Hold Harmless

The only thing visibly wrong with her was her weight, which was tremendous.

“I see you’re on the hunt,” he said, and waved her torn résumé in the air between them. (While the FedEx clerks were turned, he’d plucked it from recycling: something about the systolic din of printers emboldened him.)

“You see right,” she said. “Guess that means you see I’m disabled too.” Smallest of sneers. The flesh on her legs resembled flowstone he’d once seen in a cave.

“I saw the government subsidizes your wages if that’s what you mean,” he said with a friendly yet professional smile. “I’d love to hear the story.”

In her left hand, a stapler, which she gently squeezed and released. (It was leashed to the table behind her.)

“It’s more of a chain”—she glanced down at his dull loafers and back up at his clean-shaven face—“reaction than a story.”

“Tell you what, how ‘bout I buy you breakfast down at Original Pancake, and we talk about your qualifications.”

“You’re hiring then.”

“Might be.” He reached into his sports coat, which was pilled under the right arm, and withdrew an ivory business card with a brown covered wagon printed on its back, “Delano Morales” and “Land Planning & Development Consultant” printed on the front. A fluorescent bulb dimmed overhead.

“What do you know.” She narrowed her eyes at the foreign-looking name.

“And what might I call you?”

“Well, I’d have thunk you already knew that, Mr. Moraleez.” She waited for a response that didn’t come. Then: “Alma here.”

When he took her hand to shake it, it was so damp and cool, he nearly shuddered. His father, a cruel drunk who’d disowned him over a matter of fifty dollars, would have said a damp palm was a sign of conniving, but Delano was above such crude and backward suspicions. “Look out for the least of these,” he said to himself as he exited the FedEx.

The Pancake House was teeming with after-churchers: blue-hairs, Delano’s bread and butter, squinted at menus they’d memorized years ago; children, all wiggles and yawns, slid from their seats and crouched beneath tables, threatening sleep; and an army of middle-aged businessmen clad in putty-colored suits punctuated the steady hum of conversation with crashes of laughter. The waitresses were pinafored and adorned in little white caps that called to mind nurses from bygone wars; they bounced around the room, remembering to smile.

The only reason Alma and Delano’d even gotten a seat was because he was thick as thieves with the hostesses. He’d predicted correctly they’d be allowed to cut the line, and he’d wanted Alma to see it, was pleased she had.

“So what’s your situation, if you don’t mind my asking?” He turned his coffee cup upright and lifted his hand in the air, hoping a waitress might see.

Alma fixed him with her hazel eyes. Anger and exhaustion: they’d etched their twin signatures into her forehead.

“I’ve a boy enrolled in South. Ronnie. He’s a sophomore. Good student too—he’s got a A in algebra right now.”

“You must be proud.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Now, is ‘Ronnie’ short for Ronald?”

“It is, but he doesn’t like to be called by his full name. Reminds him of his daddy, and they don’t get on too good.”

“So his father’s out of the picture then?”

“Out of my picture.”

“I take your meaning.”

“So I’m just trying to support me and him, but the job market’s not so hot, as you surely noticed, being the observant sort you are.”

“It hasn’t escaped me, no.” He wondered if she’d been thinking of Ronald when she trashed those perfectly usable résumés. “I’m sorry to hear about the father. Real shame. Boy needs a solid father figure in his life.”

“Well, Ronnie been without one of those so long now, I guess he’s pretty used to it.” She snorted a little, as if she were amused or annoyed. Delano couldn’t tell.

A waitress appeared at the table and drew a green Guest Check from her apron.

“Apologies for the wait! What can I get you for?” she asked, beaming, a smudge of red on her front teeth.

“Dutch Baby,” Alma said. “And a side of bacon.”

“Perfect,” said the waitress. But she could see these were the sort who might take a wait time personal. “Just to warn you, Dutch Babies are a half-hour. Says so on the menu.”

“We got time,” Delano answered. “Northwest griddle for yours truly. And what’s this I see about seasonal fruit?”

“Peaches,” the woman said brightly. “From down Turner. Family operation. Served up with cream.” And then added, “My little one’s favorite.” (Though the child had just turned twelve, tips had a way of going higher when she said “little one.”)

“An order for the table.” He snapped his menu shut with definitude and handed it to the waitress. Then smiled to soften the gesture. He didn’t know why he’d snapped it like that, only that it made him feel calm after he’d done it.

The waitress bounced off toward the kitchen.

“So, what’s this with you leaving your receptionist job?”

“Didn’t leave. I was ‘let go.’ You know what ‘let go’ means, don’t you?”

Delano loosed something between a chuckle and a hiss. “Oh, I’ve been ‘let go’ myself on occasion, Alma. Lord knows the best of us have.”

She looked at his hands, which were folded in front of him. What looked to be a wedding band, scuffed, almost flat on one side, strangled his left pinky.

“Sometimes I think the good Lord isn’t so good, that he’s give up on me and Ronnie,” she said. She forced the corners of her mouth down into a jagged frown, and Delano thought, in that moment, she resembled the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. It was a terrible thought. He immediately asked forgiveness for it in the sanctum of his mind. Then he reached out across the table and placed a hand on Alma’s forearm, which was thick and soft as a loaf of bread.

“Alma, no one’s given up on you, least of all Him. In fact, I think He knows we can help each other out.”

“Hello. Delano Mo-ral-ace and Associates.” For the first few weeks, Delano had Alma answering the phones just so and taking down appointments; running copies and facsimiles; ordering deeds from First Title, topo maps from the county assessor’s; and occasionally picking up his dry cleaning or a fresh quart of milk. By week six, September nearly behind them, he felt she was ready to take on the books. After all, she’d fallen into her tasks with ease, and hadn’t she mentioned she could balance books?

“It’d be no trouble,” she said, “no trouble at all.” So he’d hauled a cardboard box down from the master bedroom to the garage, where his office was located, and began to explain his situation.

“We’re a touch behind,” he said, leaning on his draft table. “All this here, it has to be reconciled.”

“I got you.” Alma was sitting at his desk, which was littered with blank Rolodex cards, the tax box now parked atop them like an oversized paperweight. Outside, the wind was up. A branch from the giant pine tree shading the house broke free and struck the roof.

“Do you know how to do that? How to reconcile expenses?”

Alma glanced up at the ceiling, as if she could see straight through it. “I’d be lying if I said I don’t.” And she smiled in a manner—all pinch and squint, no flash of tooth—that struck Delano as quaint. Like her face had been lifted from some old Dutch painting, full of thick peasant women pinning up laundry. Heads decked out in origami angels. Eyes like olive pits pressed into still-rising dough.

“The IRS miscalculated some things. So, there’s an audit for the prior tax year as well. Every line needs accounting for. Every in. Every out. And everything that can be is written off—even if it’s a paperclip. You understand?” He rapped his knuckles against the draft table and its built-in light box popped on, fell dead again.

“I understand. People tend to want what they don’t have coming to them.” She folded her swollen hands in her lap. “Expecially government folks.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, shaking his head. His hair needed cutting: the thick black heft of it no longer lay tranquil against his skull, but had grown unruly, winding its tendrils into the space around it. “I’m trying to see if we can get a soil reclass on Mandell’s, maybe a property line adjustment too. If we can make that subdivision a go, you’re looking at a nice fat raise.”

“No worries, Mr. Moral-lace. I’ll get her done.”

“You can ask me questions if you need, of course.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “Just not today.”

A small branch clattered down the face of the house and could be glimpsed, for just a moment, dangling over the garage window, before it hit the ground.

One of these years, that tree could topple—and take the whole house with it. But Delano’s wife had loved the tree, had even named it something—Nash, wasn’t it?

“No questions,” Alma said, and the chair groaned as she shifted her weight. “No questions here.”

Alma, as it turned out, was a natural accountant, a regular expert in everything from write-offs to withholdings. Delano even remarked in passing, to his own surprise, that she was saving him. Saving him money, he corrected. But Alma caught his meaning. And she smiled.

Even her boy, Ronnie, brought something to the table. Clean-cut and clean-limbed as they came, he’d fallen into the habit of walking straight to Delano’s after school, where he’d pour himself a glass of milk and sit at the counter. (There he’d stoop over his homework for hours on end, humming almost inaudibly, his dark blond bangs hanging in his eyes as he mastered properties associative and distributive, found square roots of imaginary numbers, and compared fission and fusion reactions.) He’d also collate copies, if asked. Or do a spot of yard work while his mama, he called her “Mama,” wrapped up her day.

Delano noted the lackluster way in which the boy dragged the rake over the grass today, the sluggishness with which he clipped the hedges, closing the blades, almost with tenderness, around the Camellia’s thin waxy branches. It reminded Delano of a wind-up monkey he’d treasured as a boy: the felt-covered hands moving so gently toward each other that their cymbals made no noise when they touched.

“Here,” he said, taking the shears from the boy. “Let me show you how she’s done.” And he snapped the branches with such efficiency and brio that the bush was all but finished in a matter of seconds.

Ronnie smiled sheepishly and looked at the ground. “That’s real fast,” he said. “I was worried I’d make it lopsided.” He dragged a sneakered toe over the clippings.

It was like he’d never set foot in a garden before: another planet to him—Delano’s peaceful, verdant lot.

“Enough with the toil though.” Delano clapped his free hand on the boy’s scrawny shoulder and gave it a hearty pinch. “Let’s you and me take a walk. Go get us something sweet. Maybe bring something back for your mama. That sound nice?”

The boy looked up at Delano’s face and smiled. It was a friendly face—lively brown eyes with little purses of flesh under them, two feral eyebrows growing toward each other, the broad flat nose of a man about to be old.

“Yeah,” Ronnie said. “But what about the leaves? They’re not in bags yet.”

“Do they look like they’re going anywhere to you?”

Ronnie surprised Delano, matching his stride, even as Delano charged along his self-proclaimed shortcut, which wove this way and that through the abandoned Christmas tree lot bordering his property. (He prided himself on knowing unusual routes and hidden paths. An art he’d mastered as a boy, thanks in no small part to his father’s temper.)

“Christmas all year round here,” Delano said. Waved a hand at the huge soldierly trees crowded into perfect lines, their bottom branches browned with lack of light.

The boy held his thin, acne-pocked face angled up at the high tops of the trees. He looked nothing like his mother. Had none of her sullen enormity. None of her scald.

“Makes you wish you were a bird, doesn’t it?” Delano remarked. “So you could perch right up there at the top.”

“I’m no good with heights,” the boy replied.

“Aren’t you a touch young to know what you’re good or bad with, son?”

“I guess. Sometimes I don’t feel so young though.”

“That’s how it goes. You don’t know what youth feels like till you’re on the other side of it. Don’t be in a hurry to get there, I say.”

“How far we going?” asked the boy.

“Tired already?”

“No. I just wondered if I ought have dressed different. Looks like we might get dumped on.”

“No. No. Trust me. The clouds will hold a little longer yet.” His hand clapped again the boy’s bent back. “So what do you make of all this? They don’t have anything like this over in your neighborhood, I bet.”

“It’s like a storybook.” The boy made a face between a smile and a grimace. “Maybe a little spooky, too.”

“Now isn’t that a fact.” Delano, lowering his voice to a more serious pitch: “Probably these poor things need thinning. They’re on the verge of choking each other. God forbid if someone dropped a match.” He reached out and slapped at one of the tree branches. A few needles, close to the trunk, shook loose and whirled to the ground.

“But they look so green and healthy. Like they could live forever.”

They were having to lift their feet higher now, to stomp down the damp knee-high grass. From a distance, they might have looked like they were marching.

“For now. I worry when old man Corliss croaks, though, his kids’ll sell the place off to the highest bidder. Vultures, the lot. And all these trees? Goners. No developer’s gonna want them.”

“Coreless?”

“Liss, with an ‘i.’”

“Oh. That’s too bad.”

“That’s the world. Can’t judge. I’m in development myself. Which means your mama is too. And you, by extension. Anyway, man let it all go to hell in a handbasket.” Not unlike Ronald’s father, Del mused, when he’d written off his wife and only son. Gone the path of criminality.

“Really? I thought you made maps.”

“What’s that mother of yours been telling you?” Delano tousled the boy’s hair, in the off-handed way he’d seen TV dads do. The boy’s crown felt clean under his fingers. “No. That’s just a little piece of it. Though I do like that part. Mostly, I help people obtain permits so they can use their properties as they see fit.”

“That’s pretty dope, I guess.”

Delano laughed. “State might not agree. One of their men recently called me a ‘hired gun.’”

“Very dope then.” Ronnie smiled and combed his fingers through his hair, re-aligning his part to the center of his head. “Maybe you could teach me how to draw maps sometime. I’d be good at the scaling part.”

“I don’t doubt that you would, Ronald.” Delano glanced at the boy. “I don’t doubt you would.”

Ronnie slowed his stride and dropped behind Delano as they neared the crest of the hill. “What would you do, Mr. Morales?” he called into the raw autumn air. “If all these acres were yours?”

“Aches already, is it? We can slow down.”

“Acres,” the boy called out, as he jogged to catch up. “What would you do if they were all yours, to do with as you saw fit?”

“Me?” Delano stopped at the crest and turned around, looking first at the boy, who gazed back at him expectantly. Then at the arrow-straight rows of firs. “Well, I suppose the thought has crossed my mind.”

He could see himself and Ronald here, eating sandwiches on a square of red blanket. In the summer, they’d hold colanders high in the air and litter the ground with a hundred tiny crescents of waning light. He’d have bought them those paper glasses, the kind that let you look right at the sun.

“Oh, I guess I’d turn it into a park for the neighborhood,” Delano said, looking at the boy and registering a swell of affection. He doubted Alma even knew they lay in the path of totality here, doubted she kept tabs on the sky like he did. “So the kids’d have somewhere to run around and play hide-and-seek, watch fireworks in the summer.”

Ronnie plucked a piece of the high grass and began chewing on the end of it.

“You know, next summer, you and me, we should come out, right where we’re standing, and watch the solar eclipse. It might just be the best spot. Two whole minutes, they say. It’ll be historic, for once. Just to watch the sky.”

“You think it’ll still be here then?” the boy asked, a note of fear in his voice.

“We’ll just have to pray for the old man,” said Delano. “That he lives to see it, so we can too.”

When they got back with their box of champagne cake, Alma asked, “What we celebrating?” A filthy kitchen rag dangled from her rubicund fist.

“Life,” said Delano, his hand fastened on the boy’s shoulder.

“I thought you was gonna say me getting expenses caught up through August.” She patted one of the stove’s dark coils.

“That too, that too,” said Delano excitedly.

“Got the kitchen all spick-and-span. Wasn’t sure you noticed.”

“Beautiful! A good day indeed.” He handed Ronnie a large knife and the boy took it cautiously.

“Not so good for us, I gots to say.” She caught Ronnie’s eye, as he pressed the knife down into the cake, dividing its grinning jack-o’-lantern in two. He licked the rogue orange frosting from his thumb, then repositioned the knife for the next cut.

“Ronnie here’s been down since we got served. Landlord’s kicking us out. Just got the ’viction papers this morning.”

Ronnie dropped his eyes to the green linoleum, fresh-dusted in cake crumbs.

“You aren’t serious,” Delano said, his face falling.

“Wish I wasn’t. But it’s a little early for April Fool’s. Afraid it might mean poor Ronnie here has to move out Aumsville with his daddy, is the worst part.”

“Here,” Ronnie said, handing Delano a paper plate that sagged beneath its serving.

“How much time we talking?” Delano asked. “Before you have to be out?” He pictured the boy’s father, described to him by Alma as a rangy unemployed ne’er-do-well, young-ish but somehow rickety, cooped up in a half-collapsed single-wide with only cheap booze and the throb of country radio to keep him running. Just the kind of laze-about pervert Delano’s own father would have kept around. Would have let chase his kids up trees and paw at their ankles like a mad dog. No. No place for Ronald. No place at all.

“They been pestering me a bit here. And I been trying to pertect you, not bother you about home matters and what-all.” She folded the filthy rag and draped it over the oven door’s handle. “Figured you got plenty on your plate what with them taxes.” Then wiped her hands on her slacks.

“Here,” Ronnie said. The piece he’d cut for his mother was modest: a single black triangle of frosted eye stared up at her.

Delano considered the audit. Hadn’t Alma greatly helped him already, talking the tax agent down, buying Delano more time? For all he knew, they might’ve seized the house by now if not for her. Then was the matter of Mandell’s property approval. Overhead was unusually high these days, though. He’d have to get the expenses down before he made good on the raise. Still, hadn’t she paid for herself already? Especially when you factored in the disability subsidy? And wasn’t the boy of value too? Perhaps the closest thing he’d ever had to an heir? “Out with it,” Delano said at last. “What do you need? A loan?”

“We hadn’t thunk that far yet, to tell the truth.” Alma shot a look at Ronnie.

“We were thinking,” Ronnie said, a thin, nervous strain in his voice. “We were thinking maybe we could stay with you—for just a couple weeks?”

“Untils we get our feet on the ground. Get us a new place,” Alma quickly followed.

Delano stared first at Alma’s hands, dimpled at each knuckle, clutching the paper plate. Then at her legs, so like tree trunks. He furrowed his brow. Those slacks were from Kohl’s. He knew because he’d bought them for her two weeks prior. Clerks had scattered, at his word, to round up proper workwear in her size (more X’s required than he could now recall). The phrases “silk purse” and “sow’s ear” had popped into his mind, as she’d stepped from the changing room and twirled according to his gestures. But he’d promptly banished the thought. Appareled in a purple dress suit that made her look like a tumescent eggplant, she’d stared at herself in three mirrors at once when she’d asked him, “You really figure I can pull this number off?”

“’Course you can!” he announced. “You can stay a whole month if you need.”

“It’s too much,” Ronnie said, staring down into the pumpkin’s bisected grin. “You don’t have to do that.”

The boy had tears in his eyes. Perhaps because he finally understood what it could mean to have a real man in his life. Someone there to catch him when the chips were down. “Of course I do,” Delano said. “Now, not another word! That cake isn’t gonna eat itself.”

The U-Haul was larger than Delano had expected. On the side was painted a cluster of giant mushrooms, their roots pale and jagged as lightning. He’d considered asking them to re-park, given it was blocking the drive, but then thought better of it. (Patience. After all, how much more could be in there? They’d already extracted her huge wingback couch, saggy and infused with a strange animal-ish smell, and dropped it out back on the deck. “No room inside,” he’d had to say, as if it weren’t obvious he already had a far nicer couch of his own.)

“MICHIGAN” was legible, suspended above the mushrooms. But Delano had to leave his porch and stand within an arm’s length of the truck before the rest came into focus: 37-ACRE-HUMUNGOUS-FUNGUS!

“Gross, huh?”

Delano flinched.

“You startled me there, kiddo.”

Ronnie’s head seemed to float in mid-air, stuck out as it was from the back of the truck.

“Sorry. Just trying to unload.”

“And here I should be pitching in. Apologies. Your mama and I had some accounting matters to tie up. She sure knows how to crunch those numbers.”

“I get my math head from her.” The boy playfully knocked a fist against his own skull.

“Better math than meth, right?” A brittle shrug. Del should not have said it. That word.

“Copy that,” said Ronnie with a smile.

“But seriously, am I allowed to say I’m proud of you, bud? Heard you aced that last exam.”

“Thank you, sir. Mostly it was just isolating absolute values, though. And proving you remember to solve inside the parentheses first. Stuff we all already know.”

“Well, your mama told me it was a tough one, and she’d know. Balancing my books can’t be any walk in the park.” He emitted a quick obligatory laugh.

“My pops is okay at math too, actually. He just never went so far as Mama with it. She got her associate’s, you know.” He said this proudly, and Delano worried. Without proper guidance, community college was as far as the boy would go too.

“Well, clearly you get all the good and none of the bad, whichever blood it comes from.” Delano smiled, generously.

“Mama says this shroom might just be the biggest thing alive on the whole face of the Earth.” Ronnie reached around and slapped the side of the truck. “Depending how you define alive, right?”

“You might not want to say shroom, son. It implies hallucination.” Delano sometimes found drug paraphernalia out back in the tree lot: carved-up pop cans and bits of tin foil wrapped around busted light bulbs. Items he’d taken it upon himself to throw away. Items he’d rather Ronnie not see.

“Mushroom!” Ronnie corrected.

“Here, let me get that last one for ya.”

“Watch out, Mr. Morales. She weighs more than she looks.”

The box was labeled “TEXTBOOKS-R.” And indeed, Delano found it burdensome as he hefted it from the back of the truck onto his shoulder.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, Ronald.” He grunted, adjusting the load. “What is your mother’s ailment? I know she gets checks and all that, from the state, but what seems to be her trouble? She looks alright to me.” He had tried to broach the subject with Alma herself, but she guarded her defect as though it were sacred. “Freak thing,” was all she’d say—and drop it.

“Mama? Oh, she never told you ’bout her work accident?” The boy, hugging what looked to be a trash bag full of tennis balls, lifted up a boot-clad foot and finagled the door lever. “You first, sir.”

“Thank you, Ronald. Can’t say she related that particular event.” Delano made a show of wiping his feet before stepping onto the foyer’s polished, hardwood floor.

Ronnie followed suit, dragging his feet haphazardly over the bristly “welcome” mat.

“Well, she got hurt real bad. Her back. An industrial refrigerator thing tipped over and she tried to catch it is what happened, and it half crushed her to death.”

“My God.” Delano began to scale the stairs.

“Yeah, it was a whole thing. And they were pretty mean to her about it too. The employer and all.”

“She have to go through workers’ comp?”

“Wish I could say.” The boy shrugged. But he had the look of one withholding something. And as Delano considered how to get Ronald to open up, he took a false step. The box crashed down and books flew, bounced down steps, and a couple cracked their spines against the floor.

“Whoa there!” Ronnie rushed to Delano’s side, grabbing him under the arms to steady him, lest he go the way of the books.

“Goodness.” Delano grabbed the banister and steadied himself. “Wasn’t expecting that. Sorry, son. Guess my eyes were bigger than my belly.”

“It’s alright. They’re all secondhand anyways.” The boy smiled as he knelt to gather the books. “It’s my own fault for packing it too heavy.”

“No, no.” Delano fanned the air dismissively. Drew in a deep breath. “How you liking those new kicks, huh?”

“Oh, they’re great, sir. You’re too kind. Really.”

“Not at all. You might as well be kin at this point. Anyway, you’ll need the tread on those when we tackle that roof come spring. You still up for helping me clear the gutters? Trees have been dropping branches like there’s no tomorrow.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Morales. Here, you can carry this instead.” He handed Delano the trash bag.

Ronnie’s temporary room was modest enough, but boasted a nice window with a view out over the tree lot. It had just enough space for a double bed. And Delano had re-painted the walls moss green in anticipation of the boy’s arrival. (Before, they’d been the dim yellow of an oak leaf in fall, a shade his wife had picked out years ago.)

“What do you think? A cave of your own.” Perhaps he would even set the boy up with a college fund before the year was out. Provided business was good. Delano let the trash bag fall on the bed.

“Careful,” cried Ronnie, dropping to his knees, inspecting the contents of the bag.

“What the heck’s in there anyway? Doesn’t weigh a thing.”

“It’s my solar system! I made it out of papier-mâché.” He’d never seen Ronnie so excited about anything. In fact, he hadn’t been aware the boy was capable of such displays of feeling. “But here, I’ll show you. It’s got a special secret.”

“Impressive,” Delano said, trying to match the boy’s verve. “Shall I get us some tape?” As soon as he’d said it, he regretted it though, realizing any tape strong enough to hold up these orbs, however light, would also be strong enough to peel the paint.

“Yes. Yes, please.”

Still. The boy’s excitement was contagious.

Delano returned with the tape and a footstool, and they set to work.

“That’s Mars. He goes over here.” The boy pointed to a space between the light fixture and the window.

“Here?”

“Over a little. Yeah. Yeah, there is good. Right there.”

“Ronald, I want you to know, mi casa es tu casa. You understand? I want you to make yourself right at home while you’re here. If you’re hungry in the middle of the night and want a snack, by God, go down and fix yourself something. No scrimping in this household.” His own father had once torn him from bed in the middle of the night and struck him savagely with a belt, all for eating a saltine without permission. “I only have one rule.”

“What’s that?” Ronnie asked. He was standing on tiptoe on the double bed, securing in place what looked to be Jupiter. Yes, you could tell by its size—and its storm-shaped spot.

“No lying. Under this roof, we go in for the truth.”

“Yes, Mr. Morales. That’s the way to be.”

“And if you ever want to ask me anything, my life’s an open book. No secrets here.”

“Good to know.” The boy jumped to the floor. He seemed to be admiring his own handiwork: the planets swung in their small, singular orbits, still animated by his having touched them.

“Anything you’d like to ask me? I mean anything at all.”

“You see Mercury in there? Looks like it’s missing. Maybe it fell in with my mom’s stuff.”

“You never know. Maybe you should ask.” Was this Ronnie in the throes of inspiration? Or was he just, after all, a touch self-absorbed? Would have got that from his father, no doubt. But Delano had to remind himself: Ronnie just wasn’t used to having a role model on hand. Wasn’t used to having anyone to look up to.

“Mama thinks I’m too old to keep it. My solar system.”

“No disrespect intended, but that’s baloney. You’re never too old to enjoy a hobby. My own father, he’s in a nursing home now, God help him. Hardly knows his own name. But you know what? He still has a steady hand for painting model airplanes, the kind he used to drop depth charges out of during the war.” Delano had, as a boy, sometimes lay in his bed after a hiding (“I’ll give you a hiding,” the father would say, “I’ll give you a hiding you’ll not soon forget”) and imagined himself among those German men—burning, suffocating in their benthic capsule, fastened to the bottom of the sea. All deserving of it. All fallen at his father’s drafted, distant, still-hovering hand.

The boy had turned the trash bag upside down and was shaking it. But all that fell out were some colorful flakes of paper the planets had, in their brief transit, shed.

Ronnie plopped to the floor and was sitting cross-legged, gazing up at the ceiling and its bright array of lopsided orbs. Delano eased himself to the floor beside him.

“I think I thought up a question for you, if it’s not overly personal. I don’t want to be rude or nothing.”

“I’m the one who said open book, aren’t I?”

“Well, Mama says you were married back when. She figures it by the pictures you got hanging.”

“I was.” A sharp inhale. “Twenty-six years. We met in college.”

“So where’d she go off to?”

“My wife? God. Well, there’s no use beating around the bush, Ronald. She’s no longer with us.”

Ronnie tore his gaze from the model system and fixed it on Delano now. “Mr. Morales, I’m very sorry to hear it. I didn’t mean to bring a bad thing up. I really didn’t mean—”

“Not at all. I vowed to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. And death did us part.” He could feel a strain in his back, a certain ache stepping up his spine one vertebra at a time. Perhaps he should not have picked that box up after all. “But I’m still here. Having and holding.”

“Wayne never married my mama. I don’t think he much goes in for vows or whatever.”

“Well, don’t ever think less of yourself for that, son. Your daddy’s choices have got nothing to do with yours. You’ve your own course to chart. And don’t you forget it. You’ll travel the whole wide world if you want to. You’ll go to college and get a master’s and study the weather on Mars if you so desire.”

“The weather on Mars. That’d be wild. You’d have to haul your own oxygen with you.”

“My wife and I went to Rome for our twenty-fifth, our silver. That was wild enough for me, I tell you. We went inside more churches than you’d even believe.” He wondered if Ronald had ever set foot in a church—or if he’d like to. If he’d ever stood in the light of stained glass or smelled frankincense or felt a chorused hymn swirl through his head. Perhaps he would invite the boy come Advent. Alma too, of course.

“Really? What was in them you went so far to see?”

“Art. Sculptures. Paintings. Ceilings even. She loved a good ceiling. It’s a funny thing, in the smaller churches, you’d have to put coins into these machines that shed false daylight on the works.”

“False daylight,” the boy murmured.

“Of art, that is. Most of the time all those crucifixions and dormitions and conversions and resurrections. They just sit there in the dark. Waiting for the next coin to fall.”

“The only conversions I know are in math.” The boy laughed a little, then stopped himself. “How far does one coin get you anyways?”

“Oh, a minute. Maybe two?”

“People in Rome must walk around with heavy pockets.”

“Something like.”

“I mean, imagine if the sun only came up when you paid it to!”

“Yes. Imagine that.” But all Delano was imagining just then was his wife’s kindly face, its repertoire of winsome expressions that, once sharp and clear in his mind’s eye, had begun to acquire a devastating vagueness, like a thing left out too long in the sun.

“Here.” The boy stood up and darted past Delano. A click and the room fell semi-dark.

“They should be brighter,” Ronnie said. “Maybe they were in the bag too long. The paint, it has to absorb some light before it works, is the thing.”

Delano smiled at this. “Remember what I said earlier, Ronald. Alaska, the Panama Canal, you name it. You can go wherever you want.”

A great clamor rose through the floor, and it took the two a moment to register these were not cymbals clashing, but kitchen noises. Pots and pans crashing into place. Alma putting dinner on. Or maybe just unpacking.

“I don’t know,” said the boy. He was looking out the window now, into the neighbor’s twilit tree lot. “Half of me is him. The other half’s her.”

“Nonsense.”

“Was it slow?”

“What?”

“Your wife?”

“Oh. No. They say it was fast. A collision out on River Road South. One minute she’s here, the next—” He threw his hands in the air as if tossing seeds.

“Oh, I meant getting to know her. But fast is better, right? I mean, when it comes to going. If it’s inevitable or whatever.”

The planets glowed murkily above them, strange greenish-yellow blobs suspended in the not-yet-night.

“They say she didn’t suffer too much. But I don’t really know how those things get determined.”

“Trouble’s been calling my name,” Alma announced over breakfast. Which was bacon and eggs. Delano found himself annoyed with Alma’s cooking, and the excessive grocery bills of late. He’d thought they would be out by December 21st. (He’d thrown the date out there numerous times—“Your four-month work anniversary,” he’d kindly reminded her.) But the day just floated by like any other, somehow unnoticed and un-acted upon. And now, due to her atrocious cooking, his favorite button-up was leaving him feeling pinched this morning.

“And why is that?” he asked dully, examining the adipose mass before him. He could not bring himself, despite good manners, to take one bite.

“Ronnie’s father up and violated parole.”

Ronnie, who was thumbing through the newspaper, had stopped to linger over an expired sales insert, which featured a beaming family in matching snowman pajamas.

“Oh?” Delano perked up at this news. “What did he do to land himself on parole?”

“I never tolt you?” She picked up a bacon slice with her bare hands and folded it into her mouth, continuing, as she chewed, “Kidnapping. Bullshit, really. That’s Oregon laws for you though. You can help someone off themselves and that’s a-okay, so long as you go by Doctor. But if you so much as move somebody one place to another—”

“I don’t understand, Alma. He kidnapped Ronald?”

The boy glanced up at his mother, then quickly glued his eyes back to the current page, which had changed to a series of empty cells, some black, some white, some numbered.

“Oh, no. He didn’t kidnap no one. Just drove his dealer somewheres and the dealer said it was against his will. So that’s kidnapping. In our state anyways. Like I said, some grade-A shitola. Not that he doesn’t deserve bad things.”

“Lord,” Delano said, nudging his now cold bacon with his fork. “So what does that mean for you and Ronnie?”

“Five-letter word for the saboteur’s first shoe,” Ronnie said quietly, staring at the empty patchwork of cells.

“Oh, nothing much. Which is about what he was contributing anyways, if you get my drift.” She rubbed her shiny fingers together in that timeless gesture of the beggar.

“Hmmm.” Delano refrained from commenting further. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know how deep her pit of need truly ran. Had he not provided them with a roof, a nice one, over their heads? Food? Work—a vocation even? A chance to use her degree and keep his books? A chance to start over?

He couldn’t help feeling that her negativity was a form of ingratitude. And she did not keep house so well either. She did his laundry and even folded his underwear and put it away, which he had not asked her to do, and which had initially made him feel awkward, even ashamed. And she did not do things he did ask her to do, like wash the linens and separate compost from recycling. His wife, an excellent and healthful cook, had always done the linens once a week. And she’d never toss a glass jar in the trash. She’d keep it for preserving, which she undertook each spring and fall—peaches, pickles, and other bright durable foods. “Would you mind throwing the tablecloth in the wash today?” he asked.

“Looks clean enough to me,” Alma said.

“Saba-tu-err,” Ronnie sounded out.

Moreover, when he on occasion helped Ronald with his English or social studies homework, Alma would burst into the room and accuse him of distracting the boy.

He would have to find a way to talk with her soon, preferably when Ronnie was at school, about finding a new situation. Housing-wise, that was. He still needed her for the books. The errands. Certain other routine things. Answering phones, screening debt collectors. And he wanted the boy to feel welcome absolutely any time, knew this balance was sensitive. Still, he couldn’t have Alma continuing on as she was, hefting herself about as if she owned the place. Since they’d moved in, the stairs had begun to groan whenever you climbed them. Doors had started sticking. And the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, the one she used most, had become nearly unusable, sunken as it was into the floor now, with a dark puffy mold scaling its base. He would have cleaned it himself, but on point of principle, he felt she should take care of it. Since she was the one responsible for the mess to begin with.

“You gonna eat those or not?” She nodded to his plate.

Not to mention the roof had started to leak, which, though not her fault, coincided with her arrival in a manner that made the two seem connected. And now, whenever it rained too long or too hard, he’d fall asleep to the unnerving tune of raindrops striking—and slowly filling—the steel bowl in which his wife had once mixed bread.

“No. I’m on a diet.” This last part he said in a high tone, and watched her, to see if it soaked in.

“I don’t think I like crosswords so much,” Ronnie announced, and excused himself from the table.

And as the whining stairs announced the boy’s ascent to his room, Alma reached over and grabbed Del’s bacon, dripping a bit of grease onto the tablecloth as she conveyed the meaty ribbons toward her mouth.

“Waste not, want not, as you always say.”

All in all, it would not have been a bad year, Delano mused, though he could have done without the dog.

The creature, a malodorous “rescue” Alma had dubbed Dill, rested its drooling maw on Delano’s knee even now, but he didn’t have the heart to move it. They had the ball drop going on the TV. There it glowed and shimmered in all its geodesic glory above Times Square, though perhaps not so much glory after all, nearly eclipsed as it was by the blinding mosaic of billboards flanking the street, hemorrhaging light over a hundred thousand upturned faces. (Then again, it was probably more than that.)

Alma had made onion dip from dry mix, and a bowl full of Lay’s was nestled on the couch between them, a Budweiser wedged slyly between her thighs. Ronnie lay sprawled on the floor, a textbook winged open at his elbow. On the mantle guttered a purple candle that failed to make the room smell good.

“They pile you kids with too much homework today,” Delano declared. “You deserve to enjoy your holidays. Take it easy once in a while. You’d think they were training you all to be slaves or corporate stooges.”

“They are,” said Alma. “Only they’re not good enough at it.”

Ronnie loosed a playful moan and rolled onto his back. “I’m so ready for 2016 to be over.”

“You’re too young to be in a hurry, kiddo. What was so bad about this year anyway? I’d say we all have a lot to be grateful for.”

“For me?” Alma said, her broad tired face washed in the last blue light of the broadcast year. “The A-U-D-I-T. Didn’t know a person could get so creative with addiction and subtraction.” She dipped a Lay’s, popped it in her mouth, and shook her head.

“Addition,” Delano said. “And not creative. Just distracted.” He’d gotten up to blow out the candle, to indicate he’d be heading up to bed just as soon as the ball performed its duty. It was already sliding down its silvery pole toward the captivated earth.

“You say incest. I say Sweet Home.” And Alma laughed heartily at her joke.

“You can say it, Alma. On account of you were born there.” Delano had never meant to burn the candle. It had been his wife’s and was shaped like an angel knelt in prayer. But the animal odor had made him desperate. And now here it was, just a pool of wax between two drooping violet wings. The coin-like base of the wick winked up at him, its flaring speck of orange falling dim, as its floral smoke curled into his nostrils, stung his eyes.

“Ah, it’s not so bad,” Ronnie said. “They got a nice stretch of river going for them.” The boy splayed his limbs out over the carpet as if he were trying to leave a star-shaped hollow in fresh-fallen snow. Delano couldn’t help but notice how dirty the beige carpet had recently grown. He’d politely asked them to remove their shoes but eventually gave up. And now with the dog. “Therapy Animal,” she’d said. And he’d told her she’d have to find a new living situation. “Discrimination,” she’d said. “Protected status.”

“Remember?” Ronnie said. “That time we inner-tubed down the Santiam, we floated right through Sweet Home.”

No, Delano was not fond of the dog. (“A retriever,” the pound had said of its muddled breeding, “a birthmark” of the sinister blotch on its left ear.) It had lost bladder and bowel control in the house more than once. Not to mention, it dragged a poor little songbird in and got blood all over—the carpet, the couch, the baseboard moldings. A cedar waxwing, no less. His wife had fancied the full-throated trill of their call. And who wouldn’t?

“Not me. That was you’s and your daddy’s thing. Water’s no friend of mine.”

As the ball touched down and the crowd on the screen rejoiced in mute splendor and the Morales household’s humble window on the metropolis filled up with a rainbow of confetti, the dog lifted its head. The distant call of car horns. And Dill began growling a low, almost indiscernible note that trembled along a string of drool lengthening from his jowl.

“Del, I’ll be needing the day off,” Alma declared, that morning’s Statesman scrolled tight in her fist. He’d been on his way out the back door for his morning “weight-loss routine,” which entailed a vigorous walk about the perimeter of the tree farm, when she cornered him: “Ronnie done got himself sick. Fever. Aches. The whole kit and caboodle. I tolt him not to be riding that dumb bike out in the cold.”

Del had bought the bike for the boy as a Christmas gift, despite Alma telling him not to, despite it overdrafting his personal account. A simple miscalculation. And the boy deserved to have at least one nice thing. Didn’t every boy deserve that? In any case, the old bike was pure rust, single gear, the chain perpetually popping off its track.

“I think that’s not the way to go about it,” replied Delano. His mind ran through the possibilities. “We have Darby’s application to consider. I’ve wrapped up all the reports and data compilation on their wetland. Other than that, it should be a pretty straightforward replacement dwelling permit, and I think you can go to the county and submit on your own. I’ll stay here and work, and if Ronnie needs anything, I’m just down in the office.”

Her face contorted in that way it had, so her cheeks cinched up and her mouth curled down, usurping the sides of her chin. The dog pawed at the door, asking to be let out.

“Shut it, Dillinger!” she yelled.

“He obviously needs to go,” Delano said calmly.

“I already let him out. I already let him out twice.”

“Well, you should let him out again. So he doesn’t get in the habit of fouling the carpet.” He gestured toward a patchwork of stains near the door.

“Haven’t never submitted on my own before. Why today?”

“Because I have other tasks to attend to. And the weather’s half decent, so I could squeeze in some much-needed field visits.”

At this, Alma gave a militant exhalation, rolled the Statesman a little tighter, and then lifted it high in the air as though to strike the dog. The creature recoiled and his lips peeled back to reveal that quivering canine grin that often preludes blood.

“Don’t do that. Kindness, Alma, is the rule under my roof.”

“Don’t tell me how to treat my own. If you’d install the damn dog door, I wouldn’t have to show him what’s what.” She stamped her foot at the dog, and he retreated to the far corner behind the couch, a sanctuary he often used these days to do his business.

Delano stepped past her, undid the slide-chain, and theatrically swung the back door open.

“Dill! Out!”

With Alma out of his hair, Delano went upstairs to check on the boy, who lay buried under a mound of comforters.

“Too sick for the Enchanted Forest, is it?”

The boy merely groaned. And Delano had to peel several layers back before he could gently touch the back of his hand to the boy’s flushed face. When Ronnie finally opened his eyes, they had a pink tinge to them, as though he’d been crying or smoking what Delano’s peers had once called “Mary Jane.” He wondered if they called it that now. Or maybe “grass.” The room did not smell of smoke, though it was hard to tell. What with the omnipresent canine aromas.

“Tell me what’s really ailing you, son.”

Ronnie turned, burying his face in his pillow so Delano could hardly hear him say, “Just need to be alone.”

“Alone? No one needs that. Don’t you know it’s easy to snap a single twig in two? But take a whole bundle…” Delano had heard this somewhere. Or seen it demonstrated. He could picture the splintering stick held high in the air.

The boy re-angled his head, to be heard more clearly. “She’s driving me batshit, Del. She literally took every cent you paid me for yard work. Every red cent.”

“Why on Earth?”

“Because she hates us.”

“Ronnie, let’s not be melodramatic here. Your mother can be a tough character, don’t get me wrong. But she does care about you. And sometimes I even think she gives a hoot about me too.”

“No. She doesn’t. I got one C. In English. It’s not even a real subject. And she took it all away. ‘You’re gonna end up just like Wayne,’ is what she said. She’s being a bitch.”

“If it’s about the money, I can replace that.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” the boy mumbled into his pillow. “She knew you’d say that.”

“Ronald, you’re just angry with her. I understand. I really do.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’d rather end up like him than like her anyways.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth. Only difference between them is he gets caught for stuff. Because his face. It tells whatever’s in his head.”

“Well, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re gonna get up. You’re gonna rise and shine and take a shower. And I’m going to take us for a day of fun and entertainment. Your mama doesn’t even have to know.”

The first attraction was a maze of mirrors set among the trees. The interstate traffic a distant tide intent on coming in.

“No lines. No waiting,” said Del excitedly. “Nearly have the whole place to ourselves.”

Ronnie was staring at the young mom ahead of them. A toddler clung to her in a monkey-ish manner, and a pink umbrella dangled off her wrist. “Who is that!” she asked the child, pointing to the strange puddle of their reflection.

“You know, this whole park was just one man’s dream back in the day,” said Del. “He built all these little thatched roof structures himself, with the help of his wife. 1970’s that would have been.”

“Doesn’t that make it two people’s?”

“Right you are, Ronald. Right you are.” He chuckled lightly. “Tough maze, huh? Think we’ll make it out of here alive?”

Ronnie stared at their paired reflection which, as they walked along, graduated from squishy and fat to thin and ropey, and then collapsed back down again. He saw Mr. Morales’s face stretch and wobble alongside his own, until they blurred together and swam off the edge of the last mirrored wall. All forest again. The mother nowhere to be seen now. Cold and green—just the kind of place rosy-cheeked children went, without even realizing, to set a witch on fire.

“I guess this is the Wonderland part.” Delano was now peering into a hole in the ground, its concrete casing thrashed wildly with yellow paint. “Maybe this section’s for a slightly younger contingent. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you and me would neither of us fit down that.”

The boy, too, gazed down the unlit tunnel. And shuddered. “I really don’t feel too good,” he said. “Maybe I ate something.”

“It’s always possible. Your mama, bless her heart, is no chef.” Del smiled. “But no. I suspect it’s all that crap with your father. It’s eating you up, son. You really have to let that go. Stop holding onto it, you know?”

“I just need to lay down for a little, I think. My head feels funny, like it’s made of water.”

“You don’t even want to know the stuff my dad did. Probably deserves a life sentence, truth be told.”

Ronnie asked, because he knew it was required, “Like what?”

“Oh, the standard fare with men sent off to war.”

“War,” Ronnie murmured, and the hole seemed to exhale the word back at him in a stale, bacterial gust.

Delano laughed. “World War II. Man didn’t die, but he was still a casualty. Every day of his life I knew him, he poisoned himself with liquor. And eventually he turned into a poison himself.”

“I feel like I’ve been poisoned,” Ronnie said, and lifted a hand to his stomach. The hole now seemed to widen and constrict right in front of him, and for a moment he thought he might empty himself into it or its mouth might rise up and suck him down its vile passage.

“You should have seen our farm when he was done with it. A veritable wasteland. A literal scrapyard. He even dug up the damn soil and sold it off. Let the coal company come and fill in the holes with gob and red dog. Killed every tree in the orchard, every fish in the stream. House sunk clean into the ground, and no wonder. All that acid eating the earth out from under it.”

“What’s gob?”

“It’s coal not good enough to be called coal. Basically what’s left over after refining. And red dog, that’s just gob when it’s still halfway on fire.”

“Jesus.” It occurred to Ronnie that he’d studied such earth-eating processes in school. That he’d learned the name for the long, slow birth of all such voids, and it sounded like “spill genesis”—or maybe “spell.”

“Exactly. He’s the one to give your troubles to, kiddo. To help you forgive your father, say. He’s the one to put things back in balance.”

But Ronnie felt the ground rocking beneath him now, and balance itself seemed like a story someone had once read to him long ago, in the hopes he’d drop off into sleep and leave them to more important tasks. And as he lifted his eyes from the hole and fixed them on Delano’s pained but smiling face, he thought of the bobsled and log ride he’d still have to endure, the rumbling over tracks, shuddering and pitching and falling, the sound of chains grinding underneath them, urine-scented belts stretched useless over their laps. And all the animatronic witches and elves raising and lowering their arms in sudden jolts, tilting their mildewed faces at uncanny angles as if they were straining to hear a far-off voice. Then he thought of all the satellites soaring overhead, sending their invisible chains of numbers whispering down from on high, threading people’s heads like so many oblivious beads, seeking out some little bowl to cradle all the messages they’d send but never read.

“You could of kilt him!” Alma screamed. “He was in no way to be took out in the elements, you dum-dum.” She stood glowering at Delano from the door out to the garage. “I said you could of kilt him!” She punched the door frame and several stencils leaped free from their wall tacks: circles and trapezoids, the clean-cut voids of them trading white wall for gray floor.

“You’re overstating things, Alma.” Delano did not look up at her. He was penciling in a series of proposed lot lines on a map, using a ruler to keep things straight. The draft table’s light box was switched on, so that the map—with its many colors—glowed like a pane of stained glass. He bit his lower lip to dramatize the fact he was on task, but ended up looking a little sheepish for all his efforts.

“They almost didn’t take the application neither. On account of it was missing Appendix B. Lucky for you, I come back and found it in the files, and got back there before they closed shop. Of course, where the hell you two were at, I was left to wonder. And you not answering your cell.”

“You had plenty of time before they closed.” He reached for his eraser.

“And endangering my boy. If I weren’t nicer, I’d put you on the hot plate for your shenanigans.”

Delano looked up at her, switching off the light box so the map fell dark. “Did you ever suppose I was testing you when I sent you off on your own? To perform this very important task? Did it ever occur to you, that I trust you?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Did it ever occur to you, Alma, that today is the day I give you that raise?”

Later that night, when everyone was in bed and Dill’s claws were incessant against the back door, Del rousted himself, descended the stairs, and not only let the pathetic creature out into the yard, where it nosed around in search of possums and probably skunks, but opened the back gate onto the tree lot, and without looking over his shoulder or calling Dill to follow him, shut and locked the door, and ascended the stairs to what would surely be a peaceful night’s sleep.

“APRIL IS THE CRULLER-EST MONTH” was mural-ed in bright chalky yellow across the front windows of NightDaze Donut, the only 24/7 bakery out south.

“We’ll take a baker’s dozen,” said Del with a smile. “What better way to sweeten up tax season, am I right?”

“That means thirteen,” Alma added, eyeing the clerk suspiciously.

The boy behind the counter, who looked to be Ronnie’s age, said, “Okey dokey” in a tone she took to be sarcastic. Could be a classmate of Ronnie’s, for all she knew, but you could tell by the boy’s eyes he wasn’t half as smart. She cracked her knuckles and buried her hands deep in the pockets of her fleece. She was ready for it to be warm. Ready, too, for Del to quit penny-pinching on the heat. Of course, next it would be the air conditioning he’d forbid them from using. What was the point of even having such fancy systems, universal heat and cold, if you weren’t even gonna put them to use?

“That’ll be $10.99, ma’am,” the register-monkey said. He was idly scratching at a scab on the back of one hand, staring off through the opposite wall, which was covered with a poster of kids holding donuts up to their eyes like so many frosted monocles.

“Ain’t me paying.” She jerked her head toward Del.

“Ten-ninety-nine,” said Del in his old familiar sing-song. And without any shame, any shame at all, he drew a tube of quarters from his pocket. “Like the tax form. Now isn’t that clever?”

In truth, Alma had never wanted to be an accountant, but a high school math teacher. And she might of done, if not for Wayne and his smooth talk and his self-pronounced fetish for folds of fat. Like there wasn’t enough of her when he met her. He’d sit there all puppy-dog eyed, watching her lift french fries to her mouth. Drooling, it seemed to her, not over any food, but over watching her eat. And so she’d gained. And gained. And her period had went strange. (Her moon, Wayne called it, like some damn hippie.) And it took her four months to even know little Ronnie was growing in there, quietly preparing for life. They’d talked of ending it. That life. But so late on, it would of been hard. And so much money as they couldn’t rustle together. Not that fast anyway. And then one day, it seemed, there was too much of her. Or maybe not enough. Or he’d outgrown his fetish. Or maybe it was Ronnie was the too-much part of the equation. A breaking off from her that Wayne just couldn’t get. Couldn’t show up for. Fatherhood a nonsense, like employment, the man would not grow into.

She lifted her third cruller to her mouth. It was cheap, she knew that. Just more cheap crap Del pretended was fancy, considered her somehow in debt to him for. Even so, it was sweet and awfully wonderful, the smallest hint of lemon in the dough. The glaze just right—not too thick or too thin. She hated that she thought it was good. Wished she had the strength to flush them all straight down the toilet, like she’d done with those godawful neon cupcakes he brought in from the discount grocer’s. Colors like they got spray painted by some gang. What a joke. Like because she was fat she didn’t know what good food was. When he was the one that didn’t know good from trash.

She looked down at the tax sheet and the mound of damp dusty checkbook stubs he’d left her with. He should of left her one of those surgical masks while he was at it. So as her lungs wouldn’t get full of mold-dust. Records hauled out of the attic. Never in her life had she seen taxes as mangled as these. Entire sale of a house hardly accounted for, and that six years ago. The tax man said “bad faith” when she’d finally rang him on the phone, and she’d got where the man was coming from. “Some people got no since,” she’d told him, “no since for numbers or much else.” And the man had said “true,” like he knew just what she meant. The way Del talked, you’d think he was some kind of victim though. When the only victim she saw in plain sight was her and Ronnie.

Picked her up like a stray cat from a ditch. Late on wages. Had her fronting groceries half the time. Asking her to do house chores like she was his goddamn janitor. Or, better yet, wife. Couldn’t even pour his own water. Poor woman. Probly grateful to be gone. Alma’d lay odds he talked to the wife the way he talked to clients. Or when you got him on the ropes. Fake as hell. Like he could flip a switch and talk himself somewhere above you. “Appendices” this. “Fouling” that. Wind and more wind. When anyone else’d just say “shit.”

The balloon payment was coming due. She knew that. Knew Del had “set aside” for it. Big money. Enough for a down payment on a house for her and Ronnie. What a waste it had to go to that. Back taxes. Penalties. They wouldn’t forgive him too much on that score.

Some days she wanted to tell Del what Wayne told her: “The mud what made you never leaves you.” Wanted to tell him people smelled it on you, like your home got down deep in your pores so as you couldn’t scrub it. He could try and use her and Ronnie like some damn yardstick. Show himself how far he’d got from whatever dirt pit hatched him out. But his math was all wrong. And Alma, her nose was better than good. Could smell a fortune on a man with tore up jeans well as she could smell debt on a man in a fine cut suit.

She took another bite and set herself back to typing numbers into cells. Set herself back to reading Del’s awful hand. So many fives that looked like sixes, while his sixes were the spitting image of his zeroes.

Outside, the wind couldn’t make up its mind, a dog was barking somewhere far off in the trees, and Ronnie was threading the two o’s of an antique climbing harness with his skinny blue-jeaned legs.

“There you go!” Delano praised. “She just about fits perfect, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m not sure. Feels a little loose.” And Ronnie raised up the waist band, which was made of seatbelt material, and let it drop back to his hips, where it caught and dangled a little precariously.

“You have to have room—to move around,” said Del. “Trust me. It’s fine. Go on, shake your hips and see.”

The boy awkwardly rocked his hips around like a phantom hula hoop encircled his waist, and from the harness fell a strange and jangly music.

Del’s own father had never supplied safety equipment, no matter how loathsome the task he put his kids to. “Hell or high water,” the father would say to them, as if that annulled every grievance before it could even be uttered. “Perfect day for a little roof-scaling, isn’t it?”

Ronnie stopped his odd dance short and looked up at the sky. The harness hung at a slant from one hip bone.

“I do see what you mean there.” Del cut free a length of rope from the coil at his feet, threaded it several times around the waistband of the harness, disappeared behind the house, returned, and with a shiny staple gun in hand proceeded to fasten the rope ends in place.

“That should do you. Back in the day, if a varsity ring didn’t fit a girl, she’d wrap yarn around the band until it did. That’s where I got that particular trick from.” And he winked at Ronnie, but the boy didn’t catch it, because he was busy tucking his huge red flannel shirt (formerly Del’s) into his jeans, in hopes the new trappings wouldn’t rub him raw.

Alma could see them on the other side of the garage door. Could hear them too. And all their racket was making it hard for her to focus on her miserable task of endless itemization. The day before, when she’d needed to be crunching on the taxes (despite it being the weekend, for crying out loud), he’d drug them out to his church’s ugly pastel Easter service. Endless singing and raising hands up and down, sitting and standing and kneeling and standing—her bones ached after.

Not to mention, it got on her nerves how Ronnie didn’t seem to mind at all, but looked up at the big high ceiling like it was a new brand of sky, picked up the hymnals and turned to the right page, and even dropped Del’s tithe—the tithe he called it—into what looked to her like a gold frisbee. “For the wages of sin,” “cast off your chains,” “He is risen indeed,” and so on. She’d heard it all before. Snacks out in the lobby had been trash too. Del holding them captive while he flirted with a scrawny old hag called Ruth, sipping at their bitter coffee like it was anything good. Alma’d tried and throw him a curve ball by bringing up Dill in front of the hag. “Maybe while you’re down on your knees, you’d wanna put in a word for my friend, Dill,” she’d said to the woman, and watched Del go all guilt-eyed. “Why, of course,” the hag said, “what ails him?” “He’s went missing. Probly met a bad end—or is gonna.” That had finally got Del to shove.

But even when they’d finally went out to brunch, they had to wait near half an hour just to get seated. It was that, or else stay behind and make herself “useful” by fixing brunch for all them. Lesser of two evils and so forth. He better not be trying to convert Ronnie and her. She could handle him. But Ronnie, maybe not. She didn’t want her son getting it in his head he had some other life ahead of him so as he could go squander this one and just say sorry at the end of it. No. She would not stand for it.

Up on the roof, the boy could not be convinced to rise from all fours.

“We’re all but twenty feet up, Ronald. Let me appeal to that mathematical noodle of yours and remind you of a few salient facts. One, you’ve got a safety harness on, which is tied to that sturdy old tree over there. Two, if you fell, the tree, the apex of the roof, and the rope would all work together to ensure you never hit the ground, even in the very remote event you took a spill. Three, there’s so much pitch on this dang roof, your feet are practically glued to it.” Del smiled.

“It’s the heights. I don’t do heights too good. They make my guts go all haywire.” Ronnie was staring straight down at the patch of gritty roof shingles beneath him and the network of twigs crackling painfully under his palms and knees.

“Don’t have the guts for cleaning gutters, is it?” Del chuckled, then stopped himself, seeing as the boy was on the verge of pissing himself. Down there on his hands and knees like one about to be horsewhipped.

“If it makes you feel any better, I’ll hold the slack in my own two hands. Would that make the difference?”

Alma was close. Not so many losses and gains left to enter. Still, her eyes ached from looking at the screen—and squinting at those awful green checkbook stubs. He still used checks all the time, for crying out loud, like a damn eighty-year-old. Bookkeeping nightmare. The phone began ringing.

“Hullo. Delano Moraleez and Associates. Alma here.”

No answer on the other end of the line. Someone breathing.

“Hullo. Who’s this?”

Still no answer. The breathing jagged, like a smoker maybe. She lowered the phone back into its plastic cradle.

“Fucker,” she mumbled to no one in particular. She glanced over at the checkbook laying plain as day on Del’s draft table. Maybe he left it out there like those rich cunts rumored to leave cash out, hoping their maids would steal it. Such people loved putting lowlifes in their place. Lives that were low or lowdown. That was Wayne. Not her.

The phone began ringing again. She did not answer it this time, but continued glaring into her hateful, many-columned spreadsheet. Like she was back in college and it was end of quarter. Like ENG109 was raping her all over again. Multiple choice. But then twenty points off if you couldn’t say why some character’s zit was so important.

Only this was worse. Because this house, this job, such as it was… “All our lives on the deadline here,” as Del joked. Only no one ever laughed.

“No,” she said aloud. “Just your life.”

In the meantime, Del had got Ronnie on his feet, though the boy’s knees wobbled as he stood in a way that brought to mind a just-born fawn.

“Gettin’ your sea legs, bud?”

Ronnie had now assumed the posture of a novice surfer: feet spread far apart, knees bent dramatically, arms thrust out to the side like a balancing stick. His chest rose and fell heavily.

“I got you. See?” And Del playfully shook the rope attached to Ronnie’s waist.

The vibration of the rope hit Ronnie’s back like an ominous note, and he wondered if this was what horses felt when their riders goaded them toward the icy gush of a mountain river. To make matters worse, the wind was picking up and he could hear the tree branches creaking overhead, showering fresh needles and pitch down onto them with every new gust. “I see,” he managed to muster, though he feared even breathing these words would make him fall.

“Here.” Del, tethered to nothing, sure-footed as a goat on the roof’s steep slope, was handing Ronnie a plastic broom—or trying to. “Use it as a crutch. Till you get your feet back. I’m gonna start on this side over here and work my way toward you. Okay?”

As Ronnie’s fingers closed around the cool, hollow handle, he could hear the muffled ringing of the office phone below.

“No more calling this number, if you’re who I think.” Alma paused. “And let me make loud and clear, loud and clear, you won’t get one red cent from us, you low-down fuck. We got us a mean old guard dog at this house too. You just try a thing. He’ll rip your junk off. I dare you. You just try. He’ll shred your balls and then some.” And she slammed the phone back into the receiver before proceeding to unplug it from the base.

With some effort, she rose to her feet and made her way across the room to a set of shelves, on which sat a blue plastic boom box. Half the CDs in the stack beside it were scratched, so that she held each one up to the light, tilting it this way and that, until she arrived at one that might not skip.

On her way back to the desk, she steadied herself against the useless copy machine that stood like an island in the middle of the room, took a deep breath, then proceeded to the draft table, where she leaned and lingered, letting the bold reverberations of New Age Celtic Vibes wash over her and soothe her frayed nerves. Her belly compressed a switch and the light box popped on, lighting up her splayed palm from beneath. She squinted at this strange new vision of her flesh, glowing in soft pinks and oranges at her fingertips and within the narrow valleys between her fingers. Her blood all lit up; her hand, a star-shaped lantern. Alma had never in her life seen her skin, or what lived beneath it, look so unquestionably fine. Like art, she thought. Like a thing strangers would pay to see. Pay to watch because no understanding could come of it.

The lyrics to the song had grown almost indiscernible to her. Or had fallen into some antique tongue that leprechauns and druids sang in—maybe while they were getting ready to feast or fuck or slit a cow’s throat. If they even had cows. Wayne had once told her druids were experts in the law, but the man lied so often, it was hard to know if anything out that mouth was true. He was a handsome thing. And she’d felt handsome by extension when she was with him. Pretty equaled shallow. Alma knew that. Batting your eyelashes for a loaf of bread or a free car wash, flirting your way out of a ticket. But handsomeness seemed to run to the bone and then some. To be handsome was to be above prettiness, and the shallow influence it gave to them that possessed it by no merit of their own. If prettiness was money, handsomeness was skill.

The music took a sudden harsh turn. The melody grew dim behind three violent, erratic drum beats, and then—Alma turned her head not toward the boom box, but toward the somehow shifting source of the drum, and there saw a huge red bird just as it collided with one of the small bright squares of garage window, which before her very eyes cracked without shattering, a gleaming spiderweb replacing her view out over the drive, replacing the image of red plumage. There was no thud of bird against ground though. Just a soft moan. A human one. Then Alma pitched herself toward the wall with startling swiftness and punched the button Del said never to touch, and the door that had pretended for so long to be a wall began to lift itself up in a series of great metallic shudders, though before it could lift even halfway, Alma had dived to the ground and begun sliding herself under the rising edge, reaching toward the dangling shape she now knew to be her son.

“Obviously I’ll cover the medical costs,” said Del desperately, as the emergency vehicle pulled out of the driveway and started up its lights. He had his palms face-up like he did in church when he sang, only this time they were covered with blood, and it took Alma a second to realize it was his blood, and not her son’s. That he’d grabbed the rope.

“I’ll be needing a ride now,” she said numbly. The image of Ronnie’s swelling, darkening face. His limp limbs. Teeth crimson and loose in his mouth. Drooling the crimson onto the ground. Eyelids heavy. Mind, brilliant. Maybe dimming down, maybe about to go out like a match. No. That could not be true. He’d said her name.

“Those EMTs. Awful. Saying there wasn’t room for you to ride along.”

“Mama,” he had called, as they’d slipped a huge strange collar around his neck.

“Like you say.” She was still squinting into the red palms as if they were her boss’s new and sightless eyes. “There’s some things money can’t buy.” And she lifted her gaze now to the salmon-colored house and its windows that looked right over her head and over the heap of rope and the harness they’d cut off Ronnie, and she saw that it had no loyalty. “I’ll be needing that lift now.”

No loyalty at all.

Delano thought the boy’s new, broader nose gave him a look, all in all, not of deformity but dignity. More Man. Less Boy. And it seemed to him that Ronald may well have ended up looking something like this sooner or later anyway, even if he had not taken the unfortunate spill off the roof. The broken wing, too, was healing up quite nice: the cast, graffitied in smileys and “get-well-soon”s and signatures too small for Del to read—about to be sawed off now any day.

“What do you think, Ronnie? Flag or no flag?” Del was eyeing the bouquet of red, white, and blue carnations. (The blue ones had been dyed with something that came off on your fingers if you touched the petals.)

Still, he wished it hadn’t happened. Never would have sent the boy up there had he known Ronnie’s sense of balance was so poor. And the widow-maker coming loose from Nash, the huge branch crashing so close to them both. Freak thing. Really, if you thought about it at all, it was the wind that set off the chain of events that ended with the boy taking flight—yes, flight—for he seemed suspended in the air a moment before pitching over the edge, knocking loose the gutter, and smacking into the garage door. It had all happened so fast. Even so, Del had not let go of the rope. Though Alma didn’t seem to care one whit that his own palms remained visibly striped.

“Flag,” said Ronnie in his new, deeper, slightly more nasal tone.

He did not, just as Delano had calculated with his fine knots and clever loops around the tree, hit the ground, but had dangled horribly. His head hanging limp from his neck, like one of those marionettes when the master’s thumb is not there to lift its face toward the sun.

Delano nestled the toy flag down in amongst the flower stems and eyed the somewhat sparse arrangement. The tiny greeting, no bigger than a business card, stuck out at an odd angle, held up as it was by a flimsy, fork-like stick. He thought about adjusting it, but doubted if his father would even know what day it was, let alone who was coming to see him—or what gifts they came bearing.

“You want to tag along?”

Ronnie gave a noncommittal shrug and returned to reading.

“I wouldn’t, if I was you. The man is a billy goat. Nasty as they come. I don’t think they bathe him often enough over there. Probably because he makes comments to the female nurses.”

“You’re really selling him,” said Ronnie, and smiled a halfway smile that hid his newly chipped incisor.

They were seated on barstools at the kitchen counter. All of these stools, upholstered in a grapevine print Del’s wife once selected, had grown wobbly since Alma and Ronnie moved in, but Del didn’t dare tell Alma where she could and couldn’t sit. Not now.

“I guess your mother wouldn’t like me taking you out without her permission anyhow. She’s really got my ass, excuse my French, to the burner these days, I tell you what.”

Last time he’d said he wanted to visit his father in the home, Alma had said, “Why you wanna do that for? He won’t know you from a hole in the ground.” Then had told Del he’d better hang back and help her cook dinner.

He’d taken to slipping out into old man Corliss’s woods. Just to escape the endless chain of demands. There Del would wander among the tight-packed firs, marveling at the geometer’s precision with which they’d been planted, picking up, now and then, the trash sprent all about the understory—spent foil and bottles, broken light bulbs, a bright pink bra.

“She’s just protective,” Ronnie said, and tapped the edge of the card so it sat more evenly in the arrangement.

Once, Del had even spied the pale halo of a condom on the ground there. It appeared unused. And he’d toed a bit of dirt over it, as if it were a small dead creature in need of a burial.

“Wasn’t sure if you saw that last letter from the Infernal Revenue Service,” Delano said, settled deep into his spot on the love seat. “They’re none too happy, as you might suppose. For some reason, they say that balloon payment never got dropped. But I know you dropped it, of course. I saw, from the balance, the check cleared and all that.”

Alma was sitting on the main couch, her new rescue pup (Harold, a vague setter) sprawled over her stomach. She had the TV going: a young man, visibly high, was being reamed by a woman dressed up like a judge. The volume was cranked, so Alma had to speak loudly: “Mind grabbing me a water there, Del.”

“Oh, sure thing.” Del got up slowly and headed for the kitchen. None of the glasses were clean, as Alma had stopped washing them after the accident. And Del himself was out of practice. He now dredged a cup out of the murky soak water, dribbled some Dawn inside it, and set to rinsing.

“You know I don’t manage your mail no more,” Alma yelled toward the kitchen. “That’s a you thing. ‘Member? We talked all that out last week when we upped my role.”

“I recall that you’d requested it be taken off your task list,” he called back to her. He dumped the last suds out of the cup and turned the tap to cold. “Still, I’d like your take.”

The woman on the TV said in a mocking voice, “You call that a job? I’ll tell you what a job is.”

“My take is that you near kilt my son. And in the case you didn’t know, each and every day Wayne’s out there calling me up, preaching me I owe it to him and Ronnie to sue your sorry ass.”

“Alma, you know that was a freak set of—”

“Not me saying it. Him.”

“Well, you know I’m very sorry Ronnie had to fall like that, and the idea was to improve the house for all of us. So, pointing fingers is hardly, well—it’s very difficult to talk with that show so loud. Think we could dial it down a notch?”

“What’s that?” she called, as she scratched Harold’s head. (She preferred him over Dill; he never asked to be let out, never cowered or begged.)

Del began walking slowly toward her, careful not to spill. When he was close enough to no longer have to yell: “I said, we need to get back to before—to our old spirit of care.”

No response.

“What I’m trying to say is,” he continued, in the tone of one pitching a product no longer in stock, “Delano Morales and Associates needs you.”

“Glad you finally reckonize the value I bring to this table.” She pointed the remote at the screen and notched up the volume. “Lucky for you, I tolt Wayne I don’t owe him a damn nickel. He is the one owes me. And he better pay up too.” She flashed a sharp glance at Del, then fixed her eyes back on the screen.

“Here you go. Careful.” He held the glass out to her, but she thrust a hand up like “wait.”

The supposed judge was telling the intoxicated young man the amount of money he owed the plaintiff in damages.

“$820? Wayne owes me a hell of a lot more than that.”

“That’s the spirit. Here, your water.”

“Come to think of it, lots of folks probly owe me more than that.” Alma looked at the glass and then back to the screen. “Too full. Go dump some out.”

And the gavel smacked down so loudly it made Del flinch. It was really too much. Like a war being waged without ever being declared.

When he came back with the water, she didn’t drink any of it, but offered it to Harold, who delicately lapped at it.

Ronnie woke to Saturn crashing into his face. He’d let out a small yelp and sat up to find the paper planet split open on the floor like a too-ripe apple, its tutu of carefully painted rings smashed flat on one side. His nose ached, though the planet had only struck his forehead, and strange voices rose from the living room: bursts of forced laughter followed by meandering ribbons of wordless talk, the melody of gossip if he’d ever heard it. The clock read in gleaming green digits, 11:17 a.m.

Opening his door onto the landing of the stairs, he was greeted with a bevy of foil balloons knocking their faces against each other. The undeniable scent of smoldering briquettes and hot dogs weighted the air.

“Solar. It’s all about solar these days,” a man’s voice boomed. “Tell you what we did. We cut those firs out from around the house and slapped four panels on the roof. Solid exposure. Run both hot water heaters off them and charge the car. The future. Right there across the street from you, Delano. Come over and I’ll give you a personal tour sometime.”

“Mighty nice of you, Calvin.”

“And, uh, let me know if you need a recommendation. Our tree guy could do wonders for your situation over here. Well, you know.”

A strained laugh that could have been mistaken for choking.

“Delano!” A woman’s voice flooding in from outside. “Your dogs are burning!”

Still in his pajamas, Ronnie crept down the stairs, avoiding the steps that creaked, and remained out of view of the mysterious gathering. He half-recognized the outside woman’s voice, but strained to pair it with any face.

“Wind would be better if it didn’t kill so many birds. Wind as power, I mean,” said someone who sounded suspiciously like a college student. “Solar’s probably cleaner at the end of the day. But so much water required to maintain it, right?”

As soon as the door cringed shut behind Del, an older woman’s voice inserted itself into the fray. It was the voice of a one-time smoker and highball drinker. That’s what Ronnie’s dad would have said anyway. And such declarations always made Ronnie wonder what a highball even was.

“Not exactly rocket science, is it?” asked Highball. “Takes in Bertha and less than one year later, place smells like a pigsty and the yard’s all gone to weeds and moss. Not to mention the inside—I mean, I bet you it’s not just the carpets we’re smelling but the wood underneath. Some days, I swear I can smell the urine when I walk by to get my mail. Not exactly raising anyone’s property values, not that it’s a great time to sell anyway.”

“You wonder what the point of mowing even is when you don’t have a blade of real grass left to your name,” observed Solar. “I got dandelions mucking up my yard too. Never had weeds like that before. Not when he kept up on things.”

“A case of misplaced charity,” asserted Highball. “But too late now. Seems she’s really got his number.”

“I think it’s a little romantic,” said the college student. “Like King Arthur letting Camelot fall to ruins after Guinevere abandoned him.”

“Romantic?” Solar scoffed. “The man is high on snake oil. Or should I say, lard and vinegar?”

“You should hear yourselves,” said the college student, then laughed as if to cushion the blow. “We’re guests here, same as her.”

“Hardly,” said Highball. “We come without sights on a helpless widower’s wallet. And that beanstalk of a boy. Thomas says his daddy’s an ex-con. Bashed the poor boy’s face and arm. I suppose you saw his nose is smashed flat as a pancake? And his arm all in a cast?”

Ronnie found it hard to believe they’d noticed the cast, but not that he’d shed it over a month ago. And his nose was not so flat as they said. They only thought they paid attention—these eyes and ears he hadn’t known were aimed at them all this time.

“Well,” said Solar, “I guess you weren’t around when the ambulance showed up. Delano had that kid up there on the roof. Temporary insanity. Jabba there probably told the boy to fall off the roof.”

“Oh snap!” exclaimed Highball.

“Jeez,” said the student. “The woman seems perfectly nice. Brash, sure. But I like her for it. You know where you stand. I’d rather know what someone’s thinking, even if it’s mean.”

“Unless it’s us, you mean. Unless it’s the truth,” retorted Highball. And waved a hand in the air, to indicate she’d written off the student’s words.

“You millennials,” said Solar. “You couldn’t spot a wolf if it had your throat in its mouth.”

A coarse, shrill laugh. “Well, what’re you all doing for the ee-clipse?” inquired Highball. “We got the best view in the whole state, so I hear. I know someone in car rentals says everything’s booked up till end of August, even the vans. Better get ready!”

“I have a friend with a roof deck,” said the student in a rather distant tone, and Ronnie found himself wanting to tell her the moon was moving farther from the Earth each day, that every total eclipse was a little less total than the one that came before it.

“Set a telescope up is my professional recommendation,” said Solar. “You’ll be able to see the Baily’s beads that way.”

“Baileys? I’d take some about now.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” said the student, “But I don’t think Delano keeps alcohol in the house. I sort of looked…”

“Good one, you two. But Baily’s beads, if you care to know, are those bloodred blips that pop up for two bats of an eyelash around the edge. Some trick of light where the sun’s storms look like rubies strung on a silver bracelet. It’s something else, so I hear.”

Ronnie shifted his weight, leaning to get a better listen at these almost-familiar voices, curious what chain of reactions lived behind these fabled rubies’ few bright seconds. And marveling at how he’d come to know so much more about the moon, what Del called “the lesser light,” than about the sun. But the step he was perched on betrayed him with a loud low creak, and the conversation abruptly halted. When it resumed, the topic had already changed to ozone as a means of eliminating odors.

As it turned out, it was Independence Day, and Ronnie very nearly slept through Del’s annual barbecue: an intimate party his wife had thrown, mostly for the neighbors, every year since they’d moved there, a tradition he’d thus far kept alive. (And how alive: even the back fence, which had collapsed in two places, was gussied up in tinsel garlands and foil stars.)

“We wanted to let you rest up after the week you’ve had,” said Del, flipping the last of the chicken breasts on the grill. When he looked up, his wild eyebrows were bunched in concern, and his belly heaved out a heavy sigh that briefly distended his checkered apron. Ronnie couldn’t help but think Wayne would have Del for lunch if he ever got the chance.

“He was actually on pretty good behavior,” Ronnie admitted. “It’s just an experiment,” he quickly added. “A trial period, Mama calls it.” What he didn’t say was that he’d felt thrown off by the visit, by Wayne’s sudden and bewildering interest in him, as well as by his own curiosity and delight over his dad’s various collections—of fossils, painted saw blades, and pirated VHS’s. When Ronnie’d been dropped back the night before, he’d climbed the front steps feeling as though he’d traveled to another continent, where the night was morning and the morning night.

“Not sure how many more trials this family can handle, if you know what I mean,” said Del, and squeezed Ronnie by the shoulder. Then, turning to the group, he inquired loudly, so that the scant scattering of guests about the yard looked up from their dutiful conversations and fell quiet, “Who would like to bless the meal?”

As everyone pulled their mismatched plastic chairs up around the enormous patio table, Highball, whose name turned out to be Vicki, said of Del’s wife, “She certainly was a lovely creature. Never complained. Face like an older Audrey Hepburn, don’t you think, Dara? Elegant-like. Never had a bad word to say about anyone.”

Unlike you, Ronnie thought to himself. He scooted some canned beans around on his plate. He’d not have taken so big a serving had he known they tasted like maple syrup.

“Not sure if you’re aware, Delano,” said Ruth, “but there’s a rather impressive mushroom blossoming out the side of your downstairs lavatory.” She was one of two organists at Del’s church and, today, his self-appointed sous-chef.

“Oh, that. It’s Alma’s little experiment.” Del was the only one not at the table, though he was positioned right beside it, knelt down on the deck, vigorously turning the crank of an antique ice cream maker. A large sack of rock salt sat open beside him, and fresh-cut cling peaches soaked in their bath of sugar water behind him, their steel bowl wedged between the cushions of Alma’s old, winter-tattered couch.

“Chicken’s tough,” Alma announced, struggling to saw through her breast with a plastic knife. “Del here puts a new meaning on well-done.”

“Go for the hot dogs,” said Calvin, the expert in harnessing solar. “Costco’s got the best. Kirkland brand. Brought these ones myself.”

“That’s B-Y-O-D,” chimed Vicki. “Get it?”

“Pretty sure ‘kirkland’ means church land in Scottish,” said Dara. Apparently she drove up every year for this, all the way from Ashland, where she was getting her degree in a subject Ronnie’d never heard of but gathered had something to do with words. He hadn’t even known Del had a niece.

“Costly Co, I say,” called Delano.

“I can give it a go,” Ronnie offered, eager to leave the table with its souring small talk. “So you can sit and grab a bite, Mr. Morales.”

“Oh, son, forgive me if I take you up on it. The idea’s we all get a taste of home-churned ice cream before everyone has to split.”

“Ronald, you stay right put. Don’t need that arm re-snapping itself now.” Alma wiped the corner of her mouth with a star-spangled napkin.

“I’m fine,” Ronnie said. Though admittedly the arm still ached and itched from time to time, as if deep in the bone something remained unsettled.

“Finish your beans up first,” she said, knowing he would not take another bite of them.

“Oh come on now, Alma,” said Calvin. “The boy’s not five years old.”

Alma glowered at Calvin, but then set her features back into an image of placidity. And said with complete calm, “Only he acts like he’s five years old sometimes, jumping up whenever Del there snaps his fingers.”

“It’s fine. I’ll take a turn. Need to test my mettle anyway,” said Dara, and she struck a Rosie-the-Riveter pose as she rose from her seat, setting the group back to laughter. She was a rather short but slim young woman, with an uncanny resemblance to her aunt’s portraits, which hung on every other wall in Del’s house: her eyes were of an almond shape, and her neat narrow brows arced above them, making her look curious and surprised. Her auburn hair, though bobbed, was otherwise like the wife’s as well, as were the candidly pouty lips and assertive ears, the square straight teeth, which displayed themselves generously whenever Dara spoke. (When she’d asked Ronnie what he hoped to study in college, he’d muttered “engineering,” only because it was the first thing that popped into his head. And when she’d asked him what kind, he’d blanked out and been unable to summon such simple but melodious words as “aerospace,” “electrical,” or “biological.”)

“You’d think he was his own son. Or something.” This last word Alma let fall heavily over the table. “So much interest,” she added, for good measure.

“Well,” said Calvin. “Lucky he’s got a nice man like Delano here to instill solid values in him, steer him into manhood.”

“Amen to that,” said Vicki, and lifted her paper cup, which was full of sherry she’d excavated from the depths of Del’s cupboards.

“Takes such an interest,” Alma continued, “when last year same time, he didn’t even know my Ronnie was alive.”

A flutter of uncomfortable glances across the table.

“Mom, can you pass the potato salad, please?” Ronnie was glaring at her now, in a way she hadn’t seen before—not from him anyway. Only from Wayne. Worse yet, he’d shortened her name, somehow reduced her importance by hacking away that last and final “ah” of her. Like he was ashamed to say it, say “Mama,” in front of all these strangers.

Alma did not, in the end, pass the potato salad to her son, since her musings were cut short by a vicious tangle of growls and high-pitched yelps reaching the party from the corner of the yard, where a swirl of fur and flashing teeth and low inhuman threats had set itself in motion.

Del didn’t notice right away, as he was involved with showing his niece the finer points of turning the crank, adding salt, adding ice, checking the consistency of the cream within the inner cylinder, turning, salting, etc.

But Alma hauled herself to her feet with impressive speed and began slapping her hands together, whether applauding or attempting to dispel the violence, none could immediately tell.

“Dillinger! Harold!”

The horrible sound of canine warnings, teeth colliding, and fur uprooting continued—and as the setter grabbed hold of the retriever’s ear and began jerking the golden head here and there, it became clear the battle had started over an unguarded platter of chicken, whose shredded remains lay off to the side of the current melee.

Calvin stood up as if to head over there and put an end to the nonsense, but then thought better of it, as the fight began migrating toward the deck where they were all seated. Vicki fled into the house, afraid she was the next to be attacked. And Ronnie sat paralyzed in his chair, helpless to move even enough to yell out the name of his once-beloved dog.

As the canines tore around the deck, seemingly bound together at the head—plunging, recoiling, leaping and twisting into the air as one—Dara, who was scared to death of dogs to begin with, slid quietly under the table to wait the whole mess out. To calm herself, she focused her eyes on one of the now scattered wedges of peach, its syrup beginning to mix with ice and rock salt and the pale froth of never-to-be-ice cream now running down between the weather-beaten old planks of the deck.

“Damn you, Dillinger!” Alma was screaming.

Meanwhile, Del was searching for a long stick with which to poke into the fray, a first step toward breaking the deranged animals apart. But before he could even seize the fallen fir limb he’d been eyeing, Alma picked up her remaining hot dog and pitched it within reach of the dogs’ noses. Not before one last swift jerk of the head, which gave way to his opponent’s fiercest and highest-pitched yelp, a cry of total submission, did the setter release and dive for his new temptation and rightful property. Dillinger took the opportunity to retreat through the gap in the collapsing fence and disappear, with the remaining stub of his left ear, under the dead limbs of the enormous trees lined up like patient sentinels behind Del’s lot.

The guests, who all suddenly had other places to be, made their way off the front porch and down the few front steps, shooting quick waves or faces of apologetic encouragement over their shoulders as they caromed off into their own homes, for which they now felt a renewed sense of gratitude, or, in two cases, toward their cars and the small comfort of climate control on a hot and near-windless day. Dara blew a kiss out the window as she steered around the corner, and Ronnie tugged at Del’s shirt sleeve.

“Can I steal two minutes?”

“Ronnie, I really need a second to gather myself and—”

“No,” he said. “Now. While she’s distracted.”

There in the cramped half-bath downstairs, Delano and Ronnie struggled to pull the sliding door shut. Each could feel the other’s breath as if it were his own.

Ronnie clutched a gallon container in his trembling hands, which he uncapped, filling the room with the eye-watering tang of public pools. “Here.” He thrust the open jug into Del’s hands.

“What’s the meaning of all this, Ronald?” Del clutched the jug to his chest and squinted his eyes at the young man, whose face was so close to his own, he could see the oily constellation of whiteheads scattered across the brow. “Ronald, what is this?”

Ronnie drew in his breath, held it, then released in one fluid exhalation: “I had this weird dream last night that Mama’s stomach floated up out her mouth like a big red bubble, only she stayed connected to it by the fleshy rope of her throat turned wrong-side out, and her insides started lifting her off the ground, and I was trying to hold onto her feet to keep her from floating away, but then I started to float away with her, and we got so high up, and it was, it was—the most terrifying dream I think I’ve ever had. I can’t explain. This house, all of Salem, my school—it looked like a toy, like a little Monopoly board you could just step on and snap in two.”

“Son, it’s okay. It’s just in your head, you know. You’ve been through a lot. And this week at Wayne’s. If you need to talk…”

“No, that’s not it. Listen to me.” The small scar running over the bridge of his nose appeared to be blushing.

“I am. I am listening.” The bleach was making Delano’s sinuses burn now, and he wanted to ask the boy for the cap.

“She’s been taking from, well, you—and covering it up. She’s been doing it from day one, Del. I have proof. I can go through all the papers with you and highlight what she fudged. Little stuff—supplies. But more. That bogus repair on the copy machine. And big stuff—that payment to the IRS.” He closed his eyes, as if he were locked in some grim and quiet prayer.

Delano set the bleach bottle on the tiny basin, and looked down at the mushroom Alma had for months now called her “pet,” had not allowed him to dispose of. A welling up of deep disgust intermixed with another stranger, warmer surge—something he felt toward the boy that was not unlike what he’d felt with his wife. Not merely love, but a mutual protectiveness that made each more vulnerable to the world, such as it was. A type of loyalty gained only through a sacrifice not recognized as such by its giver.

“I had fears,” Delano said, shifting his gaze to the face before him, the blond bangs damp and heavy with sweat, the eyelashes delicate as paintbrushes, eyes a gentle green rimmed in dark amber and marbled blue—wide open, expectant, innocent but no longer only that. And the nose: for the first time, he realized it was the only feature of Alma’s inscribed into the face of her boy, only now you could not see it. Delano, consumed by a new and pitiful certainty, began to shake with a sob he couldn’t let himself fully release, and so a thin line of clear fluid began to seep from one nostril down over his lips.

“Here,” Ronnie said. And, taking the jug in his hands, he knelt at Delano’s feet and began pouring the searing liquid over the mushroom’s broad dark dome, until it began to melt away into a creamy froth tinged brown and hazmat orange. And as the harder flesh of the dome began, too, to cave, dehisce, and at last dissolve, they half expected to see a skeleton emerge from the sizzling murk, some harder and more insistent remnant of that life form’s quiet and relentless growth.

Del has stationed himself in the densest section of Mr. Corliss’s trees, so that he might watch the departure from a safer distance. Right after Wayne pulled up, just shy of noon, towing that rusted hulk of a horse trailer into which he would load Alma’s and Ronnie’s whittled-down belongings (Del had been good enough to take four carloads to Goodwill for them), he beelined for Del.

Possessed of a distinctly leopard-like aspect, his narrow blue-jeaned hips betraying a slight imbalance in his gait as he approached, Wayne was, and is, nothing of what Del expected: hair gold as fresh-cut hay, and every bit as shiny; jawbone shapely as a boomerang; and, far from the brittle drunk Alma so often hinted at, he appears robust and youthful, a man full of transfixing vigor, if not a malignant promise. Even the black, government-issued anklet with its little plastic box, seems purposeful—some crowning ornament he selected himself, perhaps to augment his native air of gritty prowess. And when his open hand spread itself across Del’s chest, so that Del felt his heartbeat diffuse into that palm, and Wayne’s voice rushed warm and damp into his ear to say, “Listen up, man,” the whole choreography of it seemed the very mapping of a curse. “Listen up, cuz I’ll only say it the once. You ever touch my son, you ever call my son—or his mama—I will personally see to it that you don’t wake to see tomorrow. Conoces, man?” Delano nodded, but just barely. Surely these are lines Wayne lifted from a movie or a bad play. Not lines he would actually live by. Tenebrous threats drawn from neighboring cells. “And me? I want you to think of me like the fucking tooth-taker, man. I show up, and no one ever knows I’ve been there. I’m the tooth-taker, you hear me? And you’re the fucking toddler who’s got a hole in his mouth. Got it?”

Del has, for his part, tried to lighten the occasion of their departure in the lead-up. “Our first anniversary,” he’s been calling it, which it very precisely is. “The paper anniversary,” his wife would have said.

“You mean, our last,” Alma snapped back, but not until after she’d signed the agreement to hold each other—what was the word?—harmless.

In the end, he has not forced her to give the balloon payment back, not because he can afford to or even ensure he’ll keep his home if he does not retrieve it, but because he does not want Ronnie to need Wayne’s help—financial or otherwise. Has wanted the boy to have a store set aside for him, and Alma ensured this would be so. Del’s own father threw a wadded five into the dirt and had him grovel for it when he, Del, set off for college all those years ago. “Git down and earn it!” the man had yelled. No. Del has not done harm. And has never, as Ronnie’s miscreant father suggests, touched the boy in any way that could be deemed harmful or impure. He has given care. Has given it freely.

He nudges a torn condom wrapper with his foot and considers the fact that he’s given Ronald and Alma more money than that man has probably ever given them in their whole lives. And certainly less heartache. Has never sold drugs—or tried them, for that matter, even when most of his college friends shamed him for remaining outside their chemical bonding rituals; has never intentionally cheated anyone; never stepped out on his vows, even when temptation occasionally presented itself; never even entertained—God forbid—kidnapping anyone; never spent one night in a cell with a stranger who might beat him.

Yet here Del is, the one hiding out in the woods—like an outlaw or a child avoiding punishment—spying on a family that would appear to any stranger not reconciled, no, but never torn apart to begin with. The family, if that’s what they can be called, stand on the crest of Mr. Corliss’s lot, the father with one hand on his son’s shoulder, his other splayed across the vast small of Alma’s back. A cigarette hanging from his mouth, ashing into the brittle grass at his feet, feet which are clad in polished leather boots (of so fine a grain, you have to wonder if they’re really his).

Del has never known Ronnie to lie to him. And yet, when Ronnie told him, earlier this morning, that Alma was using all the money to staple her guts together, to help her lose weight, “regain” her “figure,” Del did not want to believe him. Even if it were true, why would Ronald tell him so? “If I was you,” the boy had said, “I guess I’d just wanna know where all my hours were going to.”

All that is left now is to wait—for the daylight to end so it might resume its track toward a truer night. The birds have begun flying back to the trees, the evening crickets rev to life in the dry field dividing real forest from abandoned Christmas crop, and even the frogs mistakenly presume that night is coming on. The air is cooling more rapidly than Del has ever felt before. Even still, he is not watching the sky. Amid all the chaos of the agreement and the thirty-day move-out plan, he has forgotten to buy a pair of those cardboard glasses, the likes of which now hide the faces of his neighbors, who stand in paretic clusters on the hillside, chins angled up, mouths ajar in the very image of awe. And they seem ready for the fraudulent moment to hold them, draw them up into the vast unknowing of its vault, and not let go.

Instead of tracking the one star that, for all its darkening, could still blind him, Del wisely fixes his eyes on the end of Wayne’s cigarette, around which this false night falls, the end brightening with each passing second. And he fears this fiery end will fall into the high dead grass and ignite the rows of trees and the field and consume the untouched and deeply promising property that Del has for so long felt is like his own, his very own.

Deeper into the crowd of trees, Dillinger sniffs the air. He is aware that the man—who in one instant freed and abandoned him, who is now in Dill’s territory, yet does not seem to know it—is trembling, which must mean he is afraid. Dill only barked at the man, whose name sounds so much like his own, to alert him, to tell him: you have strayed into a place not meant for you. But the man still fails to notice him, is fixed on some trouble in the field, which is full of people standing very still. Dill wants them all to leave, so he can scrounge the scraps from their picnics without fear of being kicked, scolded, attacked. It is colder, and therefore later, than perhaps it should be. He sniffs again, hoping to relocate the scent of hamburger, his appetite accelerated, but is greeted with smoke instead, the kind he associates with pain; for in his other life, one of these small, identically-scented fires was pulled from a smiling mouth and stubbed out on Dill’s young velvety ear. (Dill had cried out, while the one who started the fire only laughed.) Now his ear is somewhere else; he knows this, though still scratches at it now and then, since the part of it torn away is still full of strange and beckoning sensations.

The sun is all but blotted out now, morphed by the moon into an endless tunnel whose silver mouth speaks directly to Wayne, the only one in the field staring up with unsheltered and unflinching eyes. Only one letting the sun’s sudden absence bore right into him. The frayed ring of light reminds him of what once marred the corner of picture-shows, the old kind, when whoever worked the projection box required a special sign, so they’d know to change the reel. A flicker of feathery light. A hole leading nowhere much. This is like that, he thinks, only Nature is changing the reel, and all us suckers, whether we paid or not, are trapped in its crazy theater. He glances quickly at Alma, her soft imperial profile and rosy earlobes fading rapidly from sight, then at Ronald, eyes veiled behind toy glasses Wayne’s sure won’t do a thing. His son’s nose, transformed so accurately into the shape of mishap, protrudes awkwardly from beneath its paper-doll trappings, which it forces askew, and this reminds Wayne that some damages, despite any old promises drawn up on paper, remain uncollected. He returns his gaze to the cold glittering ring, and it tells him, “Do not blink. Do not blink now. Or you will miss me.”