CHAPTER SIX

1962

We lived on the south side of Lincoln, where tall shady trees lined the streets and the houses were old and grand, keeping secrets behind smooth flawless drapes. The cars in driveways were always shiny. Women in aprons swept the front steps, and when the sun set you could smell dinner cooking. Lucille kept my grandfather’s house looking like everyone else’s, pristine and sparkling, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. My mother was brusque and fidgety. My father often went to parties alone and was the first to leave. He didn’t want to be away from her for too long. But she seemed not to care whether or not he was there. She settled down behind thousand-page novels, disappearing to places where her life became less real and my father and I were the illusion.

At school, the walls were bright and the flat sun fell in through the big windows. Girls who had friends giggled and linked arms, but the ghost of Starkweather haunted us. When he was fourteen like me, he had been a student at Irving. He had changed that place. Sometimes I would get the strange feeling that I was sitting at a desk where he had once sat, waiting for someone to take me by the hand and pull me into some different place where everything mattered a little more. Because of Starkweather, teachers treated us carefully. They were more attentive to our needs, looking for warning signs and quick to sound the alarm when someone displayed evidence of a violent temper. Everyone stepped softly except for Miss Winter, our physical education teacher. In her calisthenics class it was survival of the fittest, and I was anything but that.

She would stand over us with a whistle and force us to do sit-ups with partners, while the boys climbed ropes and hurled balls at each other’s chests on the other side of the gymnasium curtain. I always got stuck with Cora Lessing. When I held down her feet, she’d groan and haul herself toward me like some sort of beached sea creature, her red hair spraying over the mat in every direction. Her eyes were a dim, desperate blue, like the washed-up bottle glass I used to find on the shores of Lake Michigan. I tried to avoid her. I didn’t want anyone to think we were friends. In Lincoln, I was an outsider from Chicago, an oddball whose mother had quickly developed a reputation for behavior unbecoming a lady. Or so I imagined. I tried not to care that no one spoke to me—anywhere, really. When Cora and I got paired up, I’d put on a sour expression, hoping it would show I was destined for better things.

The other girls were long-limbed, brassy, big-toothed Nebraskans who, at the age of fourteen, could have easily passed for high school seniors. My mother, who had a name for everything, called their kind of Lincoln women “cobs,” because of their flaxen hair and those straight teeth that seemed specially designed to row a cob of corn. “Cobs,” she’d complain to my father after one of the rare times she went to a party at the country club. “Nothing but cobs. Did you see how they stared at me? Ha.”

“They just thought you were beautiful,” my father would say.

But he was wrong. Everyone knew we weren’t quite normal, and I was tired of it.

One day when we were supposed to play volleyball, I was early for gym. I always tried to change into my shorts before the other girls came down. I didn’t want to be naked in front of them. I knew what wasn’t right about the way I looked.

I thought I was alone in the locker room, but then a toilet flushed and Cora Lessing came out of a stall, wiping her hands on her shorts as if she thought that was sufficient. Digging around in my locker, I pretended to look for my other tennis shoe. When she sat down on the bench, I could feel her watching me. “I guess we’ll be the last ones picked for teams again,” she said finally. Her misery suddenly invigorated me. I wanted to slap her.

Instead, I turned around and stared, but she just sat there with her hands on her pink knees, looking up at me with big liquid eyes, and it seemed to me that everything depended on separating myself from her weaknesses. My heart was skipping. “No, Cora, you’ll be the last one picked,” I said, slamming my locker door and leaving her alone, sitting on the bench.

*   *   *

At dinner that night, there were fresh peonies on the table, my mother’s favorite. Lucille had been filling the house with flowers all week and Mother had been taking them out of the water and putting them in her hair. It made me sad to think of the flowers wasted in my mother’s hair, their petals dropping as she trailed up and down the stairs like Miss Hawaii.

My father carefully poured my mother more wine while she picked at her food. “We need to discuss something,” he said to her suddenly, and I brightened, sensing the possibility of something more dramatic than usual. Maybe we were going to discuss me, my troubles, the problem I was on my way to becoming. My mother put down her fork and lifted a blossom out of the vase. She looked at me, but I didn’t look back. I knew what was coming. She was going to offer the latest version of her madwoman act so that everyone would think only about her.

“Olie called me at the office,” my father said, looking so innocent I wanted to cry. “He says the elms in front need to come down before it gets too cold.” I felt like throwing something, breaking out of this boredom.

“Why?” my mother said.

“Because they have the Dutch elm, Ann.”

“They don’t look sick,” she said, shooting him a wounded look that I didn’t find convincing.

“He told you months ago.”

“I don’t remember.” My mother crossed her arms and put them on the table. Of course she was lying. She was always lying, always denying things. My uncle had told me she sometimes had troubles with the truth, and I believed everything he said about her. He had been the one to tell me about her first marriage. “You know, we all hide things. Mother’s not perfect,” he had said once. Then he frowned as if it was the idea of her imperfection that disturbed him particularly. Apparently, when she was twenty, she’d run off with a man named Nils who gambled away all the money she had inherited. The marriage lasted two months. My uncle tracked her down in a hotel outside Erie, Pennsylvania, to find her sitting backward on the bed in her slip, staring straight in front of her, studying the headboard as if it were a map of the world. When he told me the story, I knew exactly the look he was describing. She looked that way when something took place that wasn’t in the script, the only times you could believe she wasn’t acting.

“Olie said you and he went out to the driveway last May and took a look at the leaves,” my father said. “He showed you where they were turning brown.”

“I didn’t see any brown,” my mother said. “Besides, it’s autumn, and everything’s brown.”

“Do they have to come down?” I asked.

“No, Puggy, probably not. He just wants to control everything,” she said. “Your father always wants to look like he’s in control.”

For months, elms had been coming down all over Lincoln. The buzz of chain saws had filled the summer, and all the buildings looked lost, as if suffering from amnesia. My father sighed. “It’s not as if I want them cut down,” he explained.

“If anyone tries, I’ll chain myself to the roots. I’ll scream like a banshee,” my mother said.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that.”

My mother raised one eyebrow. “What would you want?”

“For you to let them do it,” my father said, digging into his pot roast.

“No, Thatcher, I mean really. What do you really want? What do you desire?” My mother’s dark eyes bore into his blue ones. “Sometimes I feel like you don’t have any idea. Sometimes I feel like that’s what’s wrong with this whole place. Everyone tries to look happy, but they’ve been doing what they’re supposed to for so long, they can’t remember what they really wanted.”

I thought she was trying to make him forget about the trees, but believed he would go along with her game in an effort to make her forget. That way each could think the other had won. But then things turned into less of a game.

My father folded his napkin and tucked it beside his plate. “I’ll tell you what, Ann. I want to make you happy. I’ve been trying pretty damn hard for quite some time.”

For a moment my mother looked stunned. “Really,” she said finally, and then she sort of laughed. “We could have an intellectual discussion. You could read Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” I couldn’t remember my father ever having read anything besides the paper. “It’s about a bored woman who commits an indiscretion with the gamekeeper because he’s more real and simple in what he desires than her proper husband—who doesn’t have any desires.”

My father looked lost.

“I know what I want,” I said, to remind them I was sitting right there.

“What’s that, Puggy?” my father said.

“More potatoes.”

“Now that’s something I can understand,” my father said. He reached for my plate, but my mother put her hand on his arm.

“There won’t be any leftovers for Lucille,” she said. “Besides, you don’t need any more food, Puggy. I know how many brownies you had before dinner. Lucille shouldn’t indulge you. You eat so many sweets and then you brush the sink instead of your teeth. I’m amazed you haven’t lost your capacity to chew.”

Unthinkable words danced a little jig on my tongue, but I kept them inside. Sometimes I wanted to do the craziest things—like stand up and scream or strip off my clothes and run out into the street and French-kiss the first person I could find.

“That’s enough,” my father said, but I was already on my way, pumping my legs up the stairs. I could hear them downstairs, bickering. Before long, they’d be laughing like everything was just fine. I imagined my parents chasing each other around the dining room table like planets orbiting the sun, drawn to each other by some inexplicable force. I brushed my teeth three times and took out the article about the Starkweather killings I’d kept secreted away for so long. I turned the worn pages and studied the protective way Charlie had his arm around Caril Ann. Their bodies leaned in toward each other. They were all smiles. No hint of how true love was going to make them crazy.

*   *   *

The next day I pretended to be sick, which was usually easy. I went to the downstairs toilet and spat out water. My father would tell me to go back to bed, and my mother would say something like, “Why don’t we all stay in bed? Nothing would be any different.”

But this time Lucille came into the bathroom, put her hand on my shoulder, and turned me around. “You don’t smell like sick.”

“I am sick.” I looked down at my feet.

Lucille shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“I can’t go to school.”

“Susan, you can’t check out ’cause you hate it.”

“This once?” I pleaded. “Don’t tell Daddy.”

When Lucille’s brown eyes turned sad, I knew she wouldn’t tell him.

*   *   *

I was in my room listening to a Sam Cooke song and eating a Charleston Chew that Lucille had left for me when I heard sounds. I reached over and turned down the radio. My mother was screeching as if someone were tearing out her fingernails. Getting out of bed, I crept down the hall toward my parents’ open door. Clothes were flung over the light pink carpet, stockings draped the vanity table. My mother was pulling out everything from the dressing room and the bureau drawers.

Lucille stood by the window with her arms crossed over her starched apron, shaking her head. Outside, the oak tree shivered, tickling red leaves against the pane. My mother put her palm down on the vanity table. I could see her face, the black waves of hair shielding her sharp features as if she had planned it to fall that way. “I can’t believe this!” my mother sobbed.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hurst,” Lucille said, but she stayed where she was by the window.

“What happened?” I said.

“You ask her!” My mother pointed at Lucille. “She’s moving to Detroit! She’s leaving me!” I kept quiet. Seizing the opportunity to put herself at the center of everything, my mother flopped down on the bed with her feet hanging off and covered her face with a pillow the way she had the Christmas before, when she complained that my father hadn’t gotten her anything personal.

“Why are you leaving?” I said to Lucille, stepping farther into the room. My mother was silent behind her pillow.

“I’m going back where I’m from,” Lucille said. “My daughter lives there. She just had a baby.”

My mother removed the pillow from her face and stared vacantly at the ceiling. “You’re from here, Lucille,” she said. “Don’t try to pretend you’re from anywhere else. If you stay in any one place long enough, it becomes where you’re from, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. I’m almost starting to be from here no matter how much I hate it. Who would have thought Nebraska? Who would have thought I’d be dull?”

A silk camisole slid off the top of the bureau and fluttered to the floor.

“I don’t know about dull,” said Lucille, shaking her head.

“Don’t tell me how I am unless you’re prepared to listen to how you are.” My mother sat up and covered her mouth, as if keeping something inside she knew shouldn’t be said. I wondered why she never felt the need to restrain herself when it came to me.

Lucille sighed, bent over, and started picking up clothes and folding them slowly against her apron. When her skin got dry, the brown knuckles turned chalky like the streaks in her hair. Her hands would catch on silk, the tablecloth, even my cotton nightgown when she rubbed my back, whispering all the little things she could remember about my grandfather. Lucille’s words were like photographs. Sometimes I could feel him breathing or smell his cigarettes just behind the wall. I used to sit in the living room armchair where he had died of a heart attack and close my eyes, leaning my head against the side of the chair, trying to imagine what it felt like to die. “Crazy child,” Lucille had said once, when she came in to dust. “You shouldn’t go around practicing to be dead. They don’t give prizes.”

*   *   *

My mother shimmied off the bed and stood up. An autumn wind beat the side of the house. “I thought we were friends,” she said to Lucille.

“I thought so too,” Lucille said.

“You’ve given up the right to think that.”

“That’s too bad.” Lucille shook her head.

“Will you come back and visit?” I asked, but my mother didn’t give Lucille a chance to answer.

“Of course she won’t. Why would anyone ever come back here?”

I thought about all the children I had known when we lived in Chicago. At one time, I could never imagine not knowing them. Now I had no idea what those little girls looked like or who they had become. The world could change because of one person’s decision to do something, but I had a feeling I would never be the one to decide anything.

Charles Starkweather had decided to kill Mr. and Mrs. Bowman four years ago because he said his girlfriend had wanted him to. Now people locked their doors and worried about their own children turning into monsters. Now the Bowmans’ son had no parents. He still lived in the white house on South 24th Street where it had all happened, not far from where we lived now. Some of his relatives had moved in to help him.

Thinking about my own mother dying, the peonies, the consoling words people would offer, I wanted to kneel down beside her and put my head in her lap and tell her I loved her, even though I wasn’t at all sure I did. But my mother stood up suddenly and turned to Lucille. “Look, I’ve made a mess. I don’t mean to be so horrible. I’m sorry, I’m just heartbroken.” She walked toward me, still looking at the floor. She passed me in the doorway. I brushed my fingers across my mother’s arm, but she didn’t feel it.

*   *   *

The following week Lucille left and my mother stayed in her room, not making a sound. Outside, men in green jackets cut down the elms, which were ancient and beautiful and gave the streets in our part of town a sense of belonging. Lined with stumps, the driveway looked shocked. Our house seemed lost, its yellow paint cracked like a tired old face. There were no sweets in the kitchen, and my bed was still unmade when I’d get back into it at night. I missed the Charleston Chews Lucille always left for me beneath the dust ruffle. Suddenly I didn’t have any clean clothes. Sometimes I’d come home from school almost expecting to find Lucille mopping the kitchen floor or standing at the foot of the stairs with her hands on her hips, shaking her head because everything had gone to pot. She would have laughed about how lost we were, and suddenly everything wouldn’t have seemed so hopeless.

One afternoon, I went into the living room to watch television and all the curtains were lying in large tan heaps on the rug like slaughtered animals. The house was silent. Flecks of dust sparkled in the dim afternoon sunlight. I could hear my breath. I didn’t go up to my mother’s room to ask what had happened. I watched myself in the tall gilt mirror, a figure moving far away out of the corner of someone’s eye. I could pass through a room without changing a thing, not even the air. I waited for my father to get home from work. I sat at the foot of the stairs and just stayed there as the sun set and the house got dark.

“Look what she did,” I said, as my father came through the door, but he just sighed. He made himself a drink without saying a word. Then he got out the ladder, and I handed up the heavy fabric, while he threaded the brass rings back along the rods.

I overheard my parents talking about it later. They were in the kitchen. I was doing homework at the dining room table, trying to remember the Pythagorean theorem. “What came over you?” my father wanted to know. She didn’t like the drapes. They made her feel trapped. I was so tired of hearing about the way she felt. The bouquet on the side table had wilted and turned brown. I took my pencil between my thumb and forefinger and knocked over the vase with the pink nub of the eraser. There wasn’t any water left. A rain of dried petals sprayed over the rug. Those petals seemed to sum up the change that had come over our lives. After Lucille left. Before the snow.

*   *   *

I went up to my room and got out that old newspaper clipping. I unfolded the article by the soft glow from the lamp with the pink shade I’d had for as long as I could remember and studied the victims’ faces. I don’t know what I was expecting to see—a high school pin, a piece of jewelry, some little detail that would say This was me, the type of person I was. But there wasn’t anything about those photos I hadn’t noticed before. Caril Ann still grinned and Starkweather looked proud. Those pictures weren’t enough.

On my way home from school the next day, I didn’t turn right on Van Dorn. I walked past our street and went up South 24th where the Bowmans and their maid had been murdered. I wanted to see what the house looked like after all this time. I was a detective, the only one who hadn’t given up on the case. Stealing a glance over the fence at the spotless windows, that perfect white paint, those carefully clipped bushes on either side of the front door, I felt shut out, and I wanted so badly to crawl inside.

If I had been there at the time, in the thick of it all, I would have understood that pain. I wished I’d lived in Lincoln when Starkweather and his girlfriend were driving around killing everyone. I tried to imagine what that had been like, citizens forming vigilante posses, torches burning through the night. It would have been a time worth remembering my whole life long.

Red leaves drifted onto the sidewalk. I tried to see through the walls, to the awful heart of the mystery. I pictured Mr. and Mrs. Bowman lying dead with their arms around each other even though I knew their bodies hadn’t been found that way. He had been just inside the door. She had been tied up somewhere. I had never even seen the Bowman boy, but I wanted to ask him how it felt to lose your parents and be lord of the manor like that all of a sudden, to sit in the stiff-backed chairs feeling so desperate and alone, listening for the ghosts. Maybe the Bowman boy got drunk and covered his ears every night to shut out the past, the way my mother tried to shut out other things. I told myself he was the sort of person I’d have something to say to, someone who needed caring for.

When I turned around to go, Cora Lessing stood glaring at me with one hand on the neighbor’s gate. I had no idea how long she’d been there, watching me. I pretended I wasn’t surprised to see her, like I was just on my way home from somewhere. The wind blew red hair across her wide pale face. She looked wild, almost, among the falling leaves. She had hated me since that day in school when I had hurt her. I could see it in the way she stood. I didn’t really blame her. “I know what you’re doing!” she said sourly.

“I’m not doing anything.” I held my canvas bag to my chest.

“They don’t like it when people stare. That’s what you’re doing.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“I live next door.” I turned to look. Cora’s was a gray-shingled house with a wide front porch. It was ordinary in every way and yet special in being so near to a tragic place. Those windows must have seen such terrible things. I wondered how much Cora knew about the day when it had happened. It was my duty to find out. I was on a covert mission, under cover. I smiled.

Cora looked down at her feet. She opened the gate and closed it behind her and started up the path to her front door.

“Wait,” I said. “I need to ask you something,” though I couldn’t think of any sort of question. It was too late. She kept walking and didn’t look back. The wind picked up and blew my skirt against my knees, and I felt a strange sense of guilt for the way I had treated her. I hugged my arms around myself and started for home, and when I got to our block I walked softly, as if I could creep up on an unfolding secret.

My mother was standing by the window, just inside the front door, with her hands on her hips. She must have been watching me pick my way down the path. When I put my key in the lock, she pulled me inside quickly and slammed the door behind me, as if the cold air had bitten her. She was wearing her blue dress with the brass buttons, her white pumps, her fire-red lipstick.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Nowhere.” Outside, it was getting dark. All the lights in the house were off. My mother grabbed the wool sleeve of my peacoat and pulled me through the foyer into the living room, which was stuffy and silent. Heavy shadows draped the furniture. “How was school?” my mother asked.

“The same as always,” I said.

“Your hair’s a mess,” she added, taking me by the shoulders and holding me away from her as if looking at me for the first time. “Do you always walk around like that? Want me to brush it for you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“Why not?” She frowned and pushed my hair back behind my ear and looked me in the eyes.

I didn’t answer her.

“Let’s listen to records and redo the living room.” My mother walked over to the phonograph. “Now that Lucille’s gone we can do what we want with this old place. I’ve got lots of ideas.”

“I like it how it is,” I said.

My mother put on my Chubby Checker record, which meant she’d been digging around in my room.

When she turned around and put her hand on the back of my grandfather’s chair, I noticed she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring.

“Where did you get that record?” I asked her.

“I’m only trying to talk to you. You don’t have to be so rude,” she said, staring into my face. “I’m always making an effort and no one’s ever returning it.”

“Why aren’t you wearing your ring?” I said.

My mother put her hands on her hips. “I’m changing my look. I’m doing the Twist.” She came over to me where I stood by the bookcase and grabbed me by the arm. I pulled away from her. Later, I wished I’d gone along with her, my mother and I doing the Twist all over the living room. It would have been something to remember.

“Hey,” she said. “Let’s break all the old furniture by accident so your father will have to get all new furniture. It’ll be our own things then.” Her eyes were sparkling in the dim light.

I shook my head. “You’ll make Daddy angry.”

“Thank God!” my mother cried. “At least someone besides me would be angry in this house.”

I thought of Starkweather’s face sitting in my drawer, that proud smirk. “I’m angry,” I said, but I’m not sure she heard me, because suddenly she sat down and put her hand over her heart and took a deep breath. “Oh,” she said, and started to cry. I thought I could see the tears falling into her lap. “God,” she sobbed, and looked up at me with her brow wrinkled and her beautiful gypsy eyes blurred with red. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

“Do you know who I am?” she said. “Do you have any idea?”

“My mother?” But maybe it wasn’t even true. Maybe that explained it.

“Sometimes I don’t feel like one. I don’t feel like anything.”

I couldn’t think of another thing to say, so I just stood there pulling a knot out of my hair.

“I’m so alone in this big house,” she went on, opening and closing her fist. “No one gives me a chance. No one ever really does. It’s true.”

She was letting me know I was part of the problem. I couldn’t help failing her. I imagined my uncle finding my mother alone in the Erie, Pennsylvania, hotel room on the bed in her slip. I imagined he had sat there staring at her back, too shocked to touch her or say anything because he couldn’t tell whether she had become herself in that hotel room, alone, or the opposite of herself. My mother seemed to me then like someone who could drag the whole world down around her, someone like Starkweather. She could swallow everyone and everything.

On the other side of the garden, the sun came out from behind its blanket of clouds, shining through the branches of our one remaining elm. My pupils shrank in the light. All the dark color turned white.

“I have to go do something,” I said, turning my back on her. I marched upstairs, closed my bedroom door, pressed my ear to the white wood, and listened. But there wasn’t a sound anywhere in the house. Only the cars sliding past on Van Dorn, quick and soft as whispers.

*   *   *

Before my father got home, my mother went up to her bedroom and made as if she’d never left it. I tried to fix my hair the way I thought my mother might like it, in a folded-over bun at the nape of my neck like Lucille used to do for me. The hairs were sticking out everywhere. I couldn’t get it right. Later, after my father had come downstairs, I knocked on her door anyway. “Go to the country club and get a hamburger or something,” she said from behind the door. “And leave me out of it. You can tell your father that!”

I found my father at his desk with his elbows on the stained blotter, still wearing his tie, twirling a pencil between his fingers, the lime in his untouched drink floating along the rim of the crystal glass. He hadn’t changed a thing in the study since the death of my grandfather. Even the files in the drawers were the same; he had picked up right where his father left off. When I saw him at his desk like this, not doing anything, or out on the garden bench, bracing his feet against the elm tree as the dusk came on, I assumed he was thinking about my mother. He seemed more passionate about her than anything else in the world.

When I cleared my throat, my father looked up, startled. “These figures won’t add up,” he said, putting the pencil down and shaking his head.

“Mother says to go to the club without her. Just us. We can get hamburgers.”

My father sat there looking puzzled for a moment. “She hates the living room couch,” he said. “She wants to drag it into the garage and burn it. She called me out of a meeting today to say she was going to do it all by herself.” He looked at me. “I hope you understand the value of a buck.”

I nodded my head. I felt that my father was speaking to me as if I were an adult, looking to me for an answer. I moved up close to the desk and put my fingers on the smooth surface. I didn’t speak for a moment. “She’s not wearing her ring,” I said.

My father sighed and loosened his tie. “Oh, she’s just dancing her dance.” But his face didn’t tell me he believed that.

His face told me he thought we were in trouble, and maybe we really were. Maybe she wasn’t just acting, trying for my father’s attention. Maybe it was real. I pictured my mother holding a gun to her head as bitter tears poured down her face. They’d have a picture of her in the paper just like the murder victims. Yes, I would say when all the people asked, we’re hanging in there. I took a breath. “She’s gone wacko, Daddy.”

“Watch your mouth,” my father snapped, rapping his knuckles on the desk and staring at me like he couldn’t believe what I had said. “I can’t have you talking that way about your mother. She’s upset about Lucille. You need to understand that. And your mother and I are a team.”

Tears tickled my cheeks as I closed my eyes, trying to trap them beneath my lids.

My father didn’t say anything more for a moment. I could hear his chair squeaking as he leaned back. The leather sighed. When I opened my eyes, he was looking at me with his forehead wrinkled and his arms folded over his chest. “Come here, Puggy,” he said, patting his knee. I went over and sat down on his lap, my feet touching the floor. He put his arms around me and kissed the back of my head. I’ll always remember the smell of his embrace: aftershave and, more faintly, the few sips of gin he’d taken of his after-work gimlet. “She’s fed up with me,” he said. “That’s all.”

*   *   *

When we came home from the country club that night, every room in the house was dark. We stepped into the shadowed foyer, flicked on the light, and wiped our feet on the mat. My mother was sitting halfway up the stairs in her bathrobe, waiting for us with her hands folded over her knees. I almost didn’t see her.

My parents stared at each other in uncomfortable silence.

“What’s this all about?” my father said. “Why are you sitting here in the dark, Ann? You locked me out.”

“Don’t be harsh, Thatcher,” she snapped. She pressed her nose into a tissue clutched in her fist and snaked her other hand along the banister. Her fingertips traced the ridges in the cherry wood. “You don’t love me, do you?” she said.

I waited for my father to tell her how I was the one who felt unloved. I waited for him to say that maybe she should think a little about her daughter. But he didn’t.

“You’re not wearing your ring,” he said instead. I went to hang my coat in the closet.

“We need new furniture. I’m suffocating. Everything’s even more dead without the trees. I need to be taken on a vacation. To a forest,” she said. “You don’t know how upset I am about those trees.” Everything was about what she needed. It took so much work to love her.

My father looked down at his hands. “Next time Capital builds a bridge.”

“What do you mean?”

Everything was silent for a moment, but there was money in the air.

“Are we poor?” I whispered, but nobody answered.

My mother narrowed her eyes at my father. “Did you let Lucille go, Thatcher? Tell me.”

My father didn’t say anything.

“Did you fire her?”

“No,” he said. “Calm down.” But he wouldn’t look at her.

My mother started down the stairs, but she had been drinking. She tripped and came toward us suddenly, sliding on her back down the remaining steps. I wanted to yell. My brain tingled at the thought of broken bones, my mother’s head smacking the banister.

She landed at the bottom of the stairs with her silk robe up around her hips, exposing her underwear. In the still moment before she covered herself, I could see her thighs threaded with spider veins, blue shadows beneath dry skin. She tugged the robe down.

My father went over to her and tried to help her up but she wouldn’t let him.

My mother was crying. She got on her hands and knees and pulled herself up by the banister.

“You’ve had too much to drink,” my father said, touching her on the shoulder.

“Leave me alone!” my mother sobbed.

“Ann.”

“You fired her, Thatcher.”

“I didn’t fire anyone. Why do you insist on that?”

“My sense tells me so.”

“We don’t have any money. Did you sense that?”

“You fired her.”

“I wouldn’t fire her.”

“I feel all wrong.”

“About us?”

“I’m always alone. I thought things would be different,” she sobbed. “This isn’t the way I pictured it. Any of it.”

I went into my father’s study. I sat down at his desk and looked out the window at the jagged outline of the neighbors’ trees. The sky was dark. I thought about the day my father pulled our Chevrolet crammed with suitcases into the driveway, and my mother didn’t want to get out of the car. It was hot, mid-July, and the air hung thick. My grandfather’s house was closed up and silent as if holding his death behind the shutters. The roses along the driveway had dropped petals onto the dusty gravel. Everything was scorched. My mother just sat there shaking her head as the car cooled down. “It’s not like I remember,” she said to my father. “It’s even worse.”

*   *   *

I heard my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs above the study. They paused on the landing and faded away, and then I couldn’t hear a sound. When I went into the foyer, my mother had pulled a chair up beside the telephone table. Her back was to me. She held the white receiver up to her ear. The curled wire dangled over the floor. A small circle of light fell over her shoulders. “You’re not listening,” she whispered into the telephone.