After the Parade

1

Aaron had gotten a late start — some mix-up at the U-Haul office that nobody seemed qualified to fix — so it was early afternoon when he finally began loading the truck, nearly eight when he finished. He wanted to drive away right then but could not imagine setting out so late. It was enough that the truck sat in the driveway packed, declaring his intention. Instead, he took a walk around the neighborhood, as was his nightly habit, had been his nightly habit since he and Walter moved here nine years earlier. He always followed the same route, designed with the neighborhood cats in mind. He knew where they all lived, had made up names for each of them — Falstaff and Serial Mom, Puffin and Owen Meany — and when he called to them using these names, they stood up from wherever they were hiding and ran down to the sidewalk to greet him.

He passed the house of the old woman who, on many nights, though not this one, watched for him from her kitchen window and then hurried out with a jar that she could not open. She called him by his first name and he called her Mrs. Trujillo, since she was surely twice his age, and as he twisted the lid off a jar of honey or instant coffee, they engaged in pleasantries, establishing that they were both fine, that they had enjoyed peaceful, ordinary days, saying the sorts of things that Aaron had grown up in his mother’s café hearing people say to one another. As a boy, he had dreaded such talk, for he had been shy and no good at it, but as he grew older, he had come to appreciate these small nods at civility.

Of course, Mrs. Trujillo was not always fine. Sometimes, her back was acting up or her hands were numb. She would hold them out toward him, as though the numbness were something that could be seen, and when he put the jar back into them, he said, “Be careful now, Mrs. Trujillo. Think what a mess you’d have with broken glass and honey.” Maybe he made a joke that wasn’t really funny, something about all those ants with bleeding tongues, and she would laugh the way that people who are very lonely laugh, paying you the only way they know how. She always seemed sheepish about mentioning her ailments, sheepish again when he inquired the next time whether she was feeling better, yet for years they had engaged in this ritual, and as he passed her house that last night, he felt relief at her absence. Still, when he let his mind stray to the future, to the next night and the one after, the thought of Mrs. Trujillo looking out the window with a stubborn jar of spaghetti sauce in her hands made his heart ache.

Aaron picked up his pace, almost ran to Falstaff’s house, where he crouched on the sidewalk and called softly to the portly fellow, waiting for him to waddle off the porch that was his stage. At nine, he returned from his walk and circled the truck, double-checking the padlock because he knew there would come a moment during the night when he would lie there thinking about it, and this way he would have an image that he could pull up in his mind: the padlock, secured.

A week earlier, Aaron had gone into Walter’s study with a list of the household items that he planned to take with him. He found Walter at his desk, a large teak desk that Walter’s father had purchased in Denmark in the 1950s and shipped home. He had used the desk throughout his academic career, writing articles that added up to books about minor Polish poets, most of them long dead, and then it had become Walter’s. Aaron loved the desk, which represented everything for which he had been longing all those years ago when Walter took him in and they began their life together: a profession that required a sturdy, beautiful desk; a father who cared enough about aesthetics to ship a desk across an ocean; a life, in every way, different from his own.

Though it was just four in the afternoon, Walter was drinking cognac — Spanish cognac, which he preferred to French — and later Aaron would realize that Walter had already known that something was wrong. Aaron stood in the office doorway, reading the list aloud — a set of bed linens, a towel, a cooking pot, a plate, a knife, cutlery. “Is there anything on the list that you prefer I not take?” he asked.

Walter looked out the window for what seemed a very long time. “I saved you, Aaron,” he said at last. His head sank onto his desk, heavy with the memories it contained.

“Yes,” Aaron agreed. “Yes, you did. Thank you.” He could hear the stiffness in his voice and regretted — though could not change — it. This was how he had let Walter know that he was leaving.

* * *

Walter had already tended to his “nightly ablutions,” as he termed the process of washing one’s face and brushing one’s teeth, elevating the mundane by renaming it. He was in bed, so there seemed nothing for Aaron to do but retire as well, except he had nowhere to sleep. He had packed the guest bed, a futon with a fold-up base, and they had never owned a typical couch, only an antique Javanese daybed from Winnie’s store in Minneapolis. Winnie was Walter’s sister, though from the very beginning she had felt more like his own. Sleeping on the daybed would only make him think of her, which he did not want. He had not even told Winnie that he was leaving. Of course, he could sleep with Walter, in the space that he had occupied for nearly twenty years, but it seemed to him improper—that was the word that came to mind — to share a bed with the man he was leaving. His dilemma reminded him of a story that Winnie had told him just a few weeks earlier, during one of their weekly phone conversations. Winnie had lots of stories, the pleasure — and the burden — of owning a small business.

“I’m a captive audience,” she had explained to him and Walter once. “I can’t just lock up and leave. People know that on some level, but it suits their needs to act as though we’re two willing participants. Sometimes they talk for hours.”

“They are being presumptuous, presumptuous and self-involved,” Walter had said. Walter hated to waste time, hated to have his wasted. “Just walk away.”

Aaron knew that she would not, for he and Winnie were alike: they understood that the world was filled with lonely people, whom they did not begrudge these small moments of companionship.

The story that Winnie had called to tell him was about a customer of hers, Sally Forth. (“Yes, that’s really her name,” Winnie had added before he could ask.) Sally Forth and her husband had just returned from a ten-day vacation in Turkey, about which she had said to Winnie, pretrip: “It’s a Muslim country, you know. Lots of taboos in the air, and those are always good for sex.” Sally Forth was a woman impressed with her own naughtiness, a woman endlessly amused by the things that came out of her mouth. The first morning, as she and her husband sat eating breakfast in their hotel restaurant and discussing the day’s itinerary, her husband turned to her and requested a divorce. Winnie said that Sally Forth was the type of person who responded to news — good or bad — loudly and demonstratively, without considering her surroundings. Thus, Sally Forth, who was engaged in spreading jam on a piece of bread, reached across the table and ground the bread against her husband’s chest, the jam making a red blotch directly over his heart. “Why would you bring me all the way to Turkey to tell me you want a divorce?” Sally Forth screamed, and her husband replied, “I thought you’d appreciate the gesture.”

Winnie and Aaron had laughed together on the phone, not at Sally Forth or even at her husband but at this strange notion that proposing divorce required etiquette similar to that of proposing marriage — a carefully chosen moment, a grand gesture.

Sally Forth and her husband stayed in Turkey the whole ten days, during which her husband did not mention divorce again. By the time the vacation was over, she thought of his request as something specific to Turkey, but after they had collected their luggage at the airport back home in Minneapolis, Sally Forth’s husband hugged her awkwardly and said that he would be in touch about “the details.”

“I feel like such an idiot,” she told Winnie. “But we kept sleeping in the same bed. If you’re really leaving someone, you don’t just get into bed with them, do you?”

And then, Sally Forth had begun to sob.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Winnie told Aaron sadly. “I wanted to hug her, but you know how I am about that, especially at work. I actually tried. I stepped toward her, but I couldn’t do it. It seemed disingenuous — because we’re not friends. I don’t even like her. So I just let her stand there and cry.”

As Aaron finished brushing his teeth, he tried to remember whether he and Winnie had reached any useful conclusions about the propriety of sharing a bed with the person one was about to leave, but he knew that they had not. Winnie had been focused solely on what she regarded as her failure to offer comfort.

“Sometimes,” he had told her, “the hardest thing to give people is the thing we know they need the most.” When he said this, he was trying to work up the courage to tell her that he was leaving Walter, but he had stopped there so that his comment seemed to refer to Winnie’s treatment of Sally Forth, which meant that he had failed Winnie also.

He went into the bedroom and turned on the corner lamp. The room looked strange without his belongings. Gone were the rows of books and the gifts from his students, as well as the Indonesian night table that Winnie had given him when he and Walter moved from Minnesota to New Mexico. It was made from recycled wood, old teak that had come from a barn or railroad tracks or a chest for storing rice — Winnie was not sure what exactly. For Aaron, just knowing that the table had had another life was enough. When he sat down on his side of the bed, Walter did not seem to notice. That was the thing about a king-size bed: its occupants could lead entirely separate lives, never touching, oblivious to the other’s presence or absence.

“Walter,” he said, but there was no reply. He crawled across the vast middle ground of the bed and shook Walter’s shoulder.

“Enh,” said Walter, a sound that he often made when he was sleeping, so Aaron considered the possibility that he was not faking sleep.

“Is it okay if I sleep here?” he asked, but Walter, treating the question as a prelude to an argument, said, “I’m too tired for this right now. Let’s talk in the morning.” And so Aaron spent his last night with Walter in their bed, trying to sleep, trying because he could not stop thinking about the fact that everything he owned was sitting in the driveway — on wheels nonetheless — which meant that every noise became the sound of his possessions being driven away into the night. He was reminded of something that one of his Vietnamese students, Vu, had said in class during a routine speaking exercise. Vu declared that if a person discovered an unlocked store while walking down the street at night, he had the right to take what he wanted from inside. Until then, Vu had struck him as honest and reliable, so the nonchalance with which Vu stated this opinion had shocked Aaron.

“That’s stealing,” Aaron blurted out, so astonished that he forgot about the purpose of the exercise, which was to get the quieter students talking.

“No,” Vu said, seemingly puzzled by Aaron’s vehemence as well as his logic. “Not stealing. If I destroy lock or break window, this is stealing. If you do not lock door, you are not careful person. You must be responsibility person to own business.” Vu constantly mixed up parts of speech and left off articles, but Aaron did not knock on the desk as he normally did to remind Vu to pay attention to his grammar.

“But you did not pay for these things,” Aaron cried. “I did. We are not required to lock up our belongings. We do so only because there are dishonest people in the world, but locking them up is not what makes them ours. They are ours because we own them.”

Vu regarded him calmly. “When the policeman comes, he will ask, ‘Did you lock this door?’ If you say no, he will not look very well for your things. He will think, ‘This man is careless, and now he makes work for me.’ ”

“I’m not saying it’s a good idea to leave your door unlocked, Vu. I’m only saying that the things inside are mine, whether I remember to lock the door or not.” Belatedly, he had addressed the rest of the class. “What do you guys think?”

They had stared back at him, frightened by his tone. Later, when he tried to understand what had made him so angry, he had come up with nothing more precise than that Vu had challenged the soundness of a code that seemed obvious, inviolable.

Aaron got out of bed to peek at the truck parked in the driveway. He did this several more times. Around three, having risen for the sixth time, he stood in the dark bedroom listening to Walter’s familiar wheezing. Then he put on his clothes and left. As he backed the truck out of the driveway with the headlights off because he did not want them shining in and illuminating the house, the thought came to him that he was like his mother: sneaking away without saying good-bye, disappearing into the night.

All along their street, the houses were lit up with holiday lights. That afternoon, as Aaron carried the first box out to the truck, Walter had blocked the door to ask, “Whatever is going on here?” adding, “It’s nearly Christmas.” In the past, Aaron would have made a joke along the lines of “What, are you a Jew for Jesus now?” They would have laughed, not because it was funny exactly but because of the level of trust it implied. Instead, Aaron had continued loading the truck without answering, and Walter had retreated to his study.

It was quiet at this hour. Driving home from the symphony one night several years earlier, he and Walter had seen a teenage boy being beaten by five other boys in the park just blocks from their house. Though Albuquerque had plenty of crime, their neighborhood was considered safe, a place where people walked their dogs at midnight, so the sight of this — a petty drug deal going bad — startled them. Walter slammed on the brakes and leaped from the car, yelling, “Stop that,” as he and Aaron, dressed in suits and ties, rushed toward the fight. The five boys in hairnets turned and ran, as did the sixth boy, who jumped up and sprinted toward his car, a BMW, and drove off.

Later, in bed, Walter joked, “Nothing more terrifying than two middle-aged fags in suits,” though Aaron was just thirty-five at the time. They laughed, made giddy by the moment and by the more sobering realization that the night could have turned out much different. Walter got up and went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of port, which they sat in bed — the king-size bed — drinking, and though Walter insisted on a lighthearted tone, Aaron took his hand and held it tightly, reminded yet again that Walter was a good man who cared about others.

When Aaron got to the park, he pulled the truck to the curb and turned off the engine, which seemed very loud in the middle of the night. He sat in the dark and cried, thinking about Walter asleep in their bed down the street.

* * *

Aaron was in Gallup buying coffee when the sun rose, approaching Needles, California, when he fell asleep at the wheel, awakening within seconds to the disorienting sight of the grassy median before him. He swerved right, the truck shifting its weight behind him, and found himself on the road again, cars honking all around him, a man in a pickup truck jabbing his middle finger at him and screaming something that he took to be “Asshole!” He was not the sort who came away from close calls energized, nor did he believe in endangering the lives of others. He took the next exit, checked into a motel in Needles, and was soon asleep, the heavy drapes closed tightly against the California sun.

But as he slept, a series of thuds worked their way into his dreams. He awoke suddenly, the room dark and still, and he thought maybe the thudding was nothing more than his own heart. It came again, loud and heavy, something hitting the wall directly behind him. A body, he thought, and then, Not a body. A human being.

He reached out and felt a lamp on the table beside the bed, then fumbled along its base for the switch. From the next room, he heard a keening sound followed by the unmistakable thump of a fist meeting flesh. He slipped on his sneakers. Outside, it was dusk. He ran down a flight of steps and turned left, into the motel lobby. The woman at the desk was the one who had checked him in. He remembered the distrustful way she looked at him when he burst in and declared that he needed a room, so exhausted he could not recall his zip code for the paperwork.

“Call the police,” he said.

She stared at him.

“You need to call the police. A man in the room next to me is beating someone up — a woman, I think, his wife or girlfriend. Someone.” He could see now that beneath her heavy makeup, she was young, maybe twenty, the situation beyond anything for which either her receptionist training or meager years of living had prepared her. “Nine-one-one,” he said slowly, like he was explaining grammar to a student. He reached across the counter, picked up the receiver, and held it out to her. She looked left and right, as if crossing the street. He knew that she was looking for someone besides him.

At last, a switch seemed to flip on inside her. She took a breath and said, “Sir, you’re in room two-fifty-two, correct?” He shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know, but she continued on, his uncertainty fueling her confidence. “It must be two-fifty-three, that couple from Montana. But they had a child with them? Is there a child?” she asked.

“Just call,” he said, and he ran back outside. When he got to room 253, he hesitated, the full weight of his good-fences-make-good-neighbors upbringing bearing down on him. He raised his hand and knocked hard at the door. The room went silent, and he knew that something was very wrong.

“Hello?” he called, making his voice louder because he had learned early on in teaching that volume was the best way to conceal a quaver.

The receptionist came up the steps and stood watching, afraid, he knew, of the responsibility they shared, of the haste with which she had wedded her life to his. “Key?” he mouthed, but she shook her head. He stepped back until he felt the walkway railing behind him and then rushed at the door, doing this again and again until the chain ripped away and he was in.

* * *

The receptionist’s name was Britta. He had heard her spelling it for the policeman who took down their stories as they stood outside the door that Aaron had broken through minutes earlier.

That night she knocked at his room door. “It’s me, Britta,” she called, without adding qualifiers—“the receptionist” or “we saved a boy’s life together this afternoon.”

When he opened the door, she said, “I came to give you an update on Jacob,” but she was carrying a six-pack of beer, which confused him. Still, he invited her in because he could not sleep, could not stop picturing the boy — Jacob — lying on the floor as though he simply preferred it to the bed, as though he had lain down there and gone to sleep. There’d been blood, and the boy’s arm was flung upward and out at an angle that only a broken bone would allow. The mother sat to the side, sobbing about her son from a distance, from the comfort of a chair. She was not smoking but Aaron later thought of her that way, as a woman who sat in a chair and smoked while her husband threw her son against the wall. It was the husband who surprised him most: a small, jovial-looking man with crow’s-feet (duck feet a student had once called them, mistaking the bird) and a face that seemed suited for laughing.

He and Britta did not drink the beer she had brought, though he could see that she wanted to. “It’s still cold,” she said hopefully as she set it down. She would not go further, would not slip a can from the plastic noose without his prompting. She was an employee after all, used to entering these rooms deferentially. Aaron was relieved. He had left behind everything that was familiar, but at least he recognized himself in this person who would not drink beer with a teenager in a cheap motel room in Needles, California.

The beer sat sweating on the desk between the television and the Gideon Bible. “Were you reading the Bible?” Britta asked, for of course she would know that it was generally kept tucked away in the bottom drawer of the desk. He felt embarrassed by the question, though he could see that she considered Bible-reading a normal activity, one to be expected given what had happened earlier.

“Not really,” he said, which was true. He had spent the last three hours not really doing anything. He had tried, and failed at, a succession of activities: sleeping, reading (both the Gideon Bible and Death Comes for the Archbishop, his least favorite Willa Cather book, though he periodically felt obligated to give it another chance), studying the map of California in an attempt to memorize the final leg of his trip, mending a small tear that had appeared in his shirtsleeve, and watching television. When Britta knocked, he had been sitting on the bed listening, the way he had as a child just after his father died and he lay in bed each night straining to hear whether his mother was crying in her room at the other end of the house. Some nights he heard her (gasping sobs that he would be reminded of as an adult when he overheard people having sex) while other nights there was silence.

“Where are you going?” Britta asked him.

“San Francisco,” he said.

She nodded in a way that meant she had no interest in such things: San Francisco specifically, but really the world outside Needles. He tried to imagine himself as Britta, spending his days interacting with people who were on the move, coming from or going to places that he had never seen, maybe never even heard of. Was it possible that she had not once felt the urge to pack up and follow, to solve the mystery of who Britta would be — would become—in Columbus, Ohio, or Roanoke, Virginia? It seemed inconceivable to him, to have no curiosity about one’s parallel lives, those lives that different places would demand that you live.

They sat in silence, he at the foot of the bed and she in the chair beside the desk. He did not know what to say next. “Do you like working at the motel?” he asked finally.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s kind of boring most of the time, but sometimes it’s interesting.”

“Give me an example of something interesting,” he said, his teacher’s voice never far away. “Other than today, of course.”

“Today wasn’t interesting,” she said. “It was scary. I threw up afterward. Weren’t you scared at all?”

“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I was terrified.”

She smiled, and then she began to cry. “Do you think we did the right thing?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “My boyfriend — Lex — he said that it was none of our business. And my boss is this Indian guy — he’s all in a bad mood now because he said it’s bad for business for people to see the cops here.”

Aaron’s first impulse was to ask what her boss’s ethnicity had to do with the rest of her statement, but he did not. He sensed no malice, and the question would only confuse her. “Listen,” he said sternly. “We definitely did the right thing. Okay? We saved a boy’s life.”

His voice broke on the word saved. It seemed he had been waiting his whole life to save this boy, though he did not believe in fate, did not believe that everything in his forty-one years had happened in order to bring him here, to a run-down motel in Needles, California, so that he might save Jacob. No. They were two separate facts: he had saved a life, and he was alone. He had never felt so tired.

“I need to go to bed,” he said, and he stood up.

Britta stood also and picked up her beer, leaving behind six wet circles on the desktop. “He’s in a coma,” she announced as she paused in the doorway. “Jacob. So you see, we might not have saved him. He might die anyway.”

Aaron leaned against the door frame, steadying himself. “At least we gave him a chance,” he said. Then, because he did not have it in him to offer more, he offered this: “You’re a good person, Britta, and that’s important.”

They were standing so close that he could smell alcohol and ketchup on her breath. He imagined her sitting in a car in an empty parking lot somewhere in Needles with her boyfriend, Lex, the two of them eating French fries and drinking beer as she tried to tell Lex about Jacob while Lex rubbed his greasy lips across her breasts.

“Good night,” Aaron said, gently now. He shut the door and pressed his ear to it, waiting to slide the chain into place because he worried she might take the sound of it personally, though later he realized that she would not have thought the chain had anything to do with her. It was a feature of the room, something to be used, like the ice bucket or the small bars of soap in the bathroom.

* * *

When the telephone rang, he sat up fast in the dark and reached for it. “Hello,” he said.

“Front desk,” said the man on the other end. He sounded bored, which reassured Aaron. “You have the U-Haul in the parking lot.”

“Yes,” said Aaron, though the man had not inflected it as a question. “Is something wrong? What time is it?”

“You’ll need to come down to the parking lot. Sir.” The “sir” was an afterthought, and later Aaron knew he should have considered that, should have weighed the man’s reassuring boredom against that pause.

“Now?” said Aaron. “Is something wrong?” But the line had already gone dead.

He looked at the bedside clock. It seemed so long ago that he had been lying beside Walter, worrying about the truck, yet it had been only twenty-four hours. He dressed and ran down the steps to the parking lot, where a man stood beside the truck. Aaron had parked under a light — not intentionally, for he had been too tired for such foresight — and as he got closer, he could see that the man was young, still a boy, with hair that held the shape of a work cap.

“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked. The boy lifted his right hand in a fist and slammed it into Aaron’s stomach.

As a child, Aaron had been bullied — punched, taunted, bitten so hard that his arm swelled — but he had always managed to deflect fights as an adult. It was not easy. He was tall, four inches over six feet, and his height was often seen as a challenge, turning innocent encounters — accidentally jostling someone, for example — into potential altercations. He did not know how to reconcile what other men saw when they looked at him with the image preserved in his mind, that of a small boy wetting himself as his father’s casket was lowered into the ground.

The boy hit him again, and Aaron dropped backward onto his buttocks. “What do you want?” he asked, looking up at the boy.

“I’m Lex,” said the boy.

“Ah, yes, Britta’s friend.”

“Boyfriend,” said the boy.

“Yes, of course,” said Aaron, but something about the way he articulated this angered the boy even more. He jerked back his foot and kicked Aaron hard in the hip. Aaron whimpered. He had learned early on that bullies liked to know they were having an effect.

“What was she doing in there?” asked the boy.

“Where?” said Aaron. “In my room, you mean? We were talking. She was telling me about Jacob, the child we saved this afternoon.”

“So why was she crying then?”

“Crying?” said Aaron.

“She was crying when she came out. I saw her. I was right here the whole time, and I saw her come out of your room. She was crying, and she wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Well,” Aaron said, trying to think of words, which was not easy because he was frightened. He could see the fury in the boy, the fury at being in love with someone he did not understand. “You do realize that people cry. Sometimes we know why they are crying, and sometimes we do not. Britta had an extremely hard day. She saw a child who had been beaten almost to death.”

The boy looked down at him. “She was in your room. You can talk how you like, mister, but she was in your room.”

Aaron realized only then what it was the boy imagined. “I don’t have sex with women,” he said quietly. He thought of his words as a gift to the boy, who did not have it in him to add up the details differently, to alter his calculations. Behind him, Aaron could hear the interstate, the sound of trucks floating past Needles at night.

“What?” said Lex. “What are you saying? That you’re some kind of fag?” His voice was filled with wonder.

Later, when he was in the U-Haul driving away, Aaron would consider Lex’s phrasing: some kind of fag, as if fags came in kinds. He supposed they did. He did not like the word fag, but he knew where he stood with people who used it, knew what they thought and what to expect from them. He had nodded, agreeing that he was some kind of fag because the question was not really about him. Lex’s fist somersaulted helplessly in the air, his version of being left speechless, and he turned and walked away.

Aaron’s wallet was in his back pocket, the truck keys in the front. He could simply rise from the pavement, get into the truck, and drive away. He wished that he were that type of person, one who lived spontaneously and without regrets, but he was not. He was the type who would berate himself endlessly for leaving behind a much-needed map and everything else that had been in the overnight bag. He went back up to his room, checked beneath the bed and in the shower, though he had not used the latter, and when he left, he had everything with which he had arrived. He drove slowly away from Needles, waiting for the sun to catch up with him.

2

“Tell me what you want, Aaron,” Walter had periodically insisted, his tone turning impatient these last few years, the words no longer an invitation but a way of chiding Aaron, of suggesting that he wanted too much — or worse, that he had no idea what he wanted. But in the beginning of their lives together, back when they were two discrete people, Walter’s motives felt easy to read: Tell me who you are, he seemed to be saying. Tell me what you want from this life. Only later had Aaron understood that his real motive in asking was to discover how he might serve as benefactor to Aaron’s wishes and ambitions and, in doing so, bind Aaron to him.

Walter had first posed the question on a Sunday afternoon, as they drove toward Moorhead, Minnesota, where Walter was a language professor — French and Spanish, Italian in a pinch — at the university. Though it was hard even to imagine such a time now, they were strangers then, two men (one just barely) occupying the intimacy of a car. Aaron had spent the first five years of his life in Moorhead. It was there that his father had died, his death causing something to shift in Aaron’s mother so that soon after, the two of them had moved to Mortonville. Aaron still had memories of the house his family had lived in and the street where his father died, enough to make his arrival with Walter a homecoming, even though he thought of what he was doing that day as running away. It was all a matter of perspective: whether one was focused on leaving or arriving, on the past or the future.

In the midst of pondering this, he heard Walter say, “Tell me, Aaron. What is it that you want?”

“I want a different brain,” he had answered.

He was eighteen and bookish, this latter the adjective that he would employ as an adult — euphemistically — to indicate that he had not yet had sex. He did not mean that he actually wanted a different brain but rather that he wanted to fill the one he had with knowledge and experiences of which he could not yet conceive but was sure existed. Walter had laughed, not unkindly, but the laughter had upset Aaron, a feeling that was underscored by the music playing on Walter’s cassette deck. It was classical music, which Aaron had never known anyone to listen to, not like this: in the car, for pleasure. People in Mortonville listened to country music and rock, hymns and patriotic songs, though they did not discount such things as classical music and poetry. Most of them were proud that their children could recite nine poems by the end of sixth grade, a poem a month. They saw these poems as proof that their children were getting educated, for they were practical people who did not expect education to be practical, did not expect it to make their children better farmers or housewives. If it did, it was probably not education.

When Aaron was nine, Mrs. Carlsrud had assigned each student a classical composer, about whom the child was expected to deliver an oral report. He was assigned Sibelius, who was a Finn, a Swedish Finn, a distinction of importance in Mortonville, where most people were either Scandinavian or German. The Scandinavian block was dominated by the Norwegians and Swedes, who were seen as separate groups, except when discussed beside the Finns; the Finns were technically Scandinavian, but they were different. All of them, every single Finn in Mortonville, lived east of town, a self-imposed segregation. They even had their own church, which sat atop a hill amid their farms.

The first day of the presentations, Ellen Arndt stood at the front of the classroom holding a small stack of recipe cards, from which she read two parallel pieces of information: “Tchaikovsky was a Russian and a homosexual.” Three children giggled, and Sharon Engstrom raised her hand and said, “What’s a Russian?” When Mrs. Carlsrud replied that a Russian was “someone from Russia, a communist,” Sharon Engstrom said, “Then what’s a homosexual?” shifting her focus to the second noun, which included the word sex after all, and the same three children laughed.

“That is not relevant,” said Mrs. Carlsrud, her reply suggesting to Aaron that homosexuals were worth investigating. He planned to ask his mother about the word after school, but when he arrived at the café, their café, she was preparing the supper special, meatballs, and because she did not like to be asked questions when she was busy, he waited until the two of them were closing up that night.

“What does homosexual mean?” he asked as he filled the saltshakers.

“What makes you ask?” said his mother. She was running her hands under the bottoms of the tables, looking for improperly disposed of gum.

“Today, Ellen Arndt said that Tchaikovsky was a Russian and a homosexual, and Mrs. Carlsrud said that Russians live in Russia but homosexuals aren’t relevant.”

“Well,” his mother said. “It means he likes men.”

“Why isn’t it relevant?” he said.

“That’s just something Mrs. Carlsrud said because she didn’t want to talk about it,” said his mother. Then, she turned off the lights in the dining room and went upstairs, which was what she did when she didn’t want to talk about something.

* * *

The first time Aaron and Walter met was on a Saturday morning when Walter came into the café for breakfast. He was alone, for his weekend fishing trips to Mortonville were solitary affairs. Aaron was fifteen. He later learned that Walter was thirty, twice his age, though Aaron, like most teenagers, had no sense of what thirty looked like. Walter stood by the door, waiting to be seated, which was not the custom at the café, so Aaron finally approached him and asked whether he needed directions.

Years later, as he walked through the Castro, Aaron would be struck by how many gay male couples looked alike, the narcissistic component of love driven home in stark visual terms, but he and Walter were opposites. Aaron’s hair was blond and fine, and already, at fifteen, he wore it in a severe right part, while Walter’s hair that day was unevenly shorn, with dark, curly patches sprouting out along his neck and across the top. When Aaron next encountered him, his hair would be long and frizzy, though just as inexpertly cut. Over the years, Walter would come home with one bad haircut after another, the bad part the only constant, but when Aaron asked why he didn’t try a different salon, Walter would reply with a shrug, “Nobody around here knows how to cut Jew hair anyway.”

Walter was short, just five eight, his weight concentrated in his lower torso and thighs, and as Aaron stood before him for the first time that morning in the café, Walter had to tilt his head slightly back to look up at Aaron. “Directions, no,” Walter said. “What I need is a hearty breakfast.”

Aaron paid close attention to Walter that morning. He noted that Walter was left-handed, though he would later learn that he was left-handed only for eating. Walter cut his food with his right hand, holding his fork in the left, but did not take what he called “the unnecessary step” of switching the fork to his right when he transported each bite to his mouth. His parents, who had both been refugees from Nazi Germany, had taught him to eat this way, like a European. He told Aaron that during the war, American spies — men who spoke perfect German — had been caught because of this simple slip, the shifting of the fork from left hand to right. Later, under Walter’s tutelage, Aaron would become a left-handed eater also. Even as he evolved into his own person over the years, he would find the Pygmalion aspect of their relationship — habits such as these, established early on — the hardest to shed.

Walter carried a book, which he sat reading. Aaron had never seen anyone read while eating, not in public. Of course, the regulars sometimes glanced at the newspaper, making comments about crop prices or sports, but Walter read as if nothing but the book existed. Aaron often wished that he could bring a book to the table, especially as the meals that he and his mother shared became increasingly silent, but his mother forbade it. When he refilled Walter’s coffee cup, Aaron looked down at his book and was shocked to see that it was not in English. Sensing his interest, Walter held the book up. “Camus. Have you read him yet?” Aaron shook his head, and Walter said, “Well, Camus is a must, but I guess I’ve officially lost my adolescent enthrallment with existentialism. I’m finding it quite tedious this time around.” He sighed the way other men sighed about the weather or a hard-to-find tractor part. The adult Aaron would have laughed at Walter’s transparent need to prove himself to a fifteen-year-old boy, but the Aaron he was then felt the world shifting, accommodating the fact that it was much vaster than he had ever imagined, that it included people who read books in other languages and spoke of ideas so foreign to him that they, too, seemed another language.

For men perhaps more than for women, there is something aphrodisiacal about finding oneself on the greater-than side of an intellectual disparity, and years later, Aaron would learn that Walter had felt something during that first encounter, a sexual stirring that they never fully discussed because Walter was not comfortable talking about desire. Aaron did know that Walter had been introduced to sex by a man who followed him back to the dressing room while he shopped for school clothes with his mother in a department store in New York. He was fourteen. He had no bad feelings toward the man, but he told Aaron that the experience had shaped him nonetheless, had taught him to associate sexual gratification with furtiveness and haste and a lack of reciprocity. On those rare occasions when Walter did discuss sex, he always brought to it this same textbook-like dryness.

Aaron had felt desire that day, a desire that was in no way sexual. In fact, it had felt to him more potent than anything sexual could be, for sexual desire was, by nature, transient, a flame that grew large and went out. Admittedly, he knew very little of sexual desire, recognized it largely in terms of what he did not want but was led to believe that he should — girls. True sexual desire, he thought, was like an undershirt worn close to the skin and covered by layers of shirts and sweaters and coats.

Three years after that first meeting, when Walter brought Aaron home with him to Moorhead and introduced him to his circle of closeted friends, one of them, Jonas, commented coyly, “Oh my, look what Walter caught,” and the others laughed as if they had known all along that Walter’s weekend getaways were not really about fishing. Within the group it was common knowledge that Jonas was in love with Walter and that his love was not reciprocated, for various reasons, among them that Walter did not date married men, and Jonas was married, a fact that the other men snickered at behind his back. They could not imagine Jonas, with his pear-shaped body and hands as white and soft as sifted flour, atop a woman. Walter did not snicker. He was patient with Jonas, partly because Walter was a kind man but largely because he pitied Jonas, pitied him for having both a woman’s body and a wife. Pity is a hard thing to bear, for it’s never about love; pity is the opposite of love, or one of its opposites, since love has many. Still, Jonas bore it.

Aaron later understood that the men’s campiness was a pose, a function of the fact that they lived their lives hidden and needed to make the most of these secret moments together, but at the time he had not known what to think of any of them — not even Walter, who was solicitous of his needs yet laughed along with Jonas’s joke, allowing the implication that he and Aaron were sexually involved to stand as truth. In fact, during their first four years together, he and Walter did not have sex, not with each other. Aaron was in college and engaged occasionally in sexual relations—as Walter termed it, taking all the passion and dirt right out of it — with other young men, his first encounter with a boy from his British literature class. He had been drawn to the familiar look of the boy, whose name was Ken. They had groped and wrestled on Ken’s dormitory bed one afternoon as they studied for their midterm, both of them losing their virginity to the other, but after he left Ken’s room, still breathless, he knew that familiarity was not what he wanted from life. He did not want to engage in furtive sex with a boy resembling those with whom he had grown up, a sturdy blonde whose hands gripped him as they once had a cow’s teat, a boy whose pillows smelled faintly of hay and gum. Still, it had pleased (and bewildered) him to know that a boy like that — like those who had shoved him around in the locker room while talking loudly about what their girlfriends did to their penises — desired him.

After Ken, there had been others, none of whom Aaron brought to Walter’s house. He felt it would be wrong to do so, even though Walter treated him in the same avuncular manner he treated everyone else, without innuendo or any hint of desire. It was Winnie who finally set him straight. “Don’t you see how much he loves you?” she had asked. Aaron said that he did not. “Fine,” she said at last. “He told me that he’s in love with you. Okay? But you must never, ever tell Walter that I told you.”

It turned out Winnie was lying, not about the nature of Walter’s feelings but about his having confessed them to her, though Aaron did not learn of her dishonesty until after he had seduced Walter the evening of his college graduation party, an event that left him inebriated and nostalgic and deeply grateful to Walter, who had paid his tuition and all of his living expenses, who had made it possible for him to occupy a different brain.

* * *

Aaron could smell himself in the cab of the truck, not the thick, musky odor of physical labor but a sickly smell suggesting something passive: fear and anxiety. As he drove, he thought mainly about Jacob, Jacob, who might already be dead. He could call the motel and ask Britta for an update, but he knew he would not, which meant that for the rest of his life, when he thought about Jacob, he would not know whether to think of him as dead or alive.

His right hip throbbed where Lex had kicked him. He imagined Lex in his work cap, striding into the lobby of the motel. “He’s a fag,” he would tell Britta by way of declaring his own love, and she would know then that he had been meddling. Perhaps that was the nature of love: either a person was not in it enough to care, or was in it too deeply to make anything but mistakes. Sad Café Love, he and Winnie called this kind of lopsided devotion, after the Carson McCullers novel. Most people, they agreed, could either love or be loved, for these two were like rubbing your stomach and patting your head — nearly impossible to accomplish simultaneously. Winnie did not have a Sad Café marriage. She was deeply in love with Thomas, her husband, and he with her. They were the most equally in love couple that Aaron knew, the sort that took turns with everything: not just with household chores and finances but even with bouts of self-doubt and sadness. Never did they seem to regard each other as competition, as so many couples begin to. When one of them made a comment at a dinner party, the other found a way to make it sound even wittier or more insightful. As a result, they were in high demand at social gatherings, but they rarely accepted invitations because they enjoyed each other’s company best.

“Every time we go to a dinner party lately,” Winnie had told Aaron not long ago, “there’s always some couple that insists on bringing everyone else into their unhappiness. When Thomas and I fight, I don’t want anyone to hear because I’m usually just saying stuff out loud to see what I think about it, but having witnesses changes everything.”

“Yes,” Aaron had said, “but when people are really unhappy, they feel like they need witnesses, some kind of permanent record.”

He told her about a fiftieth-birthday party that he and Walter had attended for one of Walter’s colleagues, a woman named Nina who taught German. Nina’s husband, Peter, had planned the event, an elaborate affair that he referred to throughout the evening as his labor of love, but as he became drunker, he began to tell stories about Nina, secrets that he presented as charming little anecdotes: she had once locked their baby daughter in the bedroom with a mouse for two hours while she waited for him to get home to kill it; during a humid summer in Thailand, a mushroom had sprouted in her navel. After each story, Peter held his glass in the air while Nina sat with a tight smile on her face, inviting the guests to laugh along with her husband, who was too drunk to notice that nobody did.

“It was completely Virginia Woolf-ish,” Aaron told Winnie, referring to the Albee play and not the author herself.

“They probably had a very passionate relationship in the beginning,” Winnie said. “When couples start hating each other, everything goes but the passion. It just gets rechanneled.”

Aaron met Winnie when he was nineteen, the summer after his first year of college. One day Walter announced that his sister would be coming for the weekend. He had never mentioned a sibling.

“Are you close?” Aaron asked.

“We’re not un-close. There’s no underlying animosity, if that’s what you mean. We’re typical of many adult siblings, I suspect. Being close, as you put it, requires a certain commitment from both parties, and perhaps we lack the commitment.”

Aaron thought of his mother and Uncle Petey, how they had gone years without speaking, not because they were angry at each other but because they too lacked commitment. His mother said that at the end of each day, when you were tired and just wanted to be left alone, you made a decision either in favor of being left alone or in favor of the relationship, and she and Petey had both chosen solitude. The good thing, she said, was that there were no hard feelings that way.

It turned out that Winnie was visiting because she and Thomas were moving to Minneapolis, where Thomas had taken a job as vice principal at a private school. When Aaron asked her whether they had chosen Minnesota to be closer to Walter, she laughed and said, “The sort of relationship we have doesn’t require proximity.”

“Walter didn’t even tell me he had a sister,” Aaron confessed.

“That sounds like Walter,” Winnie said, sounding not at all upset.

After she left, Walter noted how well Aaron and Winnie had gotten along, offering this assessment without jealousy. It was the same way he sounded when Aaron asked to borrow a scarf or a bicycle helmet. “Take it,” Walter would say. “I’m not using it. Someone should.”

Now, Aaron was giving Walter his sister back. Walter had not indicated that he wanted his sister back or even that he felt she had been taken, but Aaron preferred to think of his motives in this way because he did not know how to tell Winnie he was leaving. She would want to know why. She would want to know everything. He had instead recorded his reasons in a notebook, cataloging them as though he had in mind a tipping point—25 or 41 or 100—the number of grievances that justified leaving.

Grievance #1: Whenever Walter and I are sitting in a room together and he gets up to leave, he turns off the light on his way out. He claims that it is a gesture born of habit, something ingrained in him by his parents, but I cannot help but feel that his focus moves with him so that when he leaves a room, everything in it, including me, ceases to exist.

He told me once, not unkindly, that this bothers me because I have “abandonment issues.” I don’t particularly care for therapy lingo, yet it struck me as a convincing argument. Still, I cannot help but wonder why Walter does not then take more care to avoid triggering my “issues,” why he continues turning off lights as he goes blithely along to his study or the kitchen, leaving me there in the dark.

Grievance #14: Walter insists on using the French pronunciation of all Anglicized French words, an affectation that I must admit has become a source of embarrassment for me, unexpressed of course, for I understand that I am the one who has changed. In other words: Once, at the very beginning of our relationship — before sex entered the equation, before I became the person I now am — we went grocery shopping together. There, I watched Walter ask one stock boy after another where he might find the “my-o-nez,” watched and felt proud of his perfect pronunciation, proud of the fact that it never brought us one step closer to what we sought, a jar of bland, white mayonnaise.

Grievance #86: Last night we got together with three of Walter’s friends from college. The Credentialists, I call them. Walter doesn’t approve of the name, but I consider it apt. The first time we met, several years ago now, one of them, Harold, immediately asked where I had attended college.

“I went to a state school in Minnesota, the one where Walter used to teach.”

They had gone to Harvard. They said it apologetically—“at Harvard.”

At dinner, they proclaimed the food “fabulous,” and one of them said, “Remember how awful the food was in the cafeteria?” and another, Harold again, said, “It was dreadful, but that’s the thing. Anyone else can say their college food was terrible, and nobody thinks they’re talking about anything more than food, but if I say to a group of people — not you guys, of course, because we’re all in the same boat — that the food was awful at Harvard, well, everyone just assumes that I’m not talking about the food at all. It’s become a bit of a problem.”

“That does not sound like a problem,” I said.

There were 149 grievances in the notebook by the time he left, but the main reason that he was leaving, which he never recorded, was that he no longer loved Walter. He did not know how to consider this alongside the sheer longevity of their relationship, the fact that he had been with Walter more than half his life. Several years earlier, before Aaron began keeping his notebook, Walter had remarked during a walk one day, casually, “You know if you left me now, it would be like tossing these years aside, regarding them as wasted.” There seemed to Aaron nothing worse than feeling you had wasted your life.

The day he stood in Walter’s office reading aloud the list of items that he wished to take, after Walter said, “I saved you” and began to cry, Aaron went into his own office and took out the notebook. It seemed cruel to add to it in the home they had created together, but he took up his pen and composed Grievance #149: He saved me knowing that there is no stronger way to bind another human being to you than by saving him. This is why I must leave.

* * *

Most of his grievance cataloging had been done at Milton’s, a diner on Central Avenue, where he had secretly been eating lunch every Friday for the nine years they lived in Albuquerque. He considered himself a regular, though he suspected that nobody else did. The true regulars fell into three categories: truckers, prostitutes, and the old men who lived in the Route 66 motor lodges scattered along this stretch of Central. The truckers came and went, as did the prostitutes, though their comings and goings were dictated not by the road but by the law and their own bad luck. They sat in groups of three or four, talking without lowering their voices, even when they discussed the vicissitudes of business or the policemen who trolled for “freebies,” which the women expeditiously dispensed in the front seats of squad cars. They did not rage against these circumstances, but instead spoke as if bad luck were a family member they could not envision their lives without.

It was the old men who intrigued him most. He knew nothing of their lives and had always been too intimidated to strike up a conversation, but he thought of them, collectively, as a cautionary tale. Do not become comfortable with loneliness, he told himself as he listened to them converse awkwardly while vying for the waitresses’ attention. One of the men, whom he nicknamed Elmer, was obsessed with terrorism, specifically with the possibility that his flophouse motel might be the next object of an attack. This was right after 9/11, when terrorism was on everyone’s mind, but the certainty with which Elmer asserted his theory left Aaron disheartened. Elmer held forth from the smoking end of the counter, waving a cigarette in the air to help his point along. Aaron had never seen him without one, and as he watched Elmer light each new cigarette from the butt of the last, listened to him wheeze and hack phlegm into his napkin, he wanted to scream from his booth that it was clear what would kill Elmer and it had nothing to do with terrorists.

One Friday Aaron arrived feeling particularly fed up with people’s irrationality, for he had just sat through a faculty meeting. To add to his displeasure, the booths were full, so he was forced to take a stool at the counter, to the right of the smoking Elmer, who was putting forth his theory yet again for the bored cook.

“Excuse me,” Aaron said loudly, turning to Elmer, who rotated slowly toward him. This close, Aaron could see that Elmer’s eyes were rheumy, their greenness turned to milk, and he realized then that Elmer was just a very old man engaged in a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his life. He gestured at the pepper shaker. “Pass the pepper?” he said, as though pepper were what he had wanted all along.

The next week, Elmer was not present. From his booth, Aaron heard one of the waitresses say to a regular, “Did you hear? The terrorists finally got old Dick.” She inclined her head toward Elmer’s usual spot. Aaron finished his breakfast burrito and set a ten-dollar bill on the table, anchoring it with his coffee mug. When he got out to his car, he put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed. He had not known the old man, had not even bothered to learn that his name was Dick, so he was not sure where the grief came from, except that he pictured the old man alone in his motel room, smoking and peering into the parking lot, and he regretted that he had not argued with him.

Aaron had not thought of Elmer, Dick, in a couple of years, but the Friday before he left Walter, as he sat at Milton’s for the last time, he looked around at the old men and what came to mind was Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He was sure Thoreau had meant, literally, men, for Aaron knew that men lived far lonelier lives than women — with the exception, perhaps, of his mother, though he considered the possibility that she was no longer lonely, that she had left Mortonville (and him) all those years ago to escape loneliness. He had not read Thoreau in years, not since college. He was not interested in reading about nature, not because he disliked nature, but because he disliked the artistic tendency to interpret nature, to put nature into words. He felt that nature spoke sufficiently for itself. He did not care to discuss it or to listen to others discuss it, nor to read about it in prose or poetic form or to see it depicted in art, for nature did not puzzle him: the seasons changed in the same order year after year, animals reproduced, birds assembled nests, flowers bloomed. People, on the other hand, did perplex him, and because the mind is often like that, gravitating toward mystery and challenge, Aaron preferred people.

Here was the thing, the irony perhaps: he had been coming to Milton’s these nine years in order to be alone. No one knew of his Friday ritual, especially not Walter, for how could he have explained to Walter that surrounded by these men, these lives-of-quiet-desperation men, he had acknowledged his own abiding loneliness. He ate a forkful of beans and looked around the diner, wondering whether anyone there would notice his absence and ask, “Does anyone know what happened to that quiet young fellow who came in every Friday and ordered the breakfast burrito with chorizo?”

He hoped so.

* * *

Aaron stopped to eat just after Bakersfield, at a place marked by an old door propped up beside the road, doorknob intact, painted with the words SALS FOOD. The apostrophe — what his students called “the up comma”—was missing, though he knew that the sign looked the same to most people with the apostrophe or without. He could not get over this, for all he could see was the missing mark; it was like looking at a face without a nose.

The parking lot was empty, which meant that he could position the U-Haul in front of the window. When he walked in, three waitresses jumped up from a booth and ran toward him, calling out, “Welcome. Merry Christmas.” There were no other diners. They tried to put him at a small table with a fresh flower on it, and when he asked for a booth near the window, they became flustered. Aaron wanted to tell them that the flower was beautiful but the truck outside contained everything he owned in the world. He noted the bulge in his throat, the telltale quiver of his chin, and knew that if he did not pick up the water glass that had been set before him and drink from it right away, he would begin to cry. The three waitresses watched him, listening to his throat convulse loudly as he swallowed. When he set the glass down, one of the women — SHIRLEY said her nametag — refilled it and handed him a menu. They watched him study it, and Shirley wrote down his order — a breakfast burrito with chorizo — while Margarita stood to the side snapping photos.

“I’m sorry,” said Shirley, nodding at Margarita. “You’re our first customer.”

“Ever?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “We just opened ten minutes ago. I’m sorry if we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s our first time. We’re sisters. That’s our father.” She pointed to a man wearing a chef’s apron who stood in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Sal?” Aaron asked, and she nodded. He smiled at Margarita and hoisted his water glass as proof of their hospitality and his pleasure, evidence for their future customers, who would be looking at his picture — taped to the wall or the cash register — for years to come. “You’re doing very well,” he said.

“Thank you. Are you from around here?” she asked hopefully, though he could see that she did not think it likely.

“I’m passing through,” he said, and he pointed out the window to the truck. “I’m moving to San Francisco.”

3

Like most major cities of the world, San Francisco, Aaron would quickly learn, had developed its own brand of provincialism, which manifested itself in its citizens’ unwavering belief that theirs was the only city where one would want, even dare, to be gay. Upon discovering that he had spent the last nine years in New Mexico, more than one San Franciscan had remarked, “So I guess you moved here to really be gay,” a comment that annoyed but mainly perplexed him with its implication that, until now, he had been only going through the motions, playing at being gay.

“Actually, I came here because of a woman,” he generally replied. This was true, for he had chosen San Francisco because of Taffy, whom he had met two years earlier at an English-as-a-Second-Language conference in El Paso, a three-day event aimed at connecting ESL teachers with overseas jobs. He did not tell Walter that this was the conference’s emphasis, allowing Walter to believe that he was going off to learn yet another strategy for teaching the past unreal conditional. Aaron went with the goal not of securing a job abroad but of entertaining the notion, of talking to recruiters from Hungary and Japan as though he possessed the intention and the freedom to pick up and go. It was his first step toward leaving. Taffy, on the other hand, attended because Glenna, her girlfriend of twenty-five years, had broken up with her, which meant that Aaron and she were two halves of the same coin — the leaver and the left. They became inseparable, attending meals and events and group interviews together, prompting a recruiter from Osaka to inquire, hopefully, whether they were married, hopefully because married couples were highly sought after, two-for-ones that were considered more stable. Aaron was afraid that even uttering a simple “no” would reveal the shock and horror he felt at considering the question, at imagining Taffy as his lover.

Her given name, the one recorded on her conference pass, was Hulda. It suited her far better than Taffy, which was, after all, not a name but a candy. One heard Taffy and expected a pink-hued, stickily sweet young thing and not a dour, obese woman in her fifties who wore too much red, unbecomingly, and often left her hotel room without wiping the sleep from her eyes or the toothpaste residue from the corners of her mouth, oversights that Aaron felt obligated to point out. He told himself that Taffy had been getting along just fine without him, yet each morning at breakfast he found himself mentioning the glob of lotion that clung to the side of her cheek or offering her his unused napkin while noting that she might want to give her nose one more good blow, all of which had imposed a level of intimacy with Taffy that he did not want.

“Not married,” Aaron finally replied. “We’re friends.” This struck him as deceitful.

The recruiter, a trim Japanese man in his sixties, smiled at his response. Was he smiling at how long it had taken Aaron to respond, or because he considered friendship a virtue worth smiling about? Or was he suggesting Aaron had employed friends as a euphemism for lovers, which meant that the conversation was back where it had started. Generally, Aaron enjoyed these strolls across cultural lines, into territory where people and situations could not be easily read or categorized. It was one of the aspects of teaching foreigners that appealed to him, but this interaction had drained him.

On the final afternoon of the conference, as Aaron and Taffy worked their way, table by table, through the conference hall, a Korean recruiter informed Taffy that she would not find work unless she lost weight. “Diet,” the delegate said, pronouncing the word with an odd inflection so that, at first, Aaron thought he was actually speaking Korean.

Smiling pleasantly, Taffy assured the man that she had no interest in teaching in Korea. “Crossed it off my list ages ago,” she said, adding in a mock-friendly tone, “Korean food is not very likable.” She laughed and slapped the man on the back, and as she and Aaron walked away, she whispered, “That’ll get him. Koreans can’t stand to have their food maligned.” Then she slapped Aaron on the back. “Come on,” she said. “We might as well get a jump on happy hour.”

They left the sea of tables, each representing an opportunity to escape the lives to which they would be returning the next day, and once they were settled in the hotel bar, drinking beer and eating free nachos, Aaron said, “Don’t you think the Korean recruiter felt bad about what you said?”

“I hope he did,” said Taffy. “That was the point, after all.” She licked a glob of greasy cheese from her palm. “What I wouldn’t give for some kimchi right about now, but what are the chances of finding decent kimchi in El Paso, Texas?”

Aaron did not reply, and after a moment, Taffy said, “He started it, Aaron. The man insulted me. Do we agree?” Her voice was sharp.

Aaron nodded.

“And do I not have the right to defend myself?”

Aaron did not look at her or respond.

“Listen,” she said. “Is it because he’s Korean? Is that what this is about? You’re going to sit there and make one of those bullshit cultural relativity arguments?” She let her voice drift up to a breezy falsetto: “ ‘Oh, it’s wrong for an American to call me a fat pig, but we need to excuse him since he’s from a different culture.’ Because I can assure you that there are plenty of fat Koreans who would feel just as humiliated as I did, and he knows that. And if he doesn’t, well, it’s time he learned.”

She was breathing heavily, not even waiting for him to reply. “Or maybe you think I should be used to it by now. I’m fat, so I need to expect people to say things, right? It goes with the territory. Is that it, Aaron?” She pounded the table hard as she spoke, the basket of nachos hopping like a rabbit toward the edge. “Or maybe this is some male solidarity thing that I’m just not getting?” She studied him. “Somehow, I don’t peg you that way, but there you have it. Help me out if I’ve missed something.”

Aaron thought about the ease with which the man had spoken, as though Taffy’s body, her fat, were public domain, open for scrutiny and comment. He knew that he had hurt her more deeply than the Korean recruiter had because the recruiter was a stranger, while he was supposed to be her friend. Still, nothing changed the fact that he was put off by Taffy in a way that seemed beyond his control, repulsed not by her size or laxness in grooming but by something he did not fully understand, though he knew it had to do with the way she positioned herself in the world. She had told him at breakfast one morning that she taught only beginning ESL because she preferred the docility of students who did not yet comprehend what was being said to or expected of them. He imagined her as a child, the one always put in charge when teachers left the room because they knew she would report everything, caring more about this small measure of power than she did the goodwill of her peers.

Taffy dipped another chip into the cheese and opened her mouth wide to receive the whole dripping mess, then slapped her greasy hands across her thighs, thumping them like watermelons. “I’m fat, Aaron,” she declared, bits of nacho flying from her mouth. He felt one land on his face but did not reach up with his napkin to brush it away because he thought that that was what she expected him to do. He glanced at the tables around them. More than anything, he wanted her to lower her voice.

“That’s what Glenna always did,” she said. “Looked around to see whether anyone was listening.”

“Well, she probably couldn’t focus on the conversation with people listening. It’s like having two audiences, and they want completely different things. You want to know what I think, but everyone else wants to be entertained, and I don’t care to be entertainment for a bunch of strangers.”

This, in fact, was Grievance #78: When Walter wants to win an argument, he waits until we’re in public, knowing that the minute it gets heated, I’ll back down. He claims there’s no forethought involved, that he cannot stifle himself simply because there are others around. Still, I can’t help but feel that he seeks out an audience of strangers as a way to silence me.

After that, neither of them was in the mood for another beer. Aaron picked up the tab, and Taffy let him. The next morning, they ate breakfast together, and Aaron did not point out that Taffy’s shirt was misbuttoned. They said good-bye outside the dining room, shaking hands and exchanging addresses, though Aaron did not think they would keep in touch. However, once he was back home, away from Taffy and the constant stoking of his aversion, Aaron found himself remembering their time together with remorse. Eventually, he wrote to her, a brief note offering standard pleasantries—“It was great to meet you”—clipped to an article about teaching incorrect grammar to ESL students to help them better fit in with Americans. They had discussed the subject at breakfast the first morning, bonding over their mutual indignation. He hoped that she would see the letter as an overture.

Several weeks later, he received a reply. “Thanks for thinking of me,” her letter began. She went on to describe her new batch of students, one of whom had come to the school Halloween party dressed as Hitler. “It fell to me to speak to him about his costume,” she wrote. “Imagine trying to discuss such a thing with nothing more than a few nouns and verbs at your disposal. Still, I believe that by the end of our conversation he realized the potential this had to hurt others.” Aaron understood that he had been forgiven.

They settled into a routine, Aaron composing a letter at the beginning of the month and Taffy responding near the end. He preferred her as a pen pal, having just her words before him and not Taffy herself, nose dusted with doughnut powder. She was the only friend he had who was exclusively his, who had never met Walter. Everyone who knew Walter loved him, was taken in by the way he seemed to listen deeply before dispensing advice that sounded wise and obvious when tendered in his calm, mellifluous voice. Aaron began writing to her about Walter occasionally, indulging in a newfound openness. Two years later, when he wrote that he was leaving Walter, Taffy had not waited until the end of the month to reply. She wrote back immediately, a response that read in its entirety, “I can help with the transition if you are interested in moving to San Francisco.”

* * *

He pulled up in front of Taffy’s house around two on Christmas Eve, tired and wanting only to rinse his face and drink a glass of water, perhaps walk around the block to stretch his legs and soothe his hip, which had settled into a steady throb, but Taffy, who had been watching for him, came out and hoisted herself into the truck. She had arranged for him to rent a studio apartment in Parkside, a neighborhood near hers, from the Ng family. She had once taught Mr. Ng’s nephew.

“Let’s go,” Taffy said by way of greeting. “Mr. Ng is expecting us.”

They drove in silence except for her one-word directions—left, straight, left. Finally, Aaron asked what the studio was like. “Tiny,” she said, explaining that it was actually the back third of the Ngs’ garage, which had been converted into living quarters. “And dark. It’s the fog belt, but you’ll be just fourteen blocks from the ocean.”

The houses on his new street appeared nearly identical: the main quarters sat over the garage and were accessed by a tunnel entrance on the right. When they arrived, Mr. Ng came out. “One rule,” he said as he shook Aaron’s hand. “You pay, you stay.”

“Yes, well, I think I can remember that,” Aaron said. “Certainly the rhyming helps.” Neither Taffy nor Mr. Ng laughed. Aaron took out his checkbook and wrote a check for the security deposit and another for the first month’s rent, an amount close to what he and Walter had paid for their mortgage each month. Taffy had explained that it was the cheapest rent he would find in the city, given his insistence on living alone.

Mr. Ng stared at the check, which had his New Mexico address. “Mexico?” said Mr. Ng skeptically.

“New Mexico,” he said, and Taffy assured Mr. Ng that New Mexico was in the United States.

“Okay, okay,” Mr. Ng said finally, as though he were granting a dispensation in accepting this as fact. “Here is key.”

But it was not a key. It was a garage door opener. Mr. Ng pointed it at the garage door, which rolled up noisily before them.

It seemed that this basic principle — thrift over convenience — had governed the conversion. No thought had been given to soundproofing, for example, which meant — Aaron would soon discover — that he could hear the family walking above him, hear them talking and arguing and even snoring. A thin wall had been erected to separate the studio from the garage proper, which housed not just the Ngs’ car but also, problematically, the garbage cans. Indeed, in the months to follow, Aaron would lie in his studio at night, imagining all the ways that he could die right there in bed: the Ngs’ Toyota smashing through the wall and running him over as he lay reading; the house (and the family with it) buckling down on him during an earthquake; the ocean forgetting itself and rolling up these fourteen blocks, drowning him in his sleep.

Taffy left him to settle in by himself, which he did not mind. It took him seven hours to unload and return the truck and then find his way back via public transportation, but when he finally stood on his block holding noodles from a Thai take-out place, he realized that he could not remember his new house number. He walked back and forth, pausing at last in front of the house that he thought was the Ngs’, and when he pressed the garage door opener in his pocket, the door rolled up. He ate the noodles with his fingers because the take-out place had forgotten to include a fork and he could not find the box that contained cutlery. Above him he could hear Chinese, a pleasant sound. He focused on it and tried not to think about Walter. The two of them had observed a Christmas Eve tradition: they made a Moroccan chicken with gizzard-and-artichoke-heart stuffing and Brussels sprouts, and as they ate, they talked about what they each wanted from the coming year. It was like making resolutions, except they always began with an analysis of the previous year’s disappointments. The last couple of years, however, Walter had been less willing to focus on the past, to reveal what had frustrated or discouraged him. Instead, he raised his wineglass and announced, “I wouldn’t change a thing about my life,” which left Aaron struggling to articulate his own discontentment.

He was relieved that the telephone was not yet hooked up because he would have called Walter right then to let him know he had arrived safely, but he would not have stopped there. He would have turned contrite, explaining tearfully how sorry he was, and Walter would have slipped into his most comfortable role, becoming patient and forgiving. “It’s fine,” he would have said. “Just come home.”

Aaron wiped his greasy hands on his jeans, crawled onto the unmade futon, and slept for ten hours. The next morning, the city felt at rest. It was Christmas. He appreciated that silence would be his first memory. Then, an ambulance passed outside, and he felt the same sick dread that he had felt as a boy, when a siren almost always meant tragedy for someone he knew. He supposed that soon he would once again stop noticing sirens, but that morning he lay on his mattress and sobbed because the studio was dark and unfamiliar and because he had never lived alone.

* * *

Taffy had arranged an interview for him at her school, the San Francisco English Language Center. They needed someone to teach an advanced class, she said, and the director, Marla, wanted to meet him the day after Christmas. Taffy did not tell him much about the school, just that she had been teaching there for three years, since Glenna left. She had quit her old job, thinking change would make Glenna’s absence less noticeable, but instead she had found that going off to a new school each day and riding a new bus home to an empty apartment only made her miss Glenna more. She wrote this to him after he accepted her invitation to come, the only truly personal thing she had ever revealed. She was being kind, he supposed, letting him know that it would not be easy.

The school was on Anza Street, housed in a drab building from the sixties that bore signs of neglect. Marla was also in a state of disrepair. Half the buttons on her dress had been replaced with safety pins, and when she stood, she appeared to list to one side, though he realized later that her dress was missing a shoulder pad. She began the interview by explaining that she had a firm policy of hiring gay people, though she herself was not gay, because she believed they made better teachers. Aaron did not know how to respond, for he desperately needed the job but was not in the habit of ignoring questionable logic. He laughed in case she was joking, but it turned out that she was not, and the two of them sat there awkwardly. He immediately regretted laughing, not because he had hurt Marla’s feelings, though there was that to consider, but because he had made a decision as he stared down at the road from the wheel of the U-Haul, a decision to stop second-guessing his own instincts. The decision had seemed doable there in the truck, where his needs were basic: he stopped when he needed to urinate; bought food when he was hungry; filled the gas tank when the needle neared empty. Most important, amid the monotony of satiating himself and the truck, there was Jacob, whom he had saved because he had trusted his gut.

He looked at Marla and blurted out what he knew to be the truth, “I’m a really good teacher,” referring to the only part of himself that seemed intact.

“Good,” said Marla. “Because you’re hired.” They stood up, shook hands, and Aaron thanked her.

“What were they studying with their last teacher?” he asked.

“Well,” she said. “Nico’s been sort of filling in lately, so I’m not sure what they’re up to.”

“And before that? What about with their regular teacher?”

“They had Noreen, but she left suddenly. What happened was, she was in class one morning, and her husband called.” Marla’s voice dropped, taking on the hushed, excited tone that people use to divulge someone else’s secrets. “He said he’d fallen asleep with the baby on the bed next to him, and she’d rolled off and hit her head, but the doctor said it was more than that.”

Marla took a breath, and Aaron cut in. “What was Noreen doing with them when she left?” He wanted to establish that workplace gossip did not interest him. He had worked at schools that resembled dysfunctional families and had always ended up in the role of the older brother whose repeated attempts to remain uninvolved made him the most sought-after family member of all.

Marla stared at him. “Ask the students, I guess.”

* * *

The next morning, Aaron put on a tie, the green silk that Walter had given him on his last birthday. He did not always wear a tie to work, but he wore at least a shirt with a collar because he believed his students deserved to know that he considered teaching them a profession. He tried not to dwell on the tie’s origins, yet he could not help but think of Walter as he stood in front of the mirror, tightening the tie around his neck. Aaron regarded the world as fraught with symbolism, a place where something as ordinary as knotting a tie became a commentary on one’s life.

When he entered the classroom at nine sharp, carrying a satchel and wearing the tie, the class looked startled. Taffy later explained that the students were coming off two months with Nico, an octogenarian who could not teach at the school permanently because he made frequent trips to Cuba to visit his “young men.” According to Taffy, Nico treated the classroom as a private salon: he arrived at ten because he considered nine an uncivilized hour and spent the morning passing around photos of his latest young man and demonstrating dance steps from the rumba and danzón. One morning, he had shown up in his Castro bar wear, a leather vest and chaps, though he had worn underwear, Taffy noted, perhaps in deference to the realities of the job, which required him to turn periodically to write on the board. “Nico’s lived in San Francisco too long,” Taffy concluded, but Aaron knew that he could spend the rest of his life here and never consider wearing chaps to class. Once, he and Walter had gone to a cowboy bar in Albuquerque, but after thirty minutes they left because Aaron could not bear the sight of men playing pool and dancing and sitting on barstools wearing nothing but chaps, their buttocks ripping away from the vinyl when they stood. “You can’t be so squeamish,” Walter had scolded him afterward.

“Nine o’clock,” Aaron announced. “Time to begin class. My name is Aaron Englund.” He turned to write his name in capital letters on the board. “I will be your teacher this semester.”

“Like the country?” a student asked. The student’s name was Paolo, and he was from Italy. In Italy, Paolo had taught mathematics for twenty-six years, and then one day, he decided that twenty-six years was enough; he would go to the United States, where he would spend his days riding Harleys. He would do this until all the money he had saved during those twenty-six years was gone. When Paolo spoke, which was often, he sounded like someone parodying an Italian accent, and his hands swung rhythmically in the air as though he expected those around him to pick up instruments and begin to play. Aaron tried to imagine Paolo standing in front of a classroom, leading students through the intricacies of math. He wondered how it was possible to go from being that man, a man who wanted numbers to add up, to being a man who embraced risk.

“That’s England,” Aaron said, enunciating the e before turning to write ENGLAND next to ENGLUND. “One vowel,” he said. “The difference between me and a country.” The students laughed.

The class was large, twenty students, but he went around the room learning their names and where they were from. He always did this the first day because he knew that it mattered, especially to those who were accustomed to being overlooked. There were five Brazilians—“Almost a football team,” they joked — and three Thais, but he was most surprised by the Mongolians. He had never had a Mongolian student before, did not think he had even met a Mongolian, yet there were two in the class, both named Borol. When he said, “Borol must be a common name in Mongolia,” the second Borol replied, “Not common,” with a serious face and the voice of a Russian, and the first Borol laughed to let him know it was a joke. He realized that he had always thought of Mongolians as not the joking types. It surprised him to find that he harbored stereotypes of Mongolians.

“Well,” he asked the class, “where should we begin? You must have questions. What’s confused you lately?”

They all stared at him. They had no reason to trust him — his ability or his intentions — yet. In the front row, a handsome Brazilian named Leonardo raised his hand. In Brazil, Leonardo was a pilot, but here in San Francisco, he delivered pizzas, which the other Brazilians referred to as the Brazilian National Occupation. “Why are you studying English?” Aaron had asked each student earlier, and Leonardo had explained that it was his first step toward becoming a pilot in China.

“China?” Aaron said. He had not meant to sound so surprised. “Why China?”

“Is big country,” Leonardo said.

“Yes,” Aaron agreed, waiting for the explanation to continue, but Leonardo, he would learn, did not believe in explaining a point to death. He considered others capable of connecting the dots: a big country required lots of planes, planes required pilots. Leonardo’s reticence would not benefit his English, but Aaron could not help but think that circumspection was attractive in a pilot. Aaron did not like flying, particularly the life-and-death bargaining he did with himself each time he got on a plane. When he imagined the people who sat in the cockpit, he did not want to think of them as chatty sorts who cared about entertaining one another. He wanted to think of them like Leonardo, less enamored of words than flight.

“You have a question, Leonardo?” Aaron asked.

“Yesterday,” Leonardo said, “I hear my coworker say to my other coworker, ‘I hope the boss wasn’t mad.’ ” Leonardo leaned forward. “Is correct?”

“Yes,” Aaron said apologetically, for he could see the point in question. “It depends on the situation, but yes, it is correct.”

“Why?” Leonardo demanded, almost angrily. “Why he is saying ‘hope’ when it is past tense? Hope is about the future. This is what we always learn.”

The other students nodded, asserting their collective will. Aaron could feel their frustration and beneath it their distrust, for they had been taught, rightfully, that hope described the future, yet here he stood, telling them that this was not always so. In just one hour, he had taken away more knowledge than he had supplied.

Aaron had discovered his love of grammar as a boy, when he first observed in these structures and symbols a kind of order, patterns that allowed words — his first love — to join together and make sense. He saw that he could open his heart and love grammar almost more, the way one loved the uglier child best because it required more effort to do so. He was known for explaining grammar in ways that made sense, for filling the board with sketches and equations and even cartoons that his students eagerly copied into their notebooks. He turned now and wrote: I hope he wasn’t mad. Below the sentence, he drew a timeline, the past on the left marked Know, the future on the right, Don’t Know.

“Here we are, between the past”—he pointed to the word Know—“and the future, which we don’t know.” He looked at them encouragingly. “Okay, now let’s say one of the drivers mixes up a very big pizza order, and the next day everyone is wondering whether the boss was mad when he found out, but nobody actually knows whether he was mad because he came in after everyone was already gone. How would you say that?”

“I wish that he weren’t mad,” suggested Katya, the lone Russian.

“Okay,” Aaron said. “Except that means he was mad, that I know he was mad.” A few of the students nodded. “In this case, the boss’s reaction is in the past, but we don’t know it yet. We’ll learn about it in the future, so we have to say, ‘I hope he wasn’t mad.’ ”

He looked at them, they looked back, and then several more nodded. He was relieved to be back in the classroom, where he felt clear about what was needed from him: his knowledge and his steadying presence. But teaching provided something he needed also, a period each day when his own life receded.

“If there are no more questions,” he said, “let’s take a break.” He pointed one last time at the diagram on the board. “Remember, the nice thing about not knowing what has already happened is that we can keep hoping for the best.”

“Even though outcome is finished?” said Katya with the fatalism of a Russian.

“Yes,” he said, but he did not let himself think of Jacob, who might already be dead.

4

Mr. Ng drove a UPS truck. Most nights, he pulled his car into the garage after his shift and stayed in it for several hours. Aaron found it unsettling to have him there, on the other side of the flimsy wall that he leaned against as he sat on the bed reading or eating dinner or preparing for class, especially since Mr. Ng did not seem to be doing anything in his car, except maybe sleeping. Of course, Aaron knew that Mr. Ng was putting off as long as possible the moment when he went upstairs and he and his wife resumed their screaming, furniture-shoving arguments. Aaron did not know what their arguments were about because he did not understand Cantonese, but he assumed money, because he had read somewhere that money was what most couples argued about. At the end of prolonged quarrels, the Ngs sometimes switched to English, as though inviting him into their problems. He hated this the most, the intimacy of lying in bed in his pajamas, listening to two people who were supposed to be nothing more than his landlords destroy each other in not one but two languages.

Despite the lost hours of sleep, Aaron began rising early. He thought it was his body’s natural rhythm finally asserting itself, now that there were no one else’s habits or needs to consider. As a boy, he had been an early riser, but that was because his mother was not, so the café’s morning preparations fell to him. After she disappeared, he spent his senior year living with the Hagedorns, a family of night owls, and their schedule became his, which meant his memories of the year were clouded by exhaustion. Then, Walter came along, insisting that he call supper “dinner,” and he had, for it seemed a different meal from the one that he and his mother had rushed through in the brief lull before the early-bird special began at five.

Walter considered it improper to dine before eight, though he favored nine, and while the supper that Aaron had shared with his mother was a mishmash of kitchen errors, dinner with Walter involved wine, always, and at least two courses, with salad served last. Afterward, they drank a nightcap, cognac, though Aaron would have preferred sherry. Most nights, Walter asked Aaron to read aloud to him after dinner, poetry usually, for they agreed on poetry, not just on its value but on which poets and poems they loved. Walter liked “Dover Beach” and T. S. Eliot and Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” to which he had introduced Aaron years earlier and which Aaron had since committed to memory. “You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down,” Aaron would recite while Walter sat beside him, inhaling deeply, as though hearing the words were not enough and he needed to breathe them in also, breathe them in as Aaron exhaled them.

Aaron had always appreciated that Walter did not leave movies or concerts and immediately demand an opinion, and it was the same with poetry. They sat in silence after each poem, feeling whatever it was they each felt without having to put it into words. Eventually, they finished their nightcaps, rose, and got ready for, and then into, bed, the king-size bed, where they watched the news or read but did not have sex because Walter did not enjoy sex after dark, an indisposition he once explained by saying that he could never shake the feeling that he was being watched. Aaron assumed that Walter’s fear was tied to something from his past, something he did not want to discuss, though at times he wondered whether it might not be a function of his collective consciousness as a gay man, a throwback to an era when gay men did everything furtively, when every look or word or touch had the power to destroy lives.

Despite Walter’s fears, they had had sex at all hours in the beginning, sex at noon while the fire whistle blew, announcing lunchtime, and sex at midnight so that Aaron joked it had taken him two days to come. Sometimes Aaron would visit Walter on campus, and they would have sex there in Walter’s office, a Latin professor on one side of the thin walls and a young French professor on the other. Before he bent Aaron over his desk or tipped him back in his reading chair, Walter pulled the shades and locked the door, but such precautions made sense there, for neither of them wanted to look up as Walter thrust into Aaron hard from behind to find a student in the doorway.

Aaron always fell asleep first, Walter beside him, reading or preparing notes for an article or keeping up with his correspondence, for even after email came along, Walter continued to write letters by hand, using carbon paper between the top page, the one he would mail, and the bottom, the one that would go into a box marked neatly with the year. The boxes of letters were lined up in their basement, had moved with them from Minnesota to New Mexico. When Aaron asked Walter why he kept the letters, he said that he anticipated reaching a point in his life when the present offered nothing new, and when that day came, he would bring up his boxes and read through the story of his life, maybe finding even more pleasure in it the second time.

* * *

Most mornings the smallness of his new apartment overwhelmed him, the walls pressing in so that he could not read or grade papers or even think. He began walking to work, giving himself an hour and a half, even two hours, because he liked knowing that there was time to linger, time to learn about his new neighborhood, where he felt daily the surprise and pleasure of being an outsider. The signs on businesses often announced themselves first in large Chinese characters, catering to him as an afterthought, in English that was often grammatically incorrect and rendered in small letters. Among his favorite business names were these: Smartest Child, a tutoring center whose window featured a photograph of a teenage girl in a beauty pageant gown, her perfect SAT scores superimposed on her sash; 100 % Healthy Dessert, which he had tried once, intrigued by the pictures of syrupy concoctions filled with beans and colorful tapioca worms and even more by the menu descriptions promising enticements such as “promotes bowel movement”; and Happy Good Lucky, a tiny market on Taraval that advertised BEER ALL FLAVORS $9 and dissuaded shoplifters with a series of hand-lettered index cards, strategically placed, that read, HONESTY IS THE BEST PERSONALITY I APPRECIATE.

His favorite restaurant was T-28, a Macau diner, the name a handy mnemonic derived from its location at the corner of Taraval and Twenty-Eighth. At T-28, nobody asked how he was, only what he wanted. He found this deeply appealing and had eaten there every night his first week in San Francisco, drawn to the lack of pleasantries and inexpensive food, until the bubble burst: low on cash, he missed a night, and when he returned, the waitress slapped down his menu and said, “Hey, long time no see.” He imagined her sitting in an ESL class, memorizing such expressions and waiting for an opportunity to use them, to say, “Breakfast special already finished. Early bird gets the worm.” He did not begrudge her the chance to use her knowledge, but he missed the way it had been.

His morning walk took him down Noriega Street, where he stopped in front of a bank to read the exchange rates posted in the front window, noting which countries’ currencies were listed, because this told him something about his neighborhood, and which currencies had risen or fallen, because this told him something about the world. From Noriega, he walked over several blocks to Golden Gate Park, where he lingered longest. Often, the bison were out, a herd that was kept there — in the middle of a city — to commemorate the lost American frontier. He liked to watch them and think about the irony of this. His last stop before exiting the park was a lake, man-made, where he sat on a bench watching a group of elderly Chinese doing tai chi, teenagers smoking pot before school, and a boy and his grandfather who came frequently, though not every morning, to motor a toy sailboat across the lake.

He preferred to begin his days in silence and found that walking to work eased him into the world. There was also the fare he saved by not taking the bus. He worried about money now that he was on his own, not because he had relied on Walter — he had not — but there was something reassuring about a household with two incomes. Mainly, he was avoiding the bus because of the twins, who were always on board. He had come to suspect that they had no destination, that riding the bus was what they did, the way that other people went to jobs.

The twins were identical. They dressed alike, usually in zippered, gray sweaters over emerald green cowboy shirts with snap buttons, and groomed each other like cats, one tamping down the other’s cowlick with moistened fingertips, straightening his collar, rebuttoning his shirt, zipping his sweater to a point just above the heart. It was as though the public nature of the bus allowed them to more fully enter their own secret world. Aaron could not look away.

Twins were popping up everywhere. In class, Yoshi, who had recently become the father of fraternal twins, raised his hand to note that twins were highly unusual in Japan. Only here in America did you see twins with regularity, said Pilar, the Spaniard, turning Yoshi’s children into a by-product of their parents’ temporary expatriation. Several of her classmates nodded in vehement agreement.

Aaron knew that he should point out the obvious: the United States was nothing more than an aggregate of the world’s populations and it seemed unlikely that the genetic capabilities of these same populations would change so drastically on American soil. But he did not disabuse the class of its theory, for he had noticed that the students were sometimes skeptical of his views on topics other than grammar. They would not be convinced, for example, that homelessness was not caused by laziness or that Americans did not all eat old food, as one of the Bolors had suggested.

“What is ‘old food’ anyway?” he had asked, perplexed by the deceptive simplicity of the words.

“Food that is old,” another student said, because they all understood the charge being made. In fact, they had an arsenal of anecdotal evidence, stories of host mothers who prepared frozen waffles with expiration dates years past, of babysitting for families who ate around mold and expected them to do the same. He tried to explain that they were arguing from exception, assuring them that most Americans did not eat spoiled food or feed it to guests, but he stopped because he saw that they needed to believe these things. They spent their days cleaning houses and delivering pizzas to people who counted change in front of them, convinced of their dishonesty or inability to subtract, or, more likely, some combination of the two, being told — as they accepted a fifty-three-cent tip — how grateful they must feel to be in this country.

And generally they were grateful. They were young, most of them, and thought about their lives the way that young people do: with anticipation and the sense that their futures would build like symphonies, one great note following the next. But there was a difference between feeling grateful and having gratitude demanded of you.

* * *

Aaron encountered his first twins the summer he was five, when he and his parents embarked on a two-week vacation marked by long stretches in the car, six or seven hours at a time. It was hot that summer, and they rarely spoke as they drove, which had less to do with the heat than with the sort of family they were. Along the way, he learned to read his first words—stop, population, and vacancy—but mainly he stared at the back of his father’s head, bristly with its policeman haircut. He had not realized, until then, how white his father’s scalp was, like the inside of a potato at the moment it’s split open.

“How much longer?” Aaron could not keep from asking. Prisoners, students, passengers on long sea voyages, children in cars: they all know well the slowing that occurs because their time does not truly belong to them. His mother gave cryptic responses involving hours and minutes, words that meant nothing to him, while his father threatened to pull over and give him “a good spanking” if he did not shut up, which did mean something. It was how his father spoke of spankings, employing the adjective good as though the spanking represented some obvious moral truth.

After several days of this, days defined by the heat and the sight of his father’s head riding squarely before him, Aaron asked instead, “How many Adam-12s until we get there?” referring to a half-hour television program about policemen that he and his father watched each Saturday.

“Four,” said his mother, too enthusiastically, and so the Adam-12 system for telling time was established.

The vacation started at the Paul Bunyan Park in Bemidji, where cement statues of Paul and Babe the Blue Ox stood beside the shore of Lake Bemidji. The Englunds had visited the park twice before, the three visits merging in Aaron’s memory so that years later he could not remember which time they saw a roller coaster being built or which time his father pointed to a family of four and leaned toward him, whispering, “Look, Aaron, there go some Jews.” In the family photo album, there were three different shots of him standing between Paul and Babe, one to commemorate each visit, the changes in those young versions of himself obvious, despite the fact that whoever took the pictures (he assumed it was his father) had stood far back in order to capture the full height of Paul Bunyan, leaving Aaron an incidental presence at the statue’s feet.

He did know it was during the last visit that his father became angry at him for refusing to go on the rides. “So you’re just going to go through life a chickenshit?” his father asked as they stood to the side of the Tilt-A-Whirl, watching other children board the cars excitedly. In his pretend-casual voice, his father added, “Really, I don’t see how you’re going to manage in school.” Aaron did not say that he wondered this also.

His father turned then and walked calmly away. At home he might have shouted or smashed a bottle on the floor, but he did not believe in being a spectacle, in providing strangers with that pleasure. Aaron was familiar with his father’s stiff back, with the way his hands dove deep into his pockets and his feet kicked forward with each step, keeping an invisible can in motion, just as he recognized the way that he and his mother stood side by side, dazed by how quickly things could go awry. Only minutes earlier, his mother had turned to them, revealing a clot of yellow mustard on her ear lobe, a leftover from the hamburgers they had eaten while squeezed together on a bench. Aaron and his father had burst into simultaneous laughter, a rare occurrence that had encouraged all three of them, nudging them toward giddiness.

“Dolores,” his father said, “were you feeding that hamburger to your ear?”

They laughed again while his mother dabbed at her ear with a tissue, using Aaron and his father as mirrors, asking, “Is it gone? Jerry? Aaron? Did I get it all?”

Years later, when Aaron thought back on that day, trying to see his father’s anger as something predictable, he began here, hoping to understand the slow build of his rage, but when he remembered the way that his mother had giggled and spoken their names, he knew that she had been enjoying the attention, that his father’s tone had been free of reproach. And so Aaron, too, had been happy. It was that simple and that treacherous.

Aaron and his mother waited, without speaking, for his father to return, and when it became clear that he was not coming back, they spent the afternoon at a free storytelling event about the life of Paul Bunyan. The storyteller — an old man dressed in a plaid lumberjack shirt — fidgeted as he spoke, his right hand rubbing the wrist of the left as though it had just been freed from handcuffs. He regarded the audience eagerly, too eagerly, when he thought he had said something funny. At the end, everyone rose and filed out of the hot room quickly.

“Stay put, and don’t talk to anyone,” Aaron’s mother said, and she left too.

The storyteller regarded him nervously. “Young man, did you know that when Paul was just one week old, he was already so big he had to wear his father’s clothes?” He chuckled. “Can you imagine?” Aaron thought about his father’s shirts, which smelled of sweat that had worked itself deeply into the fibers. Even after his mother washed them, the odor remained, requiring only the heat of his mother’s iron to rekindle it. Aaron smiled at the storyteller. It was not his fault that he thought Aaron might be intrigued by the idea of wearing his father’s clothes.

The man shuffled out, and Aaron was by himself in the room. It was the largest room he had ever occupied alone, and the empty space gave freedom to his thoughts. What he imagined was his parents getting into the Oldsmobile and driving away without him, returning to their house in Moorhead (because his imagination was not equipped to send them elsewhere) while he established a new life here, sleeping under Babe’s stomach when it rained and spending his days listening to the tall tales.

Into the room came two boys. He could still recall the shock he had felt as he looked at the boy on the left, taking in the severely upturned nose and knobby, receding chin, the blue eyes and unusually short lashes, and then saw the same configuration of unfortunate features on the other boy. They were around twelve, the age at which threatening younger children offered both pleasure and a way to subvert their own feelings of vulnerability. They spoke loudly and swaggered up to Aaron as if he had stolen something of theirs that they aimed to get back.

“Hey, asshole,” said the boy on the right.

The other snickered and kicked Aaron’s chair hard. “My brother’s talking to you, asshole,” he said.

“My mother told me not to talk to anyone,” Aaron replied, his voice soft and overly polite. When he used this voice with his father, it only made him angrier.

The boys sat down behind him. “I heard that Paul Bunyan had a pecker as big as an oak tree,” the one directly behind him said. He kicked the back of Aaron’s chair, jolting Aaron forward.

His twin laughed. “Yeah, and nuts like basketballs.”

The first boy leaned forward, his voice loud in Aaron’s ear. “I heard a train thought his asshole was a tunnel — went in and never came out.”

“Paul Bunyan was a fag,” his brother said, and the boys slammed backward in their chairs, yelping like puppies.

Aaron’s mother returned and glared at the boys. “We’ll wait in the car,” she said to Aaron, which meant that she had not found his father.

They left the park and walked up and down several streets, his mother pausing at each corner, giving careful consideration to all four directions. Her tendency, like his, was to leap to the worst conclusion; he felt her fear in the way she squeezed his hand tightly one minute and flung herself free of him the next. They rounded a corner and there was the Oldsmobile, the driver-side door open, his father’s legs jutting into the street.

“It’s about time,” his father said when he saw them. “Four o’clock. What have you people been doing all day?” He called them “you people” when he found their actions as inexplicable as those of strangers.

Aaron and his mother got into the car. They said nothing because they knew that silence was best in the aftermath of his father’s anger. Aaron fell asleep against the car door, too tired to worry, as he usually did, that it might spring open and send him tumbling into the road. When he awoke to the cessation of motion, he discovered that they were in front of a motel consisting of cabins and an office shaped like a wigwam, a VACANCY sign lit up in pink neon over its door. When his father got out of the car, the smell of rotting apples wafted in. He went into the wigwam and came back with a key, which he used to unlock one of the cabin doors, and they went inside. His mother quickly opened the windows, letting in the smell of the apples, which mingled with the smell his mother had been trying to air out, a sour odor not unlike the one that came from his father’s feet when he sat in his recliner after working all day and ordered Aaron to pry off his shoes.

“Bed, Aaron,” said his mother. He followed her into the bedroom, where she produced his pajamas and toothbrush from a suitcase. He’d felt such pleasure at seeing his possessions appear in these unfamiliar surroundings. They spent two nights there, hot, sleepless nights during which Aaron clung to the edge of the bed he shared with his parents because his father had not wanted to pay extra for a cot. The sickly sweet stench of rotting apples had intensified daily, its source an overly burdened tree that shed its fruit in a wide skirt outside their bedroom window. His father liked the smell, and the windows remained open.

The first morning, his father took him inside the wigwam, showed him a shelf of souvenirs — beaded necklaces, T-shirts, and miniature totem poles with eagle wings flaring out from the top — and instructed him to choose one. He considered each item while his father chatted with the old man behind the desk. When the old man shuffled over to a postcard rack near the door, passing gas with each step, Aaron’s father turned to glare at Aaron as though expecting him to do something shameful, laugh perhaps.

“Did you find something, son?” he asked. He called Aaron “son” when there were other people around.

Aaron held up a beaded pouch shaped like a canoe with a zipper running from bow to stern. His father examined it. “That’s what you want?” he said. “A purse?”

Aaron turned and grabbed the totem pole with eagle wings, mumbling “thank you” when his father paid for it, and they walked back to the cabin.

“A totem pole,” said his mother. “Oh for cute.”

She was sitting on the bed, stitching up a pair of his shorts that had split at the seam. He was a plump child whose clothes suffered routine outbursts, though as an adult, he would be thin, his childhood pudginess retained only in his hands. He handed his mother the totem pole, which she set on the sill of the open window. Each time Aaron awakened that night and saw it outlined there, wings spread, he could not help but feel that his mother had given it the option to flee.

The next morning, she packed their suitcases while his father sat on the bed and hurried her along, and then they walked across the road to a diner called Freddie’s. Aaron was allowed to have pancakes, which they rarely had at home because his father hated them. They recrossed the road, and as his father loaded their suitcases into the trunk, his mother prepared three washcloths, wetting them and rolling them up inside a bread bag, which would be stored in the glove compartment for emergencies. She had done this the previous morning also. His father came in whistling and carrying a paper bag that the motel owner had told him to fill with the apples that lay scattered and rotting outside their cabin. The three of them gathered half a bagful, and while Aaron and his father waited in the car, his mother went back into the cabin, leaving the door ajar so that Aaron caught glimpses of her as she bent to peer under things. His father drummed impatiently on the car’s roof, his thumps growing more thunderous when she finally appeared. She got into the car holding a matchbook wrapped with black thread left over from mending Aaron’s shorts. His father, weighing the delay against this bit of nothing, snatched the matchbook and flung it out the window.

The car was filled with the waxy, overripe scent of the apples and the smell of his father, who had not bathed at the motel because the bathroom had only a shower and he preferred a tub, where he could stretch out while Aaron’s mother shampooed his hair and scrubbed his back until it turned red. His father gnawed steadily on the apples as he drove. Aaron tried to eat one, but his stomach was weak from the heat and the car’s motion, and he managed just a few bites. He closed his eyes and pressed his brow against the window.

“Look!” he heard his father cry out, and he pulled away from the window and opened his eyes. His father’s right arm was stretched awkwardly behind him, back over the top of the seat; in his hand, clutched like a baseball, was a half-eaten apple. Aaron thought that his father was offering him the apple, but as his eyes focused, he realized his father was showing him something: a worm that he had bitten in two, the half still in the apple wiggling frantically, the other half presumably doing the same in his father’s stomach. Aaron did not know which half — the one he could see or the one he was forced to imagine — caused what happened next. His body convulsed, and then his father’s arm was covered in vomit, his vomit, the pancakes and bacon and bits of apple all vaguely identifiable. His father took his eyes from the road to look at his arm as if he too were trying to sort out the ingredients of Aaron’s breakfast.

“Jerry, pull over so we can get you cleaned up,” Aaron’s mother said, staring forward, as though reading the words from a sign up ahead.

His father veered onto the shoulder, braking with such force that the keys jangled in the ignition. He climbed out, holding his soiled arm away from him. As Aaron’s mother worked to retrieve the wet washcloths from the glove compartment, jiggling its tricky latch, he yanked open Aaron’s door and leaned in.

“Eat it,” he said, mashing his arm hard against Aaron’s mouth.

Aaron clenched his jaw, but the vomit leaked back in between his lips. He tried not to move it about with his tongue, but he could taste it, sour and bitter like a rotten walnut, and beneath that was the faint sweetness of the syrup and the bacon’s clear salinity. He told himself that it had all come from him, but this realization only made things worse and he vomited again.

Then, his father was gone, replaced by his mother, who handed him one of the washcloths. “Clean yourself up,” she whispered.

He pressed the cloth to his face, taking in its musty smell, and scraped it hard across his tongue. His parents were behind the car, and he boosted himself onto his knees so that he could watch them through the rear window. “See if I give a shit,” he heard his father say, but a semi hurtled by, taking his mother’s reply with it. At last, his father held out his arm and let his mother run a washcloth along it, the vomit piling up like snow before a plow. They drove away in silence, the washcloths in a heap beside the road, the remains of their emergency.

* * *

For two weeks they drove, his father staring at the road, his mother at maps. Aaron did not find maps appealing. “They’re wonderful tools,” his mother said, which made him think of hammers and drills and noisy activities like those in which his father engaged in the basement, activities that Aaron found as unappealing as maps. “You know,” she added, “we couldn’t make this trip without a map.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, because we need the map so we know where we’re going.”

It had not occurred to him that his parents did not know where they were going.

The trip was marked by statues: a large otter in a park in Fergus Falls; the Happy Chef, who warned them to stuff cotton in their ears because he felt like singing; and Mount Rushmore, which featured the faces of very important men called presidents, whom he would learn about in school his mother said. His father held up a dollar bill, and Aaron was surprised to see that it bore the face of the man on the left, George Washington. His father said that George Washington had wooden teeth, as though this were the most important thing to know about him.

Bookending the trip were the Paul Bunyan statues, the standing one in Bemidji and the sitting Paul Bunyan in Brainerd, their final stop. It was there at the sitting Paul Bunyan’s feet that something happened, a small thing that had nonetheless offered Aaron a glimmer of hope about his potential as a son. In the photograph that remained of that day, he was standing beside Paul’s big, brown boot. He liked to imagine there was something unusual in his stance, defiant, though the look on his face was clear panic, the result of having been made to stand in line with the other children to meet Paul Bunyan while their parents waited to the side, eyeing them like 4-H calves at the fair.

He had watched as two girls in matching yellow bonnets approached the statue. “How old are you?” bellowed Paul Bunyan, and the older girl, her arm firmly around the other’s shoulders, said, “I’m seven. How old are you, Mr. Bunyan?”

“Have you seen Babe, my blue ox?” asked Paul Bunyan, not mentioning his age.

Aaron tried to prepare for his turn by thinking back on what he had learned from the tall tales, but as the line moved forward, he realized that Paul Bunyan did not respond to any of the questions put to him. Finally, when only one child stood between him and the uncooperative giant, he began to sob. The slow simmer of his fear gave way to full-blown panic — like a teapot whistle shrieking inside him — and he leaped forward and kicked Paul Bunyan.

Immediately, he was sorry. “Did you feel that, Mr. Bunyan?” he asked in a voice meant to suggest contrition.

The only response came from the parents, in the form of enthusiastic laughter and clapping. A man in plaid shorts called out, “Knock ’im again. Bust his kneecaps,” and as the parents cheered, his father pushed forward to stand beside him. More than anything else about the trip, Aaron remembered the warmth of his father’s hand on his head.

“Hello there, what’s your name?” Paul Bunyan shouted, his voice echoing from the area of his lap, but nobody was paying attention.

Aaron’s father steered Aaron past the other parents, nodding at them casually, as if to suggest that his son provided such amusing fare daily. A burly woman with a large wooden cross riding atop her bosom called out, “You’re a regular little David, aren’t you?”

“My name is Aaron,” he replied, and even this made people laugh.

5

The morning they left on the family vacation, Aaron’s father had set his coffee cup on the table as he went out the door, triggering the usual response from Aaron’s mother, who wanted to wash it right then, an argument that his father won by threatening to leave without her. When they returned two weeks later, the dirty cup sat where his father had left it, calling his parents to battle, but they averted their eyes and kept silent. In the days that followed, the truce established in front of the sitting-down Paul Bunyan hung over them, its fragility palpable. They sat at the supper table each night, afraid to speak, the hope that they had carried home settling on them like a yoke.

This went on for eight days. On the morning of the ninth, Aaron’s father fell off a parade float and died. Aaron witnessed the whole thing, beginning with his father perched on the back rail of the float with three other policemen, waving and tossing candy, and ending when the tractor pulling the float lurched into a higher gear and his father tumbled backward, landing on his head in the street below. It looked so natural — his uniformed father rolling through the air like a scene from Adam-12—that Aaron thought it had been planned, until the float crashed to a halt, the Shriners in their go-karts veering wildly to avoid his father, their fez tassels going limp as horsetails. One of the other policemen leaped from the float, put two fingers to his father’s neck, and, with something approaching awe in his voice, announced, “By God, Englund’s dead.”

It was not the first time Aaron had heard the word dead, but when he asked his mother exactly what it meant, she told him that dead was “a state, a permanent state.” Flustered by her inability to make death clearer, she added, “Permanent means forever, Aaron.” This made no sense, for when she went to the beauty shop, she got something called a permanent, which lasted just a few months, the curls uncoiling week by week. There was also the dead he associated with cold winter mornings, when his father would stomp back inside the house to pull on gloves, muttering, “The damn battery’s dead.” From the window, Aaron watched him lift the hood on his squad car and back the Oldsmobile out of the garage, attaching cables from its battery to the squad car’s battery. Minutes later, his father drove off, the squad car’s dead battery resurrected.

At the funeral, his father’s colleagues gathered awkwardly around Aaron and his mother. They pressed pennies into his hand, which he slipped into his trouser pockets, alternating between left and right. That night he emptied the pennies into a bowl. As he dressed the next morning, indeed each morning, he redistributed the coins in the same way, enjoying the even weight of them. He came to think of death as this, the steady tug of pennies holding him down, keeping him balanced.

Technically, his father had died in the line of duty, and the funeral reflected this. At the cemetery, Aaron closed his eyes, enjoying the dizziness that overtook him as he stood above the gaping hole that would soon hold his father. The gun blasts, however, had come as a surprise and he wet himself, a warm sensation in his suit pants passing into his consciousness just as the echoes of the gunshots faded. In the days afterward, he and his mother rose and ate and slept, a routine punctuated by the sound of his mother crying in a room where he was not. One night just after the funeral she appeared with a framed photograph of his father, which she set on Aaron’s night table in the spot where she usually set a glass of water. “He looks like this because he was squinting into the sun,” she said, pointing at his father’s small, scowling face.

His father glared at him as he lay in bed each morning, dry-mouthed, waiting for his mother to come for him. He always waited, a habit that had once been a simple function of age, though on his fifth birthday in March, everything changed. He had awakened early that morning and crept down the hallway to his parents’ bedroom, planning to surprise them with his newfound independence, but standing in their half-open doorway, he witnessed a terrifying sight: his father, dressed in his police uniform, had his mother, his naked mother, pressed face-first against the wall, her legs apart, arms reaching upward. “Please, Officer,” his mother said. As Aaron watched, his father handcuffed his mother. He knew what would happen next. He had heard his father run through the drill dozens of times. His mother would be put into his father’s squad car, into the backseat, which was reserved for criminals, and taken to jail. He would be left alone with his father.

He went back to his room and lay with the covers pulled up to his chin. He stayed like that for what seemed a very long time. Finally, his door opened, and his mother peeked in. “Come on, sleepy boy,” she said. “Time to get up. We have a birthday to celebrate.” She held her index finger to her lips, the signal the two of them used to indicate collusion against his father. “Once your father’s gone, we’ll make pancakes.” When she leaned over to pull back his covers, her body gave off a strange almond odor.

* * *

One morning, Aaron opened his eyes to find his father still staring at him from the nightstand. His mouth felt drier than usual, perhaps because he had been dreaming about the iron ore mines, which they had visited near the end of their vacation. They had stayed with Uncle Petey, who was twelve years older than Aaron’s mother. Petey spent his days at his kitchen table sorting buttons for his wife, Charlotte, who was a seamstress. She was German; they had met when Petey was stationed in Germany after the war. Charlotte was so thin that you could see the bones of her spine beneath her cotton shirt as she bent over her sewing machine. Aaron’s mother said she had always been this way, that she could not control her nerves except by smoking, and so, possessed of just one mouth, she had sacrificed eating. Everything in their house smelled of smoke.

Uncle Petey had once worked in the mines, but his mine had stopped producing and become a tourist attraction, which Aaron and his parents toured one afternoon. In the car on the way over, Aaron’s father said that there was more to it than the mine closing, that Petey had stopped working even before that. “He woke up one day and he was afraid of the dark,” his father said, chuckling as he usually did when discussing other people’s fears, while Aaron’s mother stared out the window.

The tour was led by former miners, who spoke to one another in a language that was not English. “Damn Finns,” his father whispered. “They run this place.” It was dark in the mines and wet, and when his father said “Finns” like that, Aaron felt as if he were underwater with everything closing in. He gasped for air.

Halfway through the tour, the group stopped walking. The Finns began ushering people over the edge of what appeared to be a drop-off, but as Aaron got closer, he saw that they were actually stepping onto a ladder and disappearing into the darkness below. Soon, only he and his parents remained at the top, along with one of the Finns. Aaron’s father swung over the edge and onto the ladder. “Let’s go,” he called to Aaron.

“I can’t do it,” Aaron whispered to his mother.

“It’s like walking down stairs,” she said. He knew this was not true.

“You go now,” the Finn told him, the light on his helmet shining into Aaron’s eyes. “It’s not hard,” he added in a kind voice, and Aaron knew the Damn Finn had seen that he was crying. Below them, the others were getting restless.

“Aaron, get your ass on this ladder now or I’m coming back up there and we’ll see if a good spanking won’t help,” said his father from the darkness. The others stopped talking, and without their chatter the mine seemed vast. With the Damn Finn’s help, Aaron knelt, his right foot reaching down for the top rung. A hand seized his ankle. He kicked, but his father held on, pulling him into the darkness.

His sheets were tangled around his legs. He worked himself free, got out of bed, and tipped the photograph forward, bringing his father face-to-face with the nightstand. He found his mother sitting at the kitchen table with the map of Fargo-Moorhead open before her. She could no longer go anywhere near the parade route, which had turned simple errands into full-day events that began here at the table with his mother marking out a route and ended with them driving in circles through newly developed neighborhoods that did not exist on the map.

“You need shoes,” his mother said. “Remember, school starts Monday.” The very thought of starting kindergarten filled him with dread. It was not that he did not want to learn. He did, but he did not want to sit in a room full of other children to do so. “Go get dressed,” his mother said.

“I like my shoes,” he said, but he did not argue because after the funeral Uncle Petey had pulled him aside. “The doctor says your mother needs lots of peace and quiet,” Uncle Petey told him, in a tone suggesting that peace and quiet was something he believed a boy Aaron’s age could not provide. Aaron wondered when the doctor had said this to his mother. She hadn’t been sick. It was true that she slept a lot, but that was something she did not do when she was sick because she always said that the best medicine was having him sit by her bed and tell her things.

He went into his bedroom and put on his pants, dividing the pennies between his front pockets. Then he sat on the floor and wiggled his feet into his shoes. They had become tighter, but that did not change the fact that these were the shoes with which he had kicked Paul Bunyan. He could not imagine starting school without them.

* * *

The store carried only children’s shoes and was decorated to appeal to its audience: a carousel horse stood out front, its coin slot filled with gum, and just inside the door was a gumball machine, flanked by dusty statues of Buster Brown and his dog, whose tail had been broken off and propped against his leg. When they entered, a bell above the door rang.

“And what can we help you with today?” the saleswoman called out to them.

“Aaron is starting school next week,” his mother told the woman.

“Starting school?” the woman said, bending toward him. “And what grade are you going to be in, young man?”

Aaron looked up at the woman. Everything about her was exaggerated — the tone of her voice, the redness of her lipstick, the puff of her hair — each feature rivaling the others like choir members who had decided to out-sing one another. He put his hands in his pockets, letting the pennies trickle through his fingers. “Kindergarten,” he said.

“Kindergarten!” the woman repeated, making her eyes large as if to suggest that meeting a boy about to start kindergarten was rare indeed in her line of work.

“Do you carry cowboy boots?” he asked.

“We do,” she replied, looking at his mother for guidance.

“Absolutely not,” his mother said. “I’m not going to spend all day polishing boots.”

“I would polish them,” Aaron mumbled.

His mother picked up a pair of dress shoes, checked the price, and held them out to him. “Now aren’t these nice?” she said. Aaron looked at them. They were not nice.

“That’s a really snazzy pair,” the saleswoman said. “They’ve been very popular with boys your age.”

Aaron succumbed to the process, allowing the woman to pry off his old shoes, measure his foot, and lace him into a pair of the cheap dress shoes.

“How do they feel?” his mother asked. He stood and paced for her, realizing that the carpet was so worn because all day long other children did as he was doing, walked back and forth while their mothers looked on. His mother and the saleswoman took turns pressing on the toes. “I guess we’ll take them,” his mother said, sighing as she got to her feet, and he could tell then that she did not think the cheap dress shoes were nice either.

“I like them,” he declared.

They moved to the counter, where the saleswoman wound a length of string around the shoebox while chatting about the weather. His mother stood writing a check, her lips moving as though she were dictating the information to her hand. In the past, she had been able to carry on a conversation while writing checks, but lately most tasks required her full concentration so that even when she did get out of bed to make supper, for example, she no longer invited him to cook with her, did not show him how to measure salt in the palm of his hand or check the temperature of the roast.

“Looks like we’ll have a lot of rhubarb this year,” the saleswoman said.

“I used to make rhubarb crisp,” his mother told the woman as she handed her the check.

“I love crisp,” the woman replied. “May I see your driver’s license?”

His mother fumbled with her purse. “Of course, that was before the parade,” she said, handing the woman her license.

The woman began copying information onto the check. “The parade?”

Aaron looked at his mother. Large, evenly spaced tears rolled down her cheeks, what she called “crocodile tears” when he produced them. Once, she had pretended to catch his crocodile tears with a needle and thread, stringing them into a necklace. She had done it to make him laugh, but his mother no longer seemed to be thinking about his laughter.

“Yes, the parade,” his mother said.

He backed away, feigning interest in a pair of Hush Puppies.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what parade you’re talking about, dear,” the saleswoman said. She returned his mother’s license and pivoted toward the cash register.

“The parade,” his mother screamed. The woman jerked back around. “The parade,” she said again, this time with quiet authority. “Don’t you know anything?” She shook her head as though she pitied the woman and then rested it on the counter, atop the nest that she’d made of her arms.

Everything that happened next would remain in Aaron’s memory as a set of images and sounds, devoid of chronology. He knew that the saleswoman had called to him repeatedly, “Young man, there’s something wrong with your mother,” and that he had stood with his back to them, focusing on the gumball machine by the door. He recalled the feel of his hands dipping repeatedly into his pockets, the way they seemed separate from him, not his own hands at all, and the things he told himself as he turned the metal crank of the machine, things like “If it’s blue, she’ll stop crying and we’ll go home.” He remembered the whirring as the saleswoman dialed the telephone and what she said first: “I’m calling to request medical assistance.” She said other things, but those things he did not remember because nothing had impressed him like that first sentence.

By the time the ambulance arrived, his pockets were empty, his dead-father pennies converted into bubblegum, which had formed a wad in his mouth the size of a Ping-Pong ball. “What’s your name, son?” one of the paramedics asked. Aaron stared up at the man, cheeks puffed out, lips pulled back menacingly. His jaw had gone numb, so he did not know that he was drooling, his spittle tinged green and pink and blue. With his pockets empty, he felt as though he might float away, so he stood very still, watching as they strapped his mother to a gurney and wheeled her to the ambulance and as the saleswoman ran after them with the cheap dress shoes. She returned looking satisfied, her transaction complete, but she saw him then and stopped.

“How can you just stand there chewing gum?” she asked in a cool, steady voice.

He stared back at her, feeling the familiar urge to vomit, but he knew nothing could get past the gum. He panicked, the pastel spittle foaming around his mouth as he struggled to breathe.

“What kind of a boy are you?” the saleswoman said just before he passed out.

* * *

His jaw ached as it did after a visit to the dentist, but the bubblegum was gone. He kept his eyes closed and breathed in, focusing on the smells: metal, ointments, and Band-Aids fresh from the wrapper, as well as something unfamiliar, a thick odor that he thought might be dead people, for he knew that he was in a hospital. He had never actually smelled a dead person, not even his father, but he knew they smelled. His father had said so at supper one night, describing, almost gleefully, the odor of an old woman, five days dead, whom he had found that morning after the mailman noted an accumulation of mail.

“We had to break in,” his father said. The idea of the police breaking into a house had shocked Aaron. “Found her tipped back in her recliner with a bowl of grapes in her lap. She choked.” His father paused. “The stink of the human body,” he said with awe. He took a long drink of milk, got up, and retrieved the shirt he had worn that day. “Smell here,” he said to Aaron’s mother as he held it to her nose repeatedly, wanting her to be impressed by the stink of the old woman also, but his mother said, “It just smells like you, Jerry.”

Aaron opened his eyes. On a chair was the box with his cheap dress shoes. He remembered the saleswoman running out to the ambulance with it, and he wondered whether this meant his mother was nearby. A man came in. “How are you, Aaron?” asked the man.

“Are you the doctor?”

“I’m a nurse,” the man said. He held Aaron’s wrist and stared up at the clock on the wall. Aaron had not known that men could be nurses.

“Do you feel groggy?” the man asked. “We had to give you a sedative to loosen your jaw.” Groggy was a word Aaron knew. The man was looking at a chart, and when he glanced up and smiled, Aaron was startled to see that he was wearing braces.

“Yes,” he said, “I feel groggy. Is my mother here?”

“Your uncle’s here,” the man said, as if that were the same thing.

When the door opened, it was not Uncle Petey but a stranger with a nub for an ear, the skin smooth and pink. “Hello, Aaron,” said the stranger. “I’m your uncle.”

“My uncle is Petey,” Aaron informed the man politely.

“Ah, yes, Petey,” the man said. “A name better suited for a parakeet, don’t you think?” He gave Aaron a moment to agree, but Aaron did not. “Lives up on the Iron Range. Fine country, the Iron Range. They’re really doing God’s work up there, though I suspect your uncle Petey’s not involved with any of that.”

“He works in a mine,” Aaron said. He did not tell the man that the mine was closed or that Uncle Petey had quit even before that because he was afraid of the dark.

“My name is Irv Englund,” said the man. “You can call me Mr. Englund. We need to get going because it’s nearly suppertime, but let’s have a prayer first.”

He took Aaron’s hand and prayed aloud in a fast, rhythmic chant, asking God to make Aaron into a child worthy of becoming a lamb. When he said “Amen,” he pressed Aaron’s hand hard against his nub. It was as smooth as Play-Doh. Aaron pulled away, and his uncle laughed.

Mr. Englund drove an El Camino, a type of car Aaron knew because his father had always pointed them out. “The car that wants to be a truck,” his father liked to say, “or maybe it’s a truck that wants to be a car.” He had smirked as though they were talking about much more than automobiles.

They got into the El Camino. “Ready?” said his uncle. He slapped Aaron’s leg as though they were pals, but the pain was sudden and sharp. Aaron nodded.

Several minutes later, they exited the interstate and stopped at the top of the ramp to wait for the light to change. Aaron thought they were in Fargo, though the two towns were connected and he could rarely tell them apart. Just outside Aaron’s window was a man perched on a backpack, a sleeping bag and pan attached to it, a crutch across his lap. His uncle leaned over and locked Aaron’s door. “Homeless people like to sit here and wait for the light to turn,” he said. “Just when you’re rolling away, they reach in your window or yank open the door and grab something.”

“What do they grab?” Aaron asked.

“Whatever they can get their hands on — a purse or briefcase, even a sack of groceries.” Groceries, his uncle explained, were not as popular because the homeless people wanted money. “For their vices,” he added.

Aaron knew what a vise was. There was one attached to his father’s worktable in the basement. When his father was away at work, Aaron used to go down and look at his tools, trying to make sense of them but really trying to make sense of his father, who was attracted to them. The vise had perplexed him. When he finally got up the courage to ask his father what it was for, his father said, “Here, I’ll show you,” and he took Aaron’s hand, held it in the air between the two sides of the vise, and began to turn the handle so that the sides moved toward each other, toward Aaron’s hand. Aaron felt an unpleasant pressure, which crossed over into pain. He tried to pull away but couldn’t. His father was watching him, waiting. Aaron whimpered, and his father loosened the vise. “Now you see how that works,” he had said.

“They use the money to buy vises?” Aaron asked. It made no sense to him.

“They’re addicted,” said his uncle. “Vices cost money, so they take what they can get and run down under the bridge over there.”

Aaron looked out at the homeless man, who gazed steadily back at him as he brought his empty hand to his mouth, fingertips pressed together. “I don’t think he can run,” Aaron said. “He has a crutch.”

“The crutch?” his uncle snorted. “That’s a prop.”

Aaron did not ask what a prop was. The light changed, and they drove in silence, finally pulling into the driveway of a white brick house, a house that looked like every other house around it. Aaron wondered whether he had driven by the house before, on family outings or trips to the dentist. His father had known everything about both towns. He took shortcuts and never got lost and told stories as he drove, like a tour guide pointing out important sites. “You see that house with the red roof?” he had said as they left town on the Englund family vacation. “I answered a call there a few weeks ago, a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen. Cute thing. A garter snake got inside the pipes and came up through the bathroom faucet. It was stuck halfway out of the tap, and the kid was afraid to call her parents because they told her never to call them at work unless it was an emergency. She told me she’d shut the door and tried to forget about the snake, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it wiggling around in there.”

“What did you do, Jerry?” asked his mother.

“I yanked it out and lopped off its head with my pocket knife.” His father laughed, perhaps recalling the weight of the dead snake in his hands.

“I hope you didn’t just leave it there,” said his mother breathlessly.

“Of course not,” his father said. “Why would I do that? The kid was in tears. She hugged me when I left. You think I’d just leave a dead snake in her bathroom?”

Aaron had not been able to stop thinking about it: that the girl, afraid to call her own parents, had called his father. Even more confusing was that his father had not laughed at her for being afraid or dangled the dead snake in front of her. He had not yelled at her to stop crying. Instead, he had helped the girl, and she had hugged him.

His father had pointed out houses belonging to drug dealers and a park where a homeless man who eschewed shoes, even in winter, had been found beaten and tied to a swing set by his hair. While they waited for the paramedics, his father had freed the man by cutting off his hair. “I did him a favor,” his father said. “It was filled with bugs and leaves and shit, actual shit, but Rapunzel there actually swore at me for cutting it.”

Everywhere they drove, his father had told stories like these, the town as familiar to him as his own living room, but never once had he said, “That house over there, the white brick with the perfect yard? That’s where my brother lives.” He had never even said that he had a brother.

“Ready to meet your cousins?” asked his uncle, and they went inside the white brick house, where a woman and too many children for Aaron to make sense of at once were waiting at a long table. His uncle sat down at the head and motioned to the empty chair beside him. Aaron wanted to wash his hands first, but he was too nervous to ask. They bowed their heads and recited a lengthy prayer, and because Aaron was not familiar with praying, he kept his head down longer than the others. When he looked up, everyone was staring at him. There was no talking during dinner, just the impressive sound of many forks and knives being utilized at once. A girl slightly older than him tipped over her milk, and his uncle turned to her and said, “What’s that good for?” which was what Aaron’s father had always said when he spilled. At the end of the meal, they prayed again, and the girl who had spilled her milk was told to apologize.

“God, I’m sorry I spilled my milk,” she said, her voice delicate as porcelain.

“That you have so graciously provided,” her father said.

“That you have so graciously provided,” she repeated.

“Fine,” Aaron’s uncle announced. “Everyone who has eaten what was put before him is excused. Devotions will be read in one hour.”

Two boys remained at the table. They sat with their backs straight, staring ahead rather than down at the onions that they had extracted with great care from the potato salad. “So, Matthew, Mark,” their father said, sounding strangely jovial. “No onions for you boys tonight?”

The boys did not answer.

“Well, I guess you know what to do.”

They rose and pushed open the sliding glass door that led out to the backyard, and their father called after them, “And not from the elm.”

Aaron’s aunt came in from the kitchen. “Popcorn with devotions?” she asked.

“Yes,” his uncle said, “but none for Matthew and Mark.”

She spoke to Aaron for the first time. “Do you like popcorn?” she asked hopefully. He told her that he did, and she said, “I’m glad.” He picked up a plate from the table to help the way he did at home. “Aaron,” she said, “that’s not for boys.” He could see the girls moving around in the kitchen, washing dishes and making order.

Matthew and Mark returned, each carrying a stick from which the bark had been peeled. They handed the sticks to their father, turned, and lowered their pants, revealing buttocks as pale as the flesh of the stripped branches. Only then did Aaron understand that the boys were about to be spanked. He wondered what they had thought about as they searched for the perfect sticks and prepared them with the knowledge that the sticks would soon be used against them. His father had delivered spankings with his belt, which he unbuckled and slid slowly from its loops. If he was still wearing his uniform, there was an extra step, the removing of the holster, a step he had conducted with great ceremony, as if the spanking were an official duty.

Aaron did not want to watch his cousins getting spanked, so he studied a clay reproduction of the Last Supper that hung on the dining room wall. The hanging had broken and been mended poorly, the largest crack creating the appearance of a rift between those to Jesus’s left and those to the right, with Jesus himself at the epicenter. Behind Aaron the sticks whizzed through the air, but Matthew and Mark were silent. At last, he heard his uncle leave the room, his cousins zippering their pants and leaving also.

Next to the Last Supper was a painting of a man. “Your uncle painted that,” his aunt said from behind him. “He made it for my birthday a few years ago.” Aaron tried to imagine his uncle sitting in a room holding a paintbrush, but he could not. “It’s the nicest gift I ever received,” his aunt declared. “It’s not paint-by-number. It’s all freehand.”

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It’s Jesus,” said his aunt. She sounded horrified by his question, but Aaron had seen pictures of Jesus and this looked nothing like him.

“Why is he wearing a stocking cap?”

“That’s the crown of thorns,” his aunt said. With her finger, she traced the rivers of blood that ran from the crown down Jesus’s face. The blood was cherry red, which gave the painting a festive quality. She went back into the kitchen, and Aaron crept over to the table by the door on which his uncle had dropped the box with his dress shoes. When he lifted the lid, he missed his mother and their house with a sudden, sick longing.

His uncle came back into the room carrying a rolled-up newspaper. “Don’t stand there gawking,” he said, swatting Aaron across the head with the paper.

“May I use the bathroom?” Aaron asked.

“You’ve got ten minutes before devotions.”

Aaron could hear the sound of popcorn popping in the kitchen. His aunt peeked out. “Aaron, what do you like to drink with your popcorn?” she asked.

She didn’t list possibilities, so he said, “Water, please.”

“Water,” said his uncle angrily, as though Aaron had requested beer.

“You can’t drink water with popcorn,” his aunt explained. “The water will taste like fish.” Aaron had drunk water with popcorn plenty of times and never noticed a fish taste, nor did he understand why a fish taste would be bad.

“How about root beer?” his aunt suggested, and Aaron nodded, though he did not like root beer. Occasionally on Sunday evenings, his father had said, “How about we drive over to the A&W for supper?” His father liked the A&W, where one could stay in the car instead of having to go inside and eat surrounded by strangers. Aaron always asked for orange pop, which his father nixed. “This is A&W,” he said. “You’ll have root beer like everyone else.” The root beer came in Goldilocks sizes, and because his mother always ordered the Baby Bear even though there was a Mama Bear, Aaron knew that she wanted something other than root beer also.

“You better get to the bathroom,” his uncle said. “I warmed the seat up for you.”

The smell began in the hallway, like rotting potatoes. When he pushed open the bathroom door and stepped in, the odor was so thick he thought he could feel it on his skin. He picked up a towel and held it to his nose, but he could not urinate like that, so he held his breath, set down the towel, and lifted the toilet seat. When he had finished, he flushed and watched, first with interest and then alarm, as the water rose in the bowl. A plunger sat in a rusted coffee can nearby, and he jammed it into the toilet, but it was too late. As the water streamed over the sides, he opened the bathroom door and called for help. His aunt came running, and they stood together beside the toilet, his aunt pumping the plunger up and down.

“My goodness, Aaron,” she said, not unkindly but with some dismay as they stared at the coil of feces floating on the surface. It was as big around as his arm. He reddened, wondering how she could possibly believe he had produced such a thing.

“Hurry up,” called his uncle from the living room.

“You better go,” his aunt said. She knelt and began mopping up the dirty water, wringing the rag into an ice cream bucket. He went into the living room, where the others sat waiting. They stared at him, this boy who had come home with their father, plugged up the toilet, and delayed devotions. One of the girls handed him a cereal bowl of popcorn, which she said he could not touch until devotions began. When his aunt joined them, she set her bowl on the floor away from her.

His uncle handed Mark a small booklet, from which Mark began to read a story about a young man who had been wounded in Vietnam. Aaron knew that Vietnam was a war because his father had talked about it at the supper table, especially about the Draft Dodgers, of whom his father spoke with great contempt. At first, Aaron did not know who the Draft Dodgers were or why his father hated them, but he did know what a draft was. When his mother came into his room at bedtime, she wiggled his window shut, saying, “You need to keep this closed, Aaron. There’s a draft. You don’t want to get sick.” Then, she laid her hand on his brow for just a moment. There was nothing better than the feel of her warmth against his coolness.

“What are Draft Dodgers?” he asked her one night after his father had spoken of them angrily throughout supper yet again.

“They’re young men who run away to Canada to escape the draft,” his mother said, adding softly, “They don’t want to die.” From the way she said this, Aaron knew that she considered it perfectly reasonable not to want to die. Then she reached up and wiggled his window closed, keeping him safe.

In the story that Mark read, there were no Draft Dodgers. The young man who came home wounded from Vietnam wrote to his mother from the hospital, asking whether he might stay with her until he got his strength back. He also requested permission to bring a friend who had lost both legs and had nowhere else to go. The mother wrote back, explaining that she looked forward to her son’s homecoming. “But,” the letter went on, “I am not strong enough to care for someone without legs. I am sure that your friend has family that can take him in. I know you will understand.”

His aunt began to sob, and Mark read the ending quickly: the mother was soon visited by an army officer, who told her that her son had wheeled himself out a hospital window to his death. “It’s like that sometimes,” the officer said. “A young man loses his legs and can’t figure out how to go on.” His aunt gasped and sobbed even more, pressing her reddened hands to her mouth while his cousins stared into their empty popcorn bowls.

Aaron did not know what to make of the story. It was not until he recalled it as a teenager that he realized the son had been talking about himself, that he was the legless friend. However, he would never understand — not as a teenager, not even as an adult — whether the son had killed himself because he felt his mother would no longer love him, or because he could not bear knowing that she had failed his test. Never did he consider that it had nothing to do with the mother at all.

* * *

“We’re putting you in with Zilpah,” his uncle said. Zilpah was the cousin who had spilled her milk. “I know you might not like sharing with a girl, but she’s the only one with her own room.” His aunt brought him a pair of Matthew’s pajamas, and after he had changed, she told him to kneel on the floor to pray. He knelt on the orange carpet next to Zilpah, and then they stood and crawled into bed together, his head at her feet, as his aunt instructed.

“We’re not allowed to study dinosaurs,” Zilpah said once they were alone in the dark room.

“Why?” he asked, though he had little interest in dinosaurs.

“My father says they’re sinful.” Her voice floated up from his feet. “We also have to leave the room if the teacher talks about Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote a story about a man who cut up a heart and put it under the floor but it was still beating, like this—boom, boom.” She sounded like a flute impersonating a drum. “Ruth’s teacher read them the story, and then Ruth told us the story at supper, and my father was very angry.”

“Why did he cut up the heart?” Aaron asked.

“Put your head under the blanket and I’ll tell you.” He felt a rush of air on his feet as she lifted her end, and he did the same. “The devil told him to,” she whispered. He pulled his head back out because it frightened him to be under the blanket with her saying “devil” just to him.

“What’s your name?” he asked, because all he could recall was that it was something strange.

She pulled her head out also. “Zilpah,” she said. “Z-I–L-P-A-H.” Aaron did not tell her that letters meant nothing to him because he had not yet started school. “It’s very uncommon to have a name that starts with Z. It’s from the Old Testament. My father says the great achievements have been made by men and that makes it hard to find good Bible names for girls.”

“My mother named me after a lake,” he said. “Lake Aaron. She used to go swimming there with her grandfather when she was little.”

“Well, Aaron’s a Bible name. The lake was probably named after the Bible,” Zilpah said. She giggled. “Do you ever wet the bed?”

“Not much,” he said, which was true.

“Me too,” she said. “Do you know that I have a condition?”

“What’s a condition?” he asked.

“I have a condition with my heart. I was born that way.”

“Can the doctor fix it?” According to his mother, doctors could not fix everything.

“My father doesn’t want them to,” Zilpah whispered. “He’s healing me with prayer. The doctor told him he was being irresponsible.”

“What does irresponsible mean?” Aaron asked.

“It means he’s not taking care of me,” she explained.

“The doctor said that?” It astonished him to think of someone saying such a thing to his uncle. “What did your father say?”

“He was very angry. He called the doctor ‘O ye of little faith.’ Then he told my mother to get me ready to go home, and he went to get the car. The doctor talked to my mother outside my room, and when she came back in, she was crying. She put my things in the suitcase, and I got to ride in a wheelchair, and we came home.”

“My mother is in the hospital,” Aaron said.

“I know. Our mother told us. Does she have a condition?”

“I’m not sure,” said Aaron. “She cries a lot. Is that a condition?”

“Well, my mother cries a lot because of my condition. I don’t really cry, except when I can’t play with Matthew and Mark.”

“Is playing fun?” Aaron asked, for there was something about the dark room and Zilpah’s voice that made him feel he could ask such things.

“Of course playing is fun,” Zilpah said. “Don’t you like to play?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t think I’ve played before.”

“That’s silly. You must play sometimes.”

Aaron gave this some thought. “No, I’m pretty sure I’ve never played. Not with other kids. I play by myself sometimes.” He could feel Zilpah’s breath on his toes.

“I know what,” Zilpah said. “I’ll ask Matthew and Mark to play with you. That way, you can see if you like it.” Her voice was so kind that he felt he might cry. “I love Matthew and Mark,” she said in a slow, sleepy voice.

“Don’t you like the others?” he asked. The topic of siblings interested him.

“Not so much,” she said. “I love them, but they never do anything that would make my father angry, even if it’s something really fun.”

“What are their names?” Aaron asked, wanting to keep her awake because he could not imagine being awake without her.

“Leah is the oldest, then Ruth. They always wear braids. Jonah is next. He’s the fat one, and my father always says to him that he named him after Jonah and not the whale and to go out and ride his bike.” Zilpah giggled. “Then Matthew and Mark are the ones that got switched after supper. They get switched all the time, but they don’t care. They hate onions. My father tells my mother to put onions in everything so they’ll learn to eat what’s put in front of them. My father loves onions.”

“My father liked them also. He hated pancakes, so we only had them when he was at work. He died, but we still don’t have pancakes because my mother forgets to go to the store. Do people who don’t have legs eat less?” he asked, now that he knew people could be legless.

“I don’t know,” said Zilpah. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have legs.”

“You didn’t meet any in the hospital?”

“The only person I met in the hospital was the foster. She was my roommate.”

“Who’s the foster?” he asked.

“She’s the one who helped my mother clear the table after supper.”

“Is she your sister?”

“She is not my sister,” Zilpah said.

“Who is she then?”

“She’s just… foster.”

“Why don’t you like Foster?”

“Her name’s not Foster. It’s just what she is. She doesn’t belong here.”

“Am I foster?” Aaron asked, thinking it sounded awful to be foster.

“No,” Zilpah assured him. “You’re not foster. For one thing, I wouldn’t let you sleep with me if you were foster. They wanted her to sleep with me, but I said no, so she has to sleep with Ruth and Leah. They like her, so it doesn’t matter. I get to have my own room because of the condition. I need lots of rest. But I don’t mind if you’re here. Besides, my mother said you wouldn’t be here long, just until your mom’s better.”

“She said that?”

“Yes, and she said we have to pray because she might have the devil in her like Edgar Allan Poe.”

Aaron sat up. “She doesn’t have the devil in her.”

“How do you know?” Zilpah asked.

It was true. He didn’t know. His aunt opened the door. “I’m going to have to move Aaron if I hear anything else out of the two of you,” she said.

After she shut the door again, they giggled quietly, and soon Zilpah’s breathing became slower. He had awakened that morning in his own bed, his father squinting at him from the night table, but he would fall asleep in this bed, a bed belonging to a stranger who was his cousin, and when he woke up, still in this bed, it would be a new day and there would be nothing connecting him to his real life. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, it was morning.

6

Three days later, school started, but Aaron was not allowed to go, despite the new dress shoes. He stayed behind with his aunt. Each morning she packed lunches while his cousins readied themselves, chaotically, for school, the mood in the house lighter because his uncle had already left for his job managing the first shift at the beet plant. At eight o’clock, somebody — usually the Foster — announced the arrival of the school bus, which led to one final burst of activity before the house became still, the front door standing open in his cousins’ wake because the last one out never knew he was last. Closing it became Aaron’s job, and because he craved duties, was comforted by routine, he liked being in charge of the door, though his heart ached at how easily he had stepped through the gate into this new life.

Only then did Aaron and his aunt have breakfast. She said a prayer, and they ate English muffins, which were his aunt’s favorite, but he could not get used to their sourness or the way they scratched the roof of his mouth. While they ate, she told him stories that would have scared him at any time of day but seemed particularly terrifying at breakfast. She said that if he passed a pigsty and the pigs were leaping in the air, it meant the devil was floating overhead and the pigs were trying to devour him. Another morning, she took a can of corn from the cupboard and pointed at the bar code on the back. Someday, they would attempt to put a bar code just like it on his body, she said, taking his wrist and tapping it to show where the bar code would go. It was called the mark of the beast and he must never let them do it. He did not know who “they” were, but he liked the way she held his wrist, leaving buttery fingerprints behind, and he assured her that he would not.

Next, they took out the cleaning supplies, and his aunt let him help her clean, though it had to be their secret. He discovered that he liked cleaning, and he thought that his aunt liked having his help. It was always noon when they finished, so they sat at the table and ate again, usually bread with a slice of Velveeta and cottage cheese, his aunt chatting the whole while about everyday things that did not involve the devil or the mark of the beast. Mainly, she talked about a church luncheon that she was in charge of planning. “It’s a big responsibility,” she said. He nodded, and she turned over an envelope to take notes. “There will be buns with ham. Do you think it’s better to serve them open-faced or with the tops on?”

“What will you do with the tops if you don’t put them on?” he asked.

“Well, the tops will be another open-faced sandwich,” she explained. “With ham on them.” Her reddened hands made a somersault, demonstrating how this would work.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

“Do you think so? I just don’t know.” This was where the conversation about the luncheon usually ended.

One day as his aunt sat looking defeated and he sat wondering how to reassure her, the telephone rang. She stood up and answered it. “Yellow,” she said, her voice sunny like the color, and in a quieter voice, “Oh, Dolores. How are you?” He moved closer so that he could hear his mother’s voice. “Rusks,” his aunt said, and then, “I’ll put him on.”

He took the receiver, which was still warm and carried a cheese smell. His mother sounded far away, like she was asleep and was calling him from inside her dream. “Are you being good for your aunt and uncle?” she asked.

He nodded, unaccustomed to using the telephone, and then, realizing she was waiting, he said, “Yes, I am. Are you in the hospital?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you sick?”

“I guess I am.”

“Where does it hurt?” he asked.

“I’m very tired,” she said. “Have you ever felt like that? So tired that you only wanted to sleep?” He waited for her to say more. He could hear something in the background, a television maybe. Finally, his aunt said, “Time to hang up, Aaron,” and she held out her hand for the receiver. He turned away and said what his mother always said to him after the book and the kiss and just before the dark. “Sweet dreams.” He handed the phone back to his aunt because sweet dreams was always the last thing.

* * *

At his aunt and uncle’s house, the day after Saturday was not called Sunday; it was called the Sabbath, a name that appealed to Aaron because it sounded clean. On the Sabbath, the entire family — his aunt and uncle, his cousins, and the Foster — went to church, his uncle driving them in two batches. Aaron wore his new dress shoes on the Sabbath because his aunt said that sneakers were not appropriate in God’s House. God’s House was not a house at all; it was a church, of the sort that he had passed with his parents many times though never entered because his parents were not interested in churches. On the second Sabbath, all the adults in the church, including his aunt and uncle, took turns going to the front and kneeling while the pastor stood over them. Aaron was used to seeing his aunt on her knees because they scrubbed the floors together each morning, but he could not reconcile his stern, unbending uncle with the contrite figure kneeling at the front of the church. When they returned to the pew, his aunt had purple commas turning up from the corners of her mouth. The sight of them made him queasy.

“What do you do when you go to the front of the church?” he asked his aunt at breakfast the next morning.

“We eat the body of Christ, and then we drink his blood,” his aunt said.

“Does God know you do that?” he asked. She had explained that Christ was God’s son.

“You’re such a funny boy,” his aunt said. She giggled as if he had said something clever. “Of course, God knows. Remember what I told you? He knows everything.”

His father had had a name for people who wanted to know everything, like their neighbor Mrs. Severson, who spent her days peering out the window. When his father pulled up each evening, she’d rushed out to ask him how many arrests he had made that day. His father called these people busybodies.

“Is God a busybody?” Aaron asked.

“Oh, Aaron,” said his aunt, her voice like a slow shattering of glass. She stared at him the way that people at his father’s funeral had, then took his hand between her own, which were sticky with jam. He could tell that he had disappointed her, though he wasn’t sure how. He took in one, tiny breath, but it exited his body in great, hiccupping sobs.

As he cried, his aunt continued to hold his hand, her mouth forming words he could not understand. After a while, she led him to Zilpah’s bed, where he fell into a deep sleep. When he awakened, she was still there, peering down at him, her face flushed. “You beat him,” she said. He lay still, his right hand flung up across his sweaty forehead, breathing in and out and missing his mother, who always awakened him from naps with a glass of water in hand because she knew how thirsty it made him to rest. “He was in you, Aaron. I prayed, but you did it.”

“Who was in me?” he asked, alarmed.

“Satan,” his aunt said. She too was sweaty. “You called God a busybody, but he was making you do it. He was using your voice. Satan is clever, but you defeated him.” She stood up. “You rest some more.”

“I already rested,” he said.

“You weren’t asleep even fifteen minutes,” she said. “You must be exhausted. I’ll take care of things around here this morning.”

He stayed in Zilpah’s bed, listening to the now-familiar sounds of the toaster being depressed and the tapping of a spoon inside a cup. He could picture his aunt measuring sugar into her coffee as she sat in her robe beneath the broken Last Supper eating a second English muffin. Finally, he heard what he had been listening for: the muted swish of his aunt’s slippers against the hallway carpet, the bathroom door being closed partway.

His aunt suffered from constipation. Constipation was not a word he’d known when he came to stay, but during one of their first breakfasts together, she explained it to him with a clarity that was rare for her. She spoke matter-of-factly, and he tried to match her tone, though he was deeply embarrassed by talk of bathroom activities. “I’ve tried everything,” she said. “Now, your uncle, he eats one minute and goes the next.”

Aaron nodded, knowing this to be true.

“Do you know, I’ve suffered from constipation since the day I married him.”

He thought about this, remembering how the doctor who talked to him and his mother after his father’s accident had said that his father had not suffered. His aunt had stood then and trudged down the hallway to the bathroom, leaving the door open several inches. While he sat at the table nibbling his English muffin, she labored loudly to expel waste from her body. When she reappeared, her face pale and sweaty, she shook her head, indicating failure, and he felt then, keenly, that his aunt did indeed suffer.

The morning he defeated Satan, Aaron listened to his aunt moving around in the bathroom, before covering his head with his pillow against the sounds he knew she would soon make. After what seemed a very long time, he removed it. Nothing. He rose and remade the bed and walked quickly down the hallway, noticing too late that the bathroom door still stood ajar. “Aaron,” his aunt called from inside. “Are you up?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to clean.”

“You’re not tired anymore?” she panted.

“I’m not tired.”

“Well, then, I need you to bring me a roll of toilet paper.”

“What?” He was sure he had misheard.

“I didn’t check the roll before I sat down. I need you to bring one, from the closet at the end of the hallway,” she said.

“Do you really need it?” he asked.

“Someone else will need it if I don’t.” She sounded glum, but then her voice lifted, as it did when she was about to pray. “It’s best to be prepared.”

Aaron had never seen anyone sitting on a toilet, but he knew how he felt — awkward and ashamed, his legs dangling helplessly, ankles bound by his trousers. His father had been the opposite. He’d thought nothing of pulling to the side of the road and urinating as cars whizzed by. “Taking a leak,” he called it. His father had also liked to tell bathroom stories, though not all of them took place in the bathroom. His father’s favorite, which he retold at the supper table every few months, involved a man with a name that was not really a name at all, more of an adjective—Stinky something or other. Each fall, Stinky and Aaron’s grandfather, as well as several other men, went on a hunting trip together, and when Aaron’s father turned thirteen, he began accompanying them. These men were willing to rise at four in the morning and sit for hours in the cold inside a blind, which Aaron found a strange name for a place from which one did nothing but watch. They also trekked through the woods, sometimes for twelve hours before giving up and returning to the cabin. The story that his father liked to tell at the supper table was one that had been told in the hunting cabin one night at supper by Harvey, who was the town barber as well as Stinky’s hunting partner, and when his father told the story, he liked to pretend he was Harvey telling it.

“It must have been around seven that we came across this buck,” he always began, his voice slowing and deepening to imitate Harvey’s, taking on a slight lisp, “but to tell the truth, we weren’t really thinking about deer yet. We were just trying to get as much coffee as possible inside ourselves when suddenly the buck’s right there, maybe forty feet off.” His father’s pace quickened. “Well, Stinky throws down his thermos and fires off three shots, and one of them nicks the back leg of the buck. It takes off, limping, and me and Stinky are running after it, when Stinky announces, ‘I’ve gotta shit something terrible.’ We run a few more steps, and he says, ‘I can’t take it,’ and he unzips his suit. I’m a half step behind, and I see his left hand snaking along to the back. We keep running, and before you know it, he pulls his hand out and he’s holding a steaming mound of shit — like a goddamn magician pulling out a live chick. I swear. Didn’t even break stride.”

Here, his father had slipped back into his own voice to explain how Harvey repeated this last line over and over—“Didn’t even break stride”—and how everyone at the table laughed so hard that they actually threw down their forks and stopped eating. What Aaron had always wanted to know — but never asked — was whether Stinky laughed with them.

The only time his mother commented on the story, it was to say, “It’s just not possible,” as if the only thing that troubled her was its feasibility.

“Have you tried, Dolores?” his father asked. His mother looked at her plate and said nothing. “Not a damn shred of humor between the two of you,” his father said then, which was what he always said at the end of his stories.

Unlike his mother, Aaron had never doubted the story’s veracity. He just did not understand why his father found it funny, for no matter how many times his father told it, it was always the same: a man called Stinky chasing a dying deer, wanting that deer so bad that he shit in his own hand to get it. Standing outside the bathroom with a roll of toilet paper, Aaron wondered what his aunt would make of the story, whether she would laugh also or cry in envy. She called to him, and he went in. There she sat with her elbows on her knees, her pink robe tented over her, covering everything but her calves. She looked up at him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have another person seeing you like that: hunched and vulnerable and straining.

“Thank you,” she said, adding, “You’re a good boy.”

He went into the kitchen and began extracting cleaners from beneath the sink, lining them up on the counter — Pledge, Lysol, Comet. His favorite was the Lysol. He unscrewed the top and breathed in its powerful, antiseptic odor. Soon, the smell would fill the room and then the house. Several years later, as he was cleaning the bathrooms in the café before school one morning, he would breathe in the Lysol’s omnipresent odor and finally understand: his aunt, who had believed God was everywhere, was used to being watched, not just when she was cooking and cleaning and praying, but even when she was on the toilet. And though Aaron did not believe in God, he hoped she had found comfort in having a steady witness to the suffering that would otherwise have been hers to bear alone.

* * *

One morning, Aaron and his aunt drove past the spot where his father had tumbled from the float and died. His aunt said nothing. They were on their way to Target. He had never been to Target. They started in the Men’s Department, where his aunt picked out undershirts for his uncle, then went on to Children’s. “What do you think about this for Mark?” she asked, holding up a blue plaid shirt that looked just like the shirts Mark always wore.

“I think he’ll like it,” Aaron said.

“Do you think so? Boys can be so difficult to buy for.” She said this as though Aaron were not a boy.

She chose shirts for everyone but the Foster. “What about the Foster?” he said. “What color would she like?”

“Don’t call her the Foster. You’ll hurt her feelings. Her name is Alice.”

Alice. It was a nice-enough name. He did not recall hearing anyone in the family use it. “What color should we get for Alice?” he asked.

“We can’t get anything for Alice today,” his aunt explained. “She has a stipend. There’s not enough money left this month.”

Aaron did not know what a stipend was. “Won’t she feel bad?” he asked.

“Well, I suppose she might, but she knows the rules.”

“Oh,” said Aaron. He had not known there were rules.

Nearly twenty years later, as he signed a credit card receipt in a bookstore at the shopping mall in Fargo, the woman behind the counter would look at the name on his card and begin to laugh, pointing at the book that he was purchasing, photographs of nude men. “Now what would your aunt and uncle have to say about your reading material?” she would ask. Only then would he look at the woman, who was pretty in the way of women who work just a bit too hard at it, and realize it was the Foster.

“Oh, my gosh. Foster,” he would say, knowing that was not her name, and she would scowl prettily at him, the sort of woman who could not help flirting with a man, even one buying a book filled with pictures of naked men.

“You still haven’t figured out that’s not my name, Aaron?”

He would apologize, and she would say, “Alice.” He would ask about his aunt and uncle and cousins, and she would say, “What a family of freaks.”

“Zilpah?” he would ask.

Zilpah was dead, she would tell him matter-of-factly. Right up until the end, her father had refused treatment. She thought there had been a case, something legal, but she didn’t know what had come of it. She would suggest they get a drink and catch up, and when he said he needed to get going, she would call after him poutily, “Enjoy your book.”

“I have a surprise,” his aunt said. “We’re going to buy you school supplies.” She clapped her hands together. “That way, you’ll be ready when you start.”

“I don’t have any money,” Aaron said. He laid his hands on his pockets, recalling the pennies.

“I have money,” his aunt said. “It will be my treat. We’ll hide everything from your uncle.”

“Why will we hide it?” he asked.

“It’ll be fun to hide it. It’ll be our secret.”

They spent forty-five minutes choosing supplies: two fat pencils; a pink eraser; a jar of paste, which his aunt let him smell; and a pair of small, dull scissors. She took down two cardboard boxes with flip lids, one picturing whales and alligators, the other Raggedy Ann and Andy. “Which one do you like?” she asked. “To put everything in.”

He liked Raggedy Ann and Andy, who were smiling and holding hands, but he pointed to the whales and alligators.

“They sure are cute,” his aunt said, gazing at Raggedy Ann and Andy before returning that box to the shelf. She held up the one he had chosen. “It says here these animals are endangered.”

“What does endangered mean?”

“It means there aren’t so many left,” she explained.

“Where did they go?”

“People kill them,” she said, “even though God wants us to protect animals.” She put the box in the cart.

In the car on the way home, he said, “Thank you for my supplies.” They were stopped, waiting for a train to pass. He wondered whether the conductor had noticed them and thought, There sits a boy with his mother.

“It’s my pleasure,” she said. She asked whether he liked trains. When he said no, she began to cry. “You’ll be going home soon.” She rummaged in her purse for a tissue. “Your mother called.”

“She’s not sick anymore?” he asked. “When is she coming?”

“I think she’s coming soon.”

In fact, when they got home, the Oldsmobile was parked at the curb and his mother stood in the yard wearing a fluorescent orange stocking cap with a pompom. It was not cold yet, so the cap puzzled him, especially since his mother did not like bright colors. She raised her hand, not quite waving, and he began to open the car door. “Wait till I stop,” said his aunt. Then, they were stopped, and his aunt said, “I didn’t think it would be so soon,” but he was already out the door and running toward his mother.

“Aaron,” said his mother in a surprised voice, as if she were not expecting to find him there.

“Why are you wearing a hat?” he asked.

She laughed self-consciously. “Oh, I’m just feeling chilly these days. One of the nurses found it in the lost-and-found box and gave it to me.” In a teasing voice, she asked, “Does it look so awful?”

“No,” he said. “It’s nice. I like orange.”

He did not like orange, which his mother knew. He put his arms around her waist, and she squeezed him back, and they stood like that, not speaking. Finally, she bent down and brushed his face with the fat, orange pompom. “How’s that?” she asked.

He made a laughing sound. “It tickles,” he said and broke free.

“Hello, Dolores,” said his aunt.

“Hello, Jean.”

His aunt went into the house and packed a grocery bag with the clothes he had been wearing the day he arrived as well as the hand-me-downs he had been wearing since. On top was the box with his new dress shoes, inside of which she had tucked a small Bible. He wondered whether she’d hidden it because of his mother or because she thought he would enjoy the surprise of finding it. She carried the bag outside, and after his mother set it on the backseat, his aunt said, “Can’t you stay a bit? Irv’ll be home any minute.”

“We really need to get back,” his mother said, speaking as though they’d been home all along and had just stepped out, leaving a pie in the oven.

They got in the car, and as they drove away, Aaron looked back at his aunt, who was staring down at the ground as she waved.

They avoided the parade route. That had not changed. When they were almost home, he said, “I forgot my school supplies,” but his mother said they did not have his supplies yet, and he did not explain, even though it made him sick to think of his aunt unloading the car alone and finding the supplies that were meant to be their secret.