Our father has a sister we have never seen. Her name is Lydia and she lives in California. Every Christmas she sends boxes that smell of hickory and beneath the cellophane grass are smoky links of sausage and soft cheese in glass jars and bonuses of small cheap butter knives.

“This is what we get,” our mother says, ripping open the plastic on a smoked sausage with her teeth and dipping it into the cheese, “because they’re not blood. Poor adopted Lydia, she’s lucky though, not to be related to her brother.”

I can mind-bend the flowered butter knife in half so that it breaks in two. “You’re really getting good at that,” our mother says, pointing with her sausage at my bent knife.

Maybe Lydia knows where he is, we start thinking. “Let’s call her,” I say. We brush away the cellophane grass, searching for the sunny address in L.A. The ringing phone we picture on a bright countertop next to bowls of ripe green avocados and a Mexican maid named Guadeloupe who is busy on her knees, her cross around her neck swinging back and forth on a chain with every arthritic movement of her well-worn scrubbing hand. Lydia in the garden. Birds of Paradise surrounding her as she sits in her painted white ironwork fanbacked chair, bringing to her lips a glass of fruity coolness, the sky a perfect blue above.

“Oh, Lydia,” our mother says, “you’ll never guess who.”

Lydia knows.

“Incredible,” our mother says. “After all these years,” she says. Our Aunt Lydia hasn’t heard from our father, not since a year ago when he called and begged to borrow money and she lent it to him.

Our mother comes home giggling. There’s a man from her office named Bob and she’s dating him and she’s going to leave us alone for two nights while she goes away with him for the weekend. We ask where she’s going, we picture New England, a wraparound porch with rockers rocking in the wind and the name of the B & B hand-painted on wood that hangs from a post, but it’s New Jersey, Newark, not far from his house, in a motel with curtains backed with foam as thick as rugs to keep out car lights from the nearby highway. We have a fear of New Jersey, we tell her, and she’s the one who gave it us.

“Not Jersey,” we say, “all the fires,” we say. She holds her hand to her mouth, she cannot stop giggling.

“Leave us the number,” we say. “Who knows what will happen while you’re away? Call us every day.” We look for her from the pier, sitting on the hood of Manolo’s car, leaning back against the windshield. We use binoculars and look for fires. We find smoke.

“Those could be the small beginnings of great fires or just what’s put out from smokestacks along the river,” Louisa says.

Manolo opens the car door and comes out stretching and yawning. In his waistband is a small bottle of scotch, which he pulls out and drinks and holds up in a toast out toward the water, saying, “To your mother, may she fuck her brains out.”

“How sweet,” Louisa says, and she lifts up her foot and kicks at Manolo’s bottle so that it falls and skates across the pier.

“Ah, carai,” Manolo says. “You remind me of a woman I was once in love with,” he tells Louisa.

“Tell me, did she look like this,” Louisa says and with her hand outlines in the cold air a curvy shape.

“Sí, sí, Maria was her name. She had a beauty mark, right here and here,” and Manolo points to places on his chest.

“They’re called nipples,” Louisa says.

Manolo laughs. “You girls know everything, don’t you? Well, she had nipples and she had the beauty marks too. I called her ‘cuatro pechos,’ four breasts, you know,” he says. He shakes his head and smiles, remembering.

She touches the foam-backed curtains, sees that they’ve been burned with cigarette holes. Bob has gone for ice, she can hear him filling the bucket down the hall. Car lights still make their way in where the curtains don’t quite meet the window frame. A circle of light shines on the wall, as if a home movie were about to be shown, but the lens isn’t focused yet. What is the film? she thinks. Is it of the Christmas where they drew the tree on the wall instead of buying one? Cal nailing small nails into the wall where he strung the lights and hung the decorations. One of the girls, she can’t remember who, touching the drawn bows on the drawn presents on the wall, trying to pull one of the ends, unwrap a gift that someday would be whitewashed away. From the street, through the window, it looked real, and they preferred looking at it from outside. She went out with Cal after the children were in bed. They stood side by side and she reached out to hold his arm in hers, and he lifted up his arm and she thought he was doing it to put his arm around her shoulders, to bring her close, but he was doing it to point, he was looking at lights from planes in the sky, marveling at how close two came to crashing, and when they didn’t, he was disappointed.

“Wouldn’t that have been something?” he said to her, “if those two planes had wrecked above us?” And she had thought they already had, she was sure any moment they would see suitcases falling, opening as they fell through the sky, folded clothing and toothbrushes raining down.

They went back inside and Cal turned off the Christmas tree lights and she tucked blankets up around her sleeping children’s chins and knocked twice for luck, lightly, on a wooden desk.

Bob wears glasses and says he is lucky he does because the ice machine shoots ice chips. The ice has left frosty shavings on his pants, at his zipper, where they melt and spread across as if the stain had come from him, as if he had, she thinks, and hopes, already done something without her back behind the ice machine in the dark corner of the hotel lobby. That over, now they could just have their drinks, sit across from each other in the room, watch the headlights from the cars pass over each others’ faces and then return again to darkness. But Bob comes close to her. Standing, he holds her hand and it’s cold and she pulls away and he says, “Sorry, it’s from the ice.”

He takes his glasses off and puts them folded on top of the television. They are so heavy, the frames and the lens both so thick, and she wants to tell him to put them back on, because how can he see without them? To him she must now appear as a blur. He wants to kiss her, she knows. She goes into the bathroom with her drink, saying she’ll be right out. In the bathroom she looks at herself, at her bloodshot eyes, the small veins like red scattered roads and branching streams.

She runs the water so that he’ll think she’s washing her hands, but what she does is swallow her drink in gulps. When she comes out of the bathroom Bob is on the bed, his glasses still off, and he is patting the bed, asking why she doesn’t come and lie down next to him. She goes to the foam-backed curtain, tries to draw it closed closer to the wall to keep out the car lights, but the curtain won’t move. She goes behind the curtain, stands in front of the window, her hands on the cold glass looking out at the oncoming cars, and then she feels Bob behind her, he is reaching around her with the curtain still between them, through the foam she can softly feel what must be his hands moving over her breasts, trying to cup them and squeeze them, and then he is pressing her up against the glass, her face now turned to the side and he is lifting up the curtain and lifting up her skirt and pulling down her hose and her panties and she thinks it’s all right, she can do this. Her eyes open, she looks down at the cars, thinks what the drivers must see, some woman’s cheek pressed against glass, her hands pushing against the glass for balance, her hose around her ankles, the curtain moving back and forth behind her as if strange shapes were struggling, trying to find a way out, a way to breathe.