Friday, I sit in the tent for an hour with nothing. My mind is edgy. The canvas is hot. The only memories I can summon up—birthdays, trips to Disneyland—look suspiciously like the photos I’ve seen multiple times in Aunt Minn’s carefully constructed scrapbooks. I consider canceling the weekend plan with Vicky to clear my head, claiming illness, or yard sale conflicts, but whatever reason I give she will surely smoke out; when I was in high school, she caught me in every lie I told about why I was past curfew or who I might be meeting, even if it was all motivated by Deena and her dubious online dating plans. Plus, she’s stubborn. One time, she got all her middle school classmates to write notes to Aunt Minn and Uncle Stan so she could go on the field trip to Descanso Gardens instead of her previously scheduled visit to the dentist. A few of the notes are still on the fridge, so many years later, yellowed by time: “Let V. join the botanists!” “Floral, not fluoride!” Burbank is actually named for a dentist, so it was, in its way, a layered rebellion. She went on the trip, of course; the dental appointment was not at all pressing. Later, Aunt Minn confessed to me during another one of our late-night dimmed living room glass-of-wine confession talks that she’d heard that some people received actual radio transmissions through their metallic fillings and she had wanted to go to the dentist that day to replace those in her daughter because, she told me, looking away, if Vicky ever did happen to hear voices, she wanted to be very, very clear where they were coming from.
She and I sat together in the living room that night, in silence. Vicky went to Descanso and frolicked around the orange fences of the Japanese garden, and at a later date, had her fillings switched to composite. As did I.