filing his nails! “That means reason for being,” he added. “In French.”

“I know that,” I said. My pride was sort of wounded. “What I don’t know is, like, well, let’s say you grow up believing there’s a true path, and you stay on it, you just live this small, disciplined life, where you work hard and try to be fair and stay out of trouble, but then you get older and leave home and realize that other people, well, they don’t exactly walk the path, and you tell yourself that you’ll be rewarded in the end, that you should just keep on doing what you’re doing, and you tell yourself all those other people running around doing whatever they want, you tell yourself they’ll be punished, but then it turns out they never seem to suffer at all, like, ever, I mean, all around you, everyone is just running around smashing and grabbing, and doing way better than you are…” I trailed off, examined my own fingernails, unpolished and not very neatly trimmed. They still had traces of espresso dust underneath them. “Like, winning at everything. My question is, I guess, this whole thing with the meek shall inherit the earth, well, maybe this is just the kind of story people tell to keep other people down? Government, religion, all of it. Maybe it’s all a wash in the end, and you’d just be better off smashing and grabbing, you know?”

The priest sighed. He had set down his nail file—I could see him gripping the top of his legs. I was causing him grief. The worst thing he probably heard every week was some housewife confessing to coveting another housewife’s golf cart. “There really is a right way and a wrong way,” he said. “And following the true path is, well, doing the right thing is its own reward.”

“I just don’t know anymore,” I said.

“It’s not your place to judge,” he said. “It’s not your job to keep track of who has what, or when or whether justice has been served. We can’t know here on earth. It’s not our place to know.”

“But not keeping track, and not judging, that just feels like the same thing as not believing in anything, right?”

“Heavens, no.”

“I can’t tell what’s good and what’s evil anymore,” I said. “Or if there’s any such thing as good and evil.”

“Gosh,” he said. “Well, let me think here. I suppose the thing to do is, whenever you find yourself tempted to balance the books, or to make judgments, you should just say a prayer instead.”

I sighed dramatically.

“I know it sounds too simple,” he said. “But I think you’ll find it helps. Just replace one habit, a bad habit, with a better one. Just say a simple prayer. Doesn’t even matter what.”

“I don’t think I have that in me anymore,” I confessed.

“Well, that kind of ruins my day.”

“Sorry, father,” I said. I ducked out of the confessional—I had to get out of there.

“Say ten Hail Marys!” he called after me. “Come see me at Mass!”

The grandfather was standing at the back, ready to leave, one foot out the door. No one liked to hang around after confession.

“That took a while,” he said.

“Sorry I held you up.”

“If you want a tip,” he said, “You don’t have to go into too much detail. I always just say I’ve had impure thoughts and move on.”

“I guess that covers pretty much everything,” I conceded.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s happy hour at the goddamn club. Mai Tai Tuesday.”

 

We took the cart down to the club and hung around the bar, playing War and Go Fish, until Phyllis and Mr. Paul showed up with Jack—all at once we looked up and saw the three of them gathered around us in a horseshoe. “You’re wearing your pajamas,” Jack said. It was just a statement, delivered in a neutral tone, though it felt like a judgment. I flushed with shame. Somehow I’d forgotten. When I’d left the house, I thought I was just driving the grandfather to confession. But then we came here.

Phyllis and Mr. Paul looked amused, as if they’d have a good story to tell later. “It’s OK,” Phyllis said. “They’re really nice pajamas.” We made our way to the special table again, past all the other diners. I tried to walk as elegantly as possible, like if I could just hold my head up high enough, people would assume I was wearing clothes.

Mr. Paul ordered more lobsters, and I watched as another kid in a waiter’s tuxedo sprinted across the back parking lot to his car, this time a bright yellow Beetle. Phyllis asked Jack about Galveston and he replied languidly, saying the prison hospital wasn’t all he was hoping for, that the hospital and island were smaller and bleaker than he’d imagined. He’d seen some of the prisoners, he said. They were all covered in tattoos and had Hepatitis C. And worse, tuberculosis was going around prisons now—it was on the rise for the first time in fifty years. Last year one of the residents had gotten sneezed on by an inmate during an exam, and somehow, well, the point was he’d ended up with tuberculosis. “I mean, you’re just trying to help people and you end up, you end up getting sick. The resident had gone home and given TB to his wife, who was pregnant. “It’s like, it’s fucked up,” he said.

“You can always come work for me,” said Mr. Paul. “Spend a lot of time overseas. You can come home and give your wife something else.”

Phyllis slapped his arm, and they burst out laughing. It was an old joke between them. Maybe he’d given her syphilis, or crabs. Then I remembered she wasn’t his wife and thought maybe she’d given crabs to him, and he’d given them to his poor wife back in Oklahoma. Maybe that explained the crab pants I’d worn yesterday.

All through dinner, Phyllis and Mr. Paul kept talking about their friend being in the White House, whether they’d get an invitation to stay over, who was going to fill which cabinet positions, and what improvements Mr. Paul could expect from policy changes. How our relationship with the Saudis was going to change, who would be assigned to which diplomatic posts, where influence might be bought, favor curried. Mr. Paul listed the stocks he had purchased that day, most of which were stocks expected to surge once Bush was announced the winner, but some of them he bought just for fun—he had taken up a percentage of the World Wrestling Federation and Hooters just because he felt like celebrating. The whole time we were eating, I watched the happenings of the golf course. Over and over again, I watched young caddies unsheathe golf clubs from their furry head covers, pull them from the bags, and hand them to older white men, then put the clubs back in the bags and replace the covers and hoist the bags over their shoulders. Waiters in tuxedos kept setting plates and glasses down in front of me and then clearing them away. Something was wrong with this situation, I kept thinking, but then again, I kept losing hold of it; it just slipped through my fingers.

Finally, we rode home in the golf cart. It was December, well past nightfall, and I was just wearing pajamas, but still, I was warm, so comfortable. I felt freed from the shackles of my former life, the work I was always bent over, the heavy coats and shoes, the bad smells and tastes, and the solemnity, the loneliness. I tilted my head back and regarded the palm trees and breathed in the air. I was…I couldn’t quite tell what. Maybe I was happy.

Back at the house, CNN was on. A female reporter was standing in front of a courthouse, her brow furrowed. “I don’t want to look at a fat reporter,” Phyllis said, changing the channel. “My god. They can’t even afford someone good-looking.”

“You think goddamn Walter Cronkite was anything to look at?” said Grandpa. “You think when Kennedy was shot people were getting up to change the channel because they didn’t like his goddamn glasses?”

“I’m tired of fighting with someone that doesn’t even have a scrap of common sense. This is the world we live in, Pa. People like to see good-looking people on television. No one wants to hear the news from a fat woman.”

“My god,” said Grandpa. “I thought you were a libber.”

“I am a libber,” Phyllis said. “But anyone who gets fat is off my list.”

“Jesus. Jesus Tapdancing Christ.”

“Whoops,” said Phyllis. “Looks like you’d better march yourself back down to confession.”

“Goddamn,” the grandfather said. He sat back in his chair, despondent.

 

Mr. Paul went up to bed, and Phyllis went to change into pajamas. When she came back down, she was wearing the same kind as mine, but gold. She had the sleeping mask on, but pushed up above her eyes like a sweatband. We sat in front of the television and waited. Jack and the grandfather and Phyllis cracked open pistachios until their fingertips and mouths were bright red. The grandfather had switched the television back over to CNN, but for some reason, this time it seemed like something Phyllis could live with. “I don’t know why I’m even paying attention to any of this,” she said, tossing a pistachio in her mouth. “We already know which way it’s going to go.”

“The hell we do,” the grandfather said. He leaned over the side of his recliner to confront her. “You’ve been saying that all day. You really think you know before the goddamn, before those reporters standing out there freezing their asses off in front of the highest court in the goddamn country? How come a whole goddamn day has gone by and what you thought you knew hasn’t come out yet?”

“I know what I know,” she said. “I don’t know what you fools are sitting around waiting for.” But she looked, for the first time all day, sort of unsure of herself.

“You don’t know,” said grandpa. He cackled.

I’d given up early in the day but it occurred to me then, maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe good people were thinking clearly and honestly behind closed doors, maybe the right thing would happen, the rule of law would be upheld, someone would make sense of this in an impartial and reasonable way, we’d find a way out of this mess…

 

 

It wasn’t much later that the news came down. People were scrambling up and down the steps of the Supreme Court with fat manuscripts in their hands. The reporter on the steps of the court, consulting his own manuscript, announced that the lower court’s decision had been reversed.

“What the hell does that mean?” the grandfather said.

“Shut the hell up,” said Phyllis. She was on her feet now, her legs spread, bent down a bit, as if positioned to field a ground ball.

The reporter said that the court found problems with the recount procedures in Florida, and the mandate to carry out the recounts should be stayed.

“What in the hell does that mean?” the grandfather said again.

“It means I won, Pa,” Phyllis said. She jumped up and down and clasped her hands under her chin like a thrilled child. “I won, I won, I won!” she cried.

The anchor broke in to say that Mr. Gore himself was just now hearing the news. He didn’t have a copy of the decision but rather was learning about it, well, from CNN.

“Ha!” said Phyllis. “What a loser! I knew this morning! Everyone in this room knew twelve hours ago!” She flailed her arms and James Brown Santa started singing again.

“Goddammit!” the grandfather said. “That goddamn Santa.”

“Well, I like him,” said Phyllis. “And it’s my house.” She started dancing along with James Brown Santa, bobbing up and down. “So good,” she sang. “So good.”

The grandfather sat stunned, gripping the arms of his chair with his long fingers, looking as if he couldn’t believe what had happened to him, what had become of his life. I turned to Jack, who was taking it all in with a smirk, looking between his aunt and grandfather. His position was an easy one, I decided. All he had to do was sit back and observe. If he could just keep his mouth shut, be polite to both sides, he looked good. He looked magnanimous to the loser in every fight, and quietly supportive of the winner. One day everyone he knew would die, and he would inherit all of their money. He couldn’t lose. All he had to do was nothing.

Then something like a gong sounded. It was so loud, and so resonant, that my chest quivered. I had the feeling we were all on some kind of game show and our time was up: whatever we had been doing was some kind of performance or test, and now it was over, we were all going to be judged. Phyllis stopped dancing and composed herself. Cesar appeared from the kitchen and walked toward the front door. The sound was the doorbell, I realized.

Cesar swung open the door. A black man in an airline uniform was standing there, holding my suitcase. I rushed toward it, but Phyllis beat me, held me back, flinging her arm across me like my grandfather had always done when he stopped short in his van. She had something to get off her chest.

“Well, it’s about goddamn time,” she told the man.

“Sorry for the delay,” he said.

“Sorry doesn’t really help,” she said. “Do you know what this young lady wore down to dinner tonight?”

“No, Ma’am,” he said.

“She went down to dinner in her goddamn pajamas, is what she did.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am.” The man was still holding the bag. I wanted to take it from him, to intercede on his behalf. But I just stood there and watched. The volume sort of went out on the scene for a bit. Phyllis kept yelling and the man kept ducking his head, almost bowing.

I remembered that night my grandfather took me with him to that mansion in the suburbs—the night we saw the deer. What had happened at that house was, the sewer had backed up into their basement, and my grandfather had gone down to figure out what needed to be done. First, he went out to his truck and pulled on these plastic coveralls, like fly fishermen wear, and a pair of tall boots. Then I followed him back into the house and sat on the basement steps while he waded around. I wish this was only a metaphor, but it wasn’t: he was knee-deep in their shit. He did whatever it was that needed doing. Then he was careful to remove his boots at the foot of the stairs. He had even brought a towel with him, to wrap the boots as he carried them up the basement steps and out of the house. But just as we were getting in his truck, the woman, the owner of the house, came after him. “You left a mess on the floor,” she said. My grandfather frowned—he didn’t think he had. He was being careful.

“There’s a spot on the kitchen floor,” she said. “Can you clean up after yourself?”

We followed her back into the house and she pointed out a drop the size of a dime on the kitchen tile. My grandfather apologized and bent down to clean it with the rag he always kept in his back pocket. “I’d do it myself,” she said, “but I’m always telling my kids, if you make a mess, you have to clean it up yourself.” This woman was still fairly young, probably mid-thirties, but she had cut her hair short and curled it to her head, like an older woman would, and she dressed like an older woman—in a white turtleneck and beige slacks. A small gold cross hung around her neck.

I had wanted to say something, that she didn’t need to lecture him, that he was a war veteran, for Christ’s sake, but I didn’t say anything. We didn’t speak of it to each other, either, all the way home.

Before I knew it, I burst out: “It’s not his fault! He’s just the delivery person! It’s no big deal! Give him a fucking break!” And after I’d defended the airline employee, I kept going. I said to Jack, who was staring at me in disbelief, “And you, you’re a coward. You have, like, absolutely no discernable personality. If personalities had faces, I couldn’t say what you look like, I mean, I wouldn’t be able to pick you out of a lineup. I don’t know where you stand on anything. You never take any risks, you never stand up for anything. You just sit there smirking.” He was smirking at that very moment. “Whatever that quote is, all that’s needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing, you’re like the world champion of doing nothing!” I was ruining everything, any chance of joining this family and their considerable riches, but it was OK, I was filled with conviction. I felt as if somehow I was doing it on behalf of the grandfather. He was standing up straight now. He looked buoyed. Maybe, I thought, God was using me in the way my grandmother always said he used people—as agents of his will and mercy. Maybe I was an angel, an apparition, someone sent to confirm the truth to the grandfather in his last days, to save him from this terrible place.

Except none of that happened, or I guess I should say it only happened in my mind. I thought about saying those things, but didn’t. I just watched the driver as he cowered, then slunk back to the delivery van, and Phyllis slammed the door. Then there was a quiet moment while we all stood regarding my suitcase. “Jesus Christ,” said Phyllis. “That’s quite a suitcase. I haven’t seen one of those in thirty years. I don’t know how in the world they lost track of that.”

Then everyone dispersed. The news had come down from the Supreme Court, my suitcase had arrived, and there was nothing left to wait for.

I went to the kitchen for some water and pulled open the cabinets, not sure where the cups were. When I found them, and reached to pull down a glass, I saw a glint of something at the back of the cabinet. I had to climb up on the counter to reach it. It turned out to be what I thought—the keys to the old station wagon out back. They were on a metal keychain in the shape of a baseball, with the Minnesota Twins logo scrawled across it. I could do this one thing, at least. I carried the keys down the hall, to Grandpa’s room. The door was open halfway. I knocked on the frame but there wasn’t an answer. Then I stuck my head in and saw that the room was empty. He must have been in the bathroom.

His room was like a child’s, made to look rustic, like a room in a log cabin. There was a large braided rug in the center, a twin-bed frame made out of four posts stained to look like tree bark. The bed was made up with red flannel sheets, and a small crucifix hung above it. Next to the bed was a nightstand with a framed portrait. I didn’t dare touch it but bent down to inspect it. It was a black-and-white portrait of the type women took in the old days. The shot was taken from behind so that you caught the woman, his wife, in profile, looking over her shoulder. She was small, delicate. Her dark hair was pressed into waves, her eyebrow painted into a sweeping arc. She didn’t look like someone who was cut out for farm life. She looked as though she should be feeding birds on a park bench, or playing piano.

I heard a toilet flush and set the keys down on his nightstand and scurried out of the room. In the great room, I took up my suitcase and carried it upstairs to the bedroom, laid it on the floor, knelt down, and opened it. My clothes were in a jumble.

“They really messed up your stuff,” Jack said. He was already in bed, almost asleep. The truth was, I’d packed my clothes that way, just thrown everything in. Now that I knew better, I could see that nothing I’d brought would have been suitable for the club, anyway. The one formal piece of clothing I’d brought was a dress I’d bought for high-school graduation, but it wasn’t the kind of dress an adult could wear to a country club—it was flowered and had smocking at the front. Basically, it was a child’s Easter dress.

I pulled clothes out of the case until I found my grandmother’s prayer book. It was palm-sized, with a black cloth cover. The pages were delicate, and yellowed, and edged in gold. I leafed through them. The prayers were in Latin. I had memorized the first few, though didn’t quite know what they meant.

As I was folding everything and putting it back in the case, I heard the start of an engine—the grandfather cranking the old station wagon to life—then heard the muffler rumbling as he backed out of the driveway. I wondered if by some miracle he’d make it to Minnesota. If some animal instinct would kick in and all his remaining strength would gather together, guide him and keep him awake. He’d drive straight north for a thousand miles, and it would get colder by the hour, easier, more comfortable. He’d drive all night, then all day, until finally he would find himself winding down familiar streets, streets he could drive blindfolded, and he’d make his way to the old farm, and park the car with a view of the old farmhouse and the fields surrounding it, where his wife was buried. He’d turn off the engine, the last thing he would ever do, and he’d watch as snow covered the windshield. His breath would slow, and he’d grow colder and colder until he couldn’t feel anything anymore. But he would know he had made it back to his home, his wife, and he could finally goddamn die in peace.

I fell asleep thinking about this, feeling good about myself for once, imagining the good I had done in the world, if only for one person. But in truth, I found out the next morning, when Jack and I made our way down to the kitchen, the grandfather hadn’t gotten far before he got lost, pulled over at a gas station, and called Cesar to come get him.

“Oh, he doesn’t want any money or help from us,” Phyllis said. “Oh no, he doesn’t need us at all. But he keeps Cesar’s number in his wallet, and guess how many times he calls it? Go on, Mary,” she said. “Guess.”

“I don’t know.”

“What was it last month?” she called to Cesar. He was in the pantry again, apparently.

“Seven,” he said.

The grandfather was sitting at the counter. I sat beside him. We both hung our heads. FOX news was blaring. Reporters were in front of the Vice President’s residence now. There was a crowd out front. Someone held a sign that said “Get Out of Cheney’s House.”

Phyllis was at the stove. She turned one of the burners on with a flick of her wrist. A blue flame ignited underneath the same stock pot that had been there yesterday. With, I realized, the same chicken in it. I stared at the flame for a long time while Phyllis and the grandfather argued, Cesar interjecting now and then—he was making a series of short phone calls and kept stepping in and out of the pantry.

I stared in amazement as, sometime later, Phyllis speared the chicken carcass with a giant fork and pulled it, dripping, from the pan. The skin was white and rubbery-looking—it looked like a fake chicken. Phyllis took a knife to the breast and sliced off a chunk, set it on a plate. Then set the plate in front of the grandfather.

I wasn’t going to stay quiet this time. A man’s life was at stake. I watched him spear a piece of chicken with his fork, raise it to his lips. “Hey!” I cried. “Wait! Don’t eat that! It’s poison!”

For a moment, everyone was silent, staring at me. I didn’t need to, but I pushed my case. “You can’t leave food out for more than three hours or it will, like, kill you!” I looked to Cesar for help—surely, he would back me up on this point, I thought, as a man’s life was at stake—but he just stared right through me.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I asked Jack. All he did was hold up his hands to profess innocence.

“This is serious!” I said.

Then everyone burst out laughing, even the grandfather. “Hey, wait!” Phyllis cried, mocking me.

“Don’t eat that!” the grandfather said. They were on the same side, for once. They were laughing so hard they could barely talk.

“I just boiled it, for Christ’s sake,” said Phyllis. “Didn’t you see me? It’s fine.”

“It’s just that I took this food safety course last year and actually it’s, it’s maybe not fine.”

“Of course, it is,” she said.

“He could get sick,” I said. “He could die.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” said the grandfather. “Haven’t you listened to a goddamn word I’ve said this whole time?”

Then I remembered. All he wanted to do was die.

 

Back in Charlottesville, I let Jack drop me off at the McLains’—I didn’t care anymore what he thought. His face registered a sort of quiet horror when we pulled up to the house, which was, admittedly, a bit of a sad lot. The house was a mint-green Cape Cod, with white metal awnings shading the front windows. The railings bordering its front steps were painted white, but rusted through in patches. The lawn was dead, a pale surrendered yellow. In the driveway, Buddy’s tricycle was collapsed on its side next to Mrs. McLain’s minivan, a Chevy Astro, also rusted in patches, which was parked at an angle suggesting it had been abandoned in distress. The Astro had two George Bush bumper stickers on the back.

Jack still came in for coffee that spring, and I still went back to his apartment with him, but things were different—there was no longer any suggestion of a future between us. At his apartment I talked freely, told him everything about my life, which was embarrassingly small and drab compared with his. I described my hometown, a crumbling heap of abandoned factories, and my small, uneducated, exceedingly Catholic family. There was no point hiding any of this anymore. We were just two people killing time. It didn’t matter.

Jack matched at Galveston, but backed out—decided he was going to work for Mr. Paul. “The starting salary is, like, five times as high,” he said. Plus, the work was more fun. He was going to start out as lobbyist for Mr. Paul’s company. He’d be just hanging out in DC, taking people to dinner and hosting parties. But that was just to start. Eventually, he’d be groomed to replace Mr. Paul as CEO. All that money would be his.

“What are you going to do?” he said one night. “Are you going to stay here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had a job waiting for me back home, but I was considering just staying in town and working full time at the coffee shop. I’d tell my family I was getting a master’s, buy myself a few more years. Maybe something would occur to me during that time: what I was supposed to do, what kind of person I was supposed to be.

But that didn’t happen, because three weeks before finals, my mother called. She had never called me, not once during the whole four years of college, so I knew something was wrong. “Your grandfather is sick,” she said. “You might want to come home.” I told her I’d be home in a few weeks. “You might want to come, well, now,” she said. She explained that he had been diagnosed with cancer a year ago, but they hadn’t told me because they thought he would get better. Esophageal cancer, she said. From all the commercial plumbing he’d done in the fifties, all that exposure to asbestos. He was dying now. He’d be gone in a day or two.

So I packed up the French suitcase again, all the clothes it could fit, and took the train back. And in the first days, it really did seem like he would be gone at any moment. He slept most of the time, and his breathing was labored. Days went by, a week, two weeks, and I began to realize I was going to miss finals. So I called my professors and arranged to mail my papers. Then it occurred to me I might just as well never go back. I didn’t have much at the McLains’, anyway. In my three years living there I had accumulated only a few dozen books and the television and VCR and cartoon video tapes. My bicycle and typewriter. None of it was worth anything. So I called Mrs. McLain and told her I wasn’t coming back, that she could give away my things to the next lodger. She said she understood, that she would always consider me family, would always have a place for me if I wanted to return. The hardest part was, I’d told Buddy I wasn’t leaving for good. I’d promised I’d come back to see him soon. “Tell Buddy to look for a letter in the mail,” I said. I had to hang up because I was about to cry.

My grandfather lived for two more months. At first, he had a bed set up in the living room, where we’d always watched the news, and, in fact, still did. Watching the news, and then Carol Burnett, had always been his favorite part of the day, and we wanted him to have it, still, even though he was asleep most of the time—we hoped it would at least break through to his subconscious. We carried on like this all through the summer, one of us at his bedside at all times, holding his hand. My grandmother lighting candles and saying prayers.

Finally, he moved to the hospital, and a day later he died, and we buried him, and after that, we each hardened into more exaggerated versions of ourselves—my grandmother somehow even more Catholic, my mother even quieter, and I—I was darker and more brooding than usual.

 

In the fall, I started teaching at the girls’ high school, which had been run-down when I attended and was even more so now. The paint was peeling off the walls, and there were water stains on the ceiling of every classroom, some of which looked like saints in their agonies. My students were ninth- and tenth-graders, and didn’t seem to like me, which I suppose wasn’t their fault. I was too soft-spoken and tended to wring my hands while I lectured, and I teared up whenever I talked about noble, doomed characters. I was too tall, too pale. I wore no makeup, and pulled my hair back in a severe bun. Then there was the issue of my clothes. “Why do you dress all in black,” one of the girls said at the end of the first week. The truth was that I had simplified my wardrobe so I didn’t have to think about what to wear in the mornings, but what I said was, “I’m in mourning.” I thought maybe it would win me points, that they would feel sorry for me and start to like me, or at least leave me alone, but it went the other direction: the girls kept after me. “Why do you always do that with your hands when you’re talking?” they asked. “How come you eat lunch at your desk instead of with the other teachers? Why don’t you have a car? Is that your mother that worked in the front office of the grade school? Oh my god.” I figured they hated me because I had been in their place not long ago, and hadn’t managed to get out from the net that ensnared me, was ensnaring them. They were going to do better than I had done, and part of doing better was hating anyone who hadn’t. They were right, I supposed.

But none of that ended up really mattering, because just three weeks into the school year, we watched the world end—the twin towers collapsing, the Pentagon set ablaze—then watched George Bush try to handle it. The whole world was held in thrall, wondering what kinds of things a frat boy would do when someone came into his house and started shit. Then we found out. It was a dark time. Even the high-school girls grew somber, philosophical. “I was planning on going to college,” they often said. “And then getting married and having a family. But, like, what’s the point?” I didn’t know what to tell them.

That spring, not even a year after my grandfather died, my grandmother started showing the first signs of dementia. At first, we thought she was simply deranged by grief. But then she started wandering off, straying from the path she had walked to the grocery store for almost fifty years. Sometimes, even at home, she disappeared for long stretches, and we’d find her sitting on the floor of her closet, or out in my grandfather’s car, in the garage, in the passenger seat, as if she was waiting for him to take her somewhere. We began to realize something was wrong.

A year of this, two. Eventually, my grandmother couldn’t be left alone, so my mother had to leave her job to take care of her, and then we were all living on my income. So I couldn’t leave. A year of this, two…

During her last year, my grandmother started to say, pointing at me, “Your father.” I thought she was confused, thought she was confusing me with my mother, thought when she said “your father” she was referring to her own late husband. Something along the lines of, “Wait till your father gets home.”

For a while, it started and stopped there, just that single phrase. She’d say it to me when I brought her tea, or covered her legs with a blanket, or helped her up the stairs to the bathroom. Then one night, after I had gotten her into her nightgown and was unbraiding her hair, she continued. “Your father was one of the handsomest men I ever saw,” she said. “And so tall.” And I knew she couldn’t have been talking about my grandfather, who had been short and squat, and not particularly handsome. “All the parish loved him,” she said. “He was so young, a breath of fresh air.” She kept talking as I brushed her hair. From there it emerged, in phrases and fragments, that my father had been a priest at St. Mary’s. Not long after his arrival, he and my mother started “carrying on together,” as my grandmother phrased it. When my mother turned out to be pregnant, and was compelled to name the father, a great scandal erupted, though perhaps “great scandal” wasn’t the right phrase, she said, as it was contained to the innermost circle of the diocese—it never got beyond a handful of people. A deal was struck. The priest was relocated. My mother was said to be ill and was allowed to complete her school work at home. After graduation she was given a job. And I had been guaranteed an education.

By the end of her story my grandmother had gotten under the covers and pulled them up to her chin, crossed herself, and started muttering her prayers. That was it. She never spoke of him again.

Of course, I saw my mother in a different light after that. Because she was so quiet, so slow in her movements, because she almost never laughed or displayed anger, she had always struck me as simple. But then I saw her as someone living out the wake of a great love that had gone wrong. All that time she spent dreaming, staring off, she was probably remembering him. Perhaps she had a secret life—maybe they still wrote to each other, saw each other now and then. I didn’t know. I would never know.

Then the end drew near for my grandmother, and we brought the hospital bed into the living room…

A few years later, I married another teacher, moved out. But there were things wrong with each of us—I was too somber and, it turned out, infertile. My husband was, it slowly occurred to me, an alcoholic. We were both disappointed, both felt swindled. We started fighting. Fought all the time. So a few years later we got divorced, and my mother, who by then was back in her old job at the church, invited me to move in with her, back into the old house. So I did and it was, once again, as if I had never left.

One night in bed, scrolling the internet on my phone, I came across an article on the first man ever launched into space, a Soviet named Yuri Gagarin. On his way to board his rocket, he stopped to kiss his comrades and said to them: All my life seems like one beautiful moment. And what popped into my head just then was: All my life seems like one long accident.

It was on my phone, too, late one night, that I saw that diamond ring once again, the giant ring of Jack’s mother’s, for a brief, flashing second. It was not long after the other election, the one that left the world in a state of staggering disbelief. The White House was full of rich people again, people who weren’t nearly so discreet and underhanded as the Bushes had been about the smashing and grabbing they were doing. They were torching everything in plain view, in broad daylight. I saw pictures and video clips of this new administration all day long, whether I wanted to or not—every time I walked past a television, or did anything on the computer, or picked up my phone, there they were. This particular administration liked to throw parties. Parties at which people seemed to be celebrating everything that had just been, or was about to be, burned to the ground, all the sacred things some of us had held dear, all of it turned to ashes.

I saw a video clip of one of these parties, the new President shaking someone’s hand, and behind him, walking past, was Jack. I only saw his face for a second but I recognized instantly the nose, and jawline, the way his head hung down as if apologizing for his height. He was holding hands with a woman, dragging her behind him, it seemed. I didn’t see her face, as it was obscured by a sheet of blond hair, but as she passed, she swept her left hand through her hair, tucking some of it back behind her ear, and I saw the ring, that huge oval diamond surrounded by smaller diamonds. I thought for a moment about what might have happened if I’d played my cards right, as Phyllis had said, what color golf cart I’d be driving, what delicacies I’d be ordering off-menu at the club. I saw myself laughing at James Brown Santa. I’d be laughing because I had so much free time and so few cares, because I wouldn’t be scrambling around every morning to get dressed and packed up and out the door to school, to teach five classes, to girls who mostly didn’t want to learn, plus lunch and study-hall monitoring. I’d be laughing because my calendar was filled up with balls and galas and dinner parties and victory parades and god knows what else. I would know so many people, would have traveled so many places. And the money. I’d be laughing because I had so much money.

All the old questions started swirling within me again, the ones that had bothered me when I was young, questions about the true path, about right and wrong and good and evil. All those unknowable things that kept me up at night worrying, and raging, before I had a job and was too old and tired to worry and rage about those things anymore. In an instant, it all came flooding back, and for the next few hours, I thought and thought about it. I still couldn’t come up with any answers, couldn’t say anything for sure. Except that it looked like I was on the wrong side of things again. Jack and Phyllis and Mr. Paul and their friends had control of everything once more, were doing whatever they wanted, turning the White House into a WWF Smackdown, the tantrums, the threats, the chair-throwing, all of it catered by Hooters. Meanwhile, I was divorced and living with my mother and almost completely broke and the world, too, was broken, or so it seemed from here.

I supposed I was judging again, trying to balance the books. Which wasn’t my job, the priest had said, that poor priest whose day I had ruined, all those years ago. I wasn’t supposed to think about who had what and what they had done to get it. I wasn’t supposed to be keeping track of who had cheated, who had lied, who had gotten away with murder. Who had been punished and who had yet to be punished. It wasn’t my place to know, not in this life.

Well, I thought. That was sort of bullshit.

Or maybe—what did I know?—maybe it wasn’t.

I didn’t exactly say a prayer, as the priest had suggested—I hadn’t done that in a long time. Years and years. But still, I wanted something like that. I suppose you could say I was compelled in that direction. I got up and crossed the hall and rummaged through a box I kept underneath my desk in my office, which was really just a linen closet I had cleaned out. The room was dark but my hand went right to what I was looking for—my old tape recorder, the one I used to use to capture my thoughts as I was falling asleep, back when I lived with the McLains. At one point, when he was playing with it, Buddy had taped over my recording. “Hi, Mary,” he had said, giggled. “Hi, Mary full of grace. The Lord is with thee.” He laughed again.

Buddy was a firefighter now, I had learned from Judy McLain’s most recent Christmas letter. She had enclosed a picture of him in his uniform. He was no longer the chubby kid I had known. Now he had a strong, square jaw, an imposing gaze. I supposed this was the face you had to put on when you were having your picture taken at your first job, one where you were supposed to be brave.

Of course, Buddy didn’t remember me at all, or if he did, it was just as the lady who used to send him Christmas presents in the mail. But I remembered him, all those hours we spent together during the last days of what I now recognized to be my own childhood. I remembered how we laughed watching the coyote, laughed especially at the long whistling sound that accompanied his plunging off a cliff. Then the little poof, the tiny white cloud of dust that rose up to indicate his impact with the ground.

It was so funny, then, because we didn’t know anything yet, didn’t know the game, the real game of cat and mouse, of chasing and falling, was waiting for us. These were my final days of not knowing. Not knowing how the world really worked, not knowing who my father really was, not knowing what death was like, or love, or loss. I wanted to feel that way again. So I sat crouching on the floor of that office, that tiny dark room, listening at first to my voice, which was working out a poem, earnestly trying to set down a line about beauty, about tree branches against the winter sky, and then, abruptly, Buddy’s voice chiming in: Hi, Mary. I played it over and over, listening to those bright, happy voices, the voices of children.