Our mother shuts the window but the rickety frame is old, and large triangles of yellowed glass break loose from fractures in the pane and fall on her shoulders and clatter to the floor sounding like dinner plates come crashing down from shelves.

“Oh, Mom,” we say. We tell her to come away from the window and she picks up glass shards and sails them out over our lot and the fat neighbor walks in and says, “That is exactly how they threw them at me.” She means the Chinese stars the gang boys threw at her on the subway trains. Our mother walks to the garbage pile, sitting in one of the broken-legged chairs whose wicker seat is propped by a full plastic bag. Our mother sinks down. The fat neighbor stands sweaty under our hot skylight. The dog in the corner growls a low, constant growl at her. Our mother fluffs the garbage bags around her like pillows.

The fat neighbor says, “May I?” and takes a seat too on the pile of garbage where it really sinks down and compresses. The old greasy bags burst at the seams as she sits and garbage falls out—balled tin foil that once lined broiling pans, butter wrappers, and moth-ravaged sweaters.

The fat neighbor lifts our garbage up and tries to tuck it back into the bags, apologizing, and our mother nods her head. Then the fat neighbor asks for a glass of water and drinks it quickly and then goes to the wall and holds the glass up, listening to what she can hear on the other side, her loft. She says she swears he is having an affair. She has seen the other woman leaving their downstairs front door, and she has passed her in the hallway and has smelled him on the woman’s long hair, has even seen, she says, red hair, the same as his, tangled in the woman’s black.

“So?” our mother says and our mother snaps her fingers at us and we bring her a cigarette and she lights it and smokes.

The fat neighbor lowers her head and big tears fall down her face and would hit the floor, except that she’s so fat and the tears hit her belly instead.

“Maybe I didn’t mean ‘so,’” our mother says. “Maybe I meant ‘big deal,’” she says. “Or not ‘big deal,’ but ‘merde.’ Maybe I simply meant ‘merde.’” Our mother keeps her cigarette between her lips and holds out her hands so that we lift her up and she can go to our fat neighbor and pat our fat neighbor on the back. Then our mother takes the glass from the fat neighbor’s hand and she holds it up against the wall herself and listens. Our mother starts to laugh.

“What?” our fat neighbor says.

Our mother says it sounds like two men. Our mother asks if our fat neighbor is sure it isn’t two men over there on the other side of the wall. Our fat neighbor shakes her head. Our mother says it sounds like two old men to boot. Our mother laughs louder.

“Two old men huffing and wheezing and who can’t figure out in which hole to put it,” she says.

The neighbor starts out our door. We can still hear her crying.

“Merde,” our mother says and wipes her eyes of her own tears from laughing. “Drop by any time,” our mother yells to our neighbor who we can now hear walking in the hall, the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling shaking from the weight of her footsteps hitting the floor.

Our father is with us everywhere in the house. He stands in front of us like Manolo’s outlined women. He is in front of Jody, I’m sure, in an orchard picking apples, giving her the reddest ones. He is in front of Louisa, too, the morning after a night of heavy rain, pointing to a grassy field covered in mushrooms. He is in front of our mother, or on our mother in the dark bed, the sweat on his head sparkling in street light coming in from a window, the phosphorescence of the bald.

He is in front of me, not drunk, not stumbling, but sitting in a chair, clearing his throat as if he will talk, ready to call my name, but he never does. Perhaps he brushes shoulders with Manolo’s curvy women, or even Jochen’s paint-stained fingers press upon his arm, steering him through the length of our house.

The silk saffron-colored pants have a hole in the seat. A small hole, but still, one that I worry will split wide open in Metal or English or Spanish. I stop wearing the pants and Ma Mère tells me it’s about time, their bright color was starting to make her sick.

I sit across the street from John on the curb in the park. He waves me over and asks me where I’ve been. He shows me three Hersheys held fanned out like a poker hand and asks me to pick the one that I want. Nuts and no nuts and dark. I take all three with one hand, and stick them in the back of my jeans pocket.

“There’s my girl,” John says and he rubs his hand through my hair and he tells me he is going away. He is going back home on a plane to see if he can find his wife and children. He has saved enough one-dollar bills in ten cigar boxes that he plunked down at the travel agent’s to pay for his ticket and his only regret is that he has not saved enough money to pay for new teeth and when he finds his wife she might only see an old man with a hole in his head.

“What about your children?” I say. “How will they know you?”

“They won’t,” he says.