After the Parade

22

The grass around the bus was high, obscuring the wheels and even the black lettering on the side that announced the name of a school whose students the bus had once shuttled. Aaron supposed the school no longer existed, that it had been consolidated like those in so many small towns. He wondered whether there were still wasps living inside the bus but thought that Gloria had probably disposed of them after the attack, the way people put down dogs that were biters. He parked the car, an airport rental, got out, and slammed the door loudly, but no one came from the house to greet him. He shooed away three dogs that barked at him halfheartedly, climbed the porch steps, and knocked. After several minutes — during which he heard nothing from inside — the door opened.

It was his mother. She looked old, not simply older, for of course she was older, but old. It was not just one thing — wrinkles or jowls or bad teeth — but all of them combined, years of ignoring dentists and hairdressers and doctors, of ignoring the expectations of the world. During the three-hour drive from the Twin Cities, he had worried about numerous things, including how they would greet each other, so he was relieved when she said, “Hello, Aaron,” stepped back, and motioned him inside.

The doilies were gone, but otherwise the room was as he remembered it. His mother sat down on the couch, leaning back into it. She did not fill the silence with small talk, did not ask about his drive up from the Cities, whether he had eaten lunch along the way or gotten lost or seen anything of interest. He was thankful for this. Of all the scenarios he had imagined, the one he dreaded most was the one in which his mother spoke to him with casual familiarity.

“What about Clarence?” he asked finally.

His mother laughed. “Clary? He’s dead. He’s been gone for a good while now.”

He was not surprised to hear Clarence was dead. He had assumed he would be. “When did he die?” he asked. “How?” He did not ask his mother why she had laughed.

“You were like this as a boy,” his mother said. “So serious. Always asking questions. You never had any friends because everyone was afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me?” he said. It was he who had always been afraid: of his father and then of his father’s death, the memory of his father somersaulting through the air and the watermelonish thwack of his head; of his mother’s illness and the constant sound of her crying; of Miss Meeks and the other children; of being left alone. He had spent his adult life dismantling these fears, but he did not say any of this to his mother. She did not deserve to know who he was, who he had become. She had given up that right.

Gloria came in and rushed toward him, chattering nervously, asking the questions about his trip that his mother had not. It was not how he remembered her. In fact, everything about her seemed different. Usually one confronted the past and it shrank down to size, but when Gloria held out her hand to shake his, it was the size of a man’s, her grip almost painful. Of course, she had been strong back then also. He recalled the way she had cracked walnuts open with her hands and then handed the flesh to his mother, shyly, while his mother talked about his father and cried. “Someday, you’ll enjoy irony,” Clarence had predicted. It was true. He had grown into a man who saw the world in terms of irony and symbol, who looked at these two women before him and thought of walnuts being squeezed together.

“I’m sorry to hear about Clarence,” he said.

Gloria nodded. “He lived longer than the doctors ever thought he would,” she said. “He fell out a window, you know.”

“That’s how he died?” Aaron said. He pictured Clarence tumbling through the air as his father had.

“Oh, no. I mean when he was a baby. Our grandfather lived with us. He used to pick Clary up and talk to him when he cried late at night, and sometimes he’d hold him out the window so the rest of us wouldn’t be bothered by his fussing. But one night he dropped Clary. He was sure the fall was what made Clary little.”

“Clarence told me that story,” Aaron said. “After the wasps attacked me. Remember?”

Gloria nodded. “I made mustard compresses.”

He felt foolish, for of course she remembered. She remembered everything connected to his mother. He saw that now. He had not seen it as a boy, but Clarence had, and so had his mother. It was why she had come here. Sad Café Love, he thought. It was better to be the loved than the lover, if better meant easier, safer.

“You know, Clary hated nearly everyone, but especially children,” Gloria said. “I always thought it had to do with their size, but after you left that day, he told me he thought you might grow up to be ‘more bearable’ than most folks.”

She laughed and Aaron found himself joining her. His mother did not laugh. Gloria was the one who had cracked open.

* * *

His original plan had been to show up unannounced. He imagined something useful coming out of the surprise, but he had changed his mind when he arrived in the Twin Cities the night before, once he was back in Minnesota and could feel how easily he might lose his nerve, how he might drive back and forth past Gloria’s farm for an entire afternoon without ever pulling in. He needed something that would bind him to action, something beyond his own weakening resolve, so he took out the telephone number Bill had given him and dialed it from his hotel near the airport.

Gloria had answered. “Yut,” she said, and he said, “This is—” and she said, “Aaron,” as though she had been sitting there by the telephone waiting for him to call.

“Yes,” he said. “This is Aaron,” and then, not knowing what to say next, he added, “Her son,” using the pronoun even though they had not yet mentioned his mother because his mother was all they had between them.

“I’ll put her on,” Gloria said. Her breathing was off, wheezy.

“No,” he said. “Just let her know I’m coming.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“All right, then,” Gloria said. She did not say that his mother would be happy to see him or that they looked forward to his arrival. He appreciated the lack of pleasantries.

The hotel was not in an area conducive to walking. This he had learned during check-in, when he asked the woman at the front desk — her nametag said IRENE — what restaurants were in walking distance. She looked at him as though he were asking about strip clubs or how to obtain a sexual partner. The last time he’d stayed in a hotel was in Needles. He remembered the way Britta had regarded him as he signed in; he’d been too tired to operate a pen, unable to recall his address, the one in Albuquerque that he was leaving behind. Perhaps it was just the nature of people who worked front desks to act skeptical and uninterested, to make clear that hospitality had its limits.

“Walking distance?” Irene said. She slid a list of restaurants across the counter. The nearest was three miles away. She put an X beside two she thought might still be open at this hour. It wasn’t even late, nine o’clock, still seven on his watch, which he had not moved ahead when the pilot suggested they do so just before landing. He was sure that he would not be in Minnesota long enough to make it worth the effort of losing and then regaining time.

He was not hungry enough to do everything required to obtain food: get back into the rental car, follow a map, enter a restaurant filled with people, some of whom he would need to interact with in order to procure a meal. Instead, he took his suitcase to his room and set it on the bed, sat down next to it, stood up and paced, and sat again. It was then that he had called Gloria’s number, but when he finished talking to her, he still felt restless. He knew this had to do with the flight, on which he had occupied a window seat for four hours, his knees pressing hard against the seat in front of him. Despite his long legs, he always requested the window. He had come to flying as an adult and hated it, hated especially the moment when the plane veered onto the runway and he could see the long expanse of tarmac before him. The engines revved, the plane lurched forward, faster and faster, while he considered the sheer impossibility of it all. Walter, by contrast, got on a plane, took out a book, and began to read, as calmly as if he were in his study at home. Aaron supposed Walter’s calmness should have made him calmer, but it never had. The only thing that made him calmer was staring out the window with a steady focus that kept the plane moving down the runway and into the air.

He left his room and began walking briskly up and down the hallways of the hotel. Until San Francisco, he had never lived so close to strangers. It both shocked and impressed him to know that people did not alter their behavior around the fact of this proximity. The Ngs continued to scream their discontentment day after day, night after night, despite the fact that he, a stranger, lay below them, while behind each door of this hotel, there were televisions on too loud, children crying, even a dog barking. He did not understand people who traveled with dogs. As he paced, he heard other sounds, private sounds: gas being passed, a man saying, “I’m ashamed to even know you,” people moaning. In room 208, a woman panted the word bigger over and over in a rhythmic, unsettling way. It seemed an impossible demand.

On the landing between the second and third floors he discovered a vending machine. There was nothing in it that he wanted, but he bought two bags of pretzels, a bag of M&M’S, and Cheetos. Back in his room, he emptied everything into the ice tub and began to eat, going from the salty pretzels to the chocolate to the chemical flavor of the Cheetos. Finally, he washed the orange Cheetos powder from his hands and picked up the telephone again, dialing from memory. It was almost eleven, but he knew Winnie would be awake, stretched out on her gerebog, a coffinlike, wheeled rice chest from Java. It had taken four large Samoan men to get it into her living room. When they set it down, they were coated with sweat and collapsed onto it, filled with admiration for its solidness. At night after everyone went to bed, even the dog, Winnie lay atop the gerebog reading, for though she loved Thomas and her boys deeply, she said that part of maintaining that love was knowing to end her day alone.

Aaron listened to the phone ringing, imagined her resting her book across her stomach as she reached for it. Then, “Hello,” she said, right into his ear. She sounded tired, and he wanted to hang up, understanding his own selfishness. She said hello again, and when he still did not reply, she said, “Aaron, is that you?”

“Winnie,” he said. “I’m here. I’m in Minnesota.” And he began to sob.

* * *

It was Gloria who asked him to stay for supper. His mother had gone out to feed the animals, the three dogs as well as the geese and chickens they still kept. They had gotten rid of everything else, Gloria said. It was too much work for a couple of old spinsters. He had not offered to help his mother. He needed a few minutes away from her. He asked Gloria what he could do to assist her with the meal, but she said she had her own way of doing things in the kitchen and did not really know how to factor another person into it, so he stood awkwardly off to the side watching her.

“My mother doesn’t help with the cooking?” he finally asked.

Gloria had taken a pint box of fish fillets out of the freezer and was running hot water over it. “I guess you like sunfish?” she said.

“I haven’t had them in a while.” He did not want her to think he hadn’t had them because he didn’t like them, so he added, “They’re not easy to come by in San Francisco.”

The truth was that he thought of sunfish as specific to his childhood, along with lutefisk, which his mother had served in place of meatballs as the Thursday special the last two weeks before Christmas. She prepared it with boiled potatoes and a white sauce of butter, flour, and water, and on the side was a sheet of potato lefse, everything on the plate as white as snow. Then she added string beans and lingonberry sauce, the green and red giving the plate a holiday feel. On those two Thursday nights, people lined up outside the café to get in.

“Why don’t you serve lutefisk every night?” he had asked.

“That’s not the way it works,” she said. “Folks are only this interested because I don’t serve it every night. That’s human nature. Besides, I couldn’t stand the smell of it every day.”

His mother hated fish. Didn’t Gloria know this?

“Your mother caught these sunfish last summer,” Gloria said.

“My mother caught them?” he said. She had also hated fishing, though she had gone only once that he knew of, with his father when they stayed at Last Resort on their honeymoon. She had told him the story of that trip numerous times, and always she stressed that she had never been so aware of her life ticking away as when she sat in that boat waiting for a fish to bite.

“Sure,” Gloria said. “All summer long she’s out on the lake. Winter too. She’s got a fish house that one of the neighbor boys hauls out with his truck after the lake’s solid. He gets it all set up for her — puts in the stove, stacks some wood, drills a few holes, brings in her card table and chair. Every morning she packs sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and I don’t see her until bedtime most days.”

Gloria worked a butter knife between the fillets. “Try not to judge her too harshly,” she said now that her back was to him. She plugged in a frying pan and dropped a chunk of Crisco into it. As it melted, she dredged the fillets in flour and then lined them up in the pan. “Anyway,” she said, “she’s a different person.”

At supper his mother dished up several fillets of the sunfish and ate them without comment. “How’s work?” she asked him.

“Do you even know what I do for a living?” he said. He took a bite of his fish and thought about how much better it would be fried in butter.

“Yes,” said his mother. “Actually, I do. I know some things about you, you know, about your life.”

“How?” he said. “How do you know these things about me?” He knew that she was lying.

“Well,” she said. “I shouldn’t say how I know because that involves other people, and it’s always best not to involve others, but I know you’re a teacher.”

She put another piece of fish into her mouth and swallowed quickly without chewing, which was what he did when someone served him onions and there seemed no polite way to avoid them. Gloria was wrong. His mother had not changed. She still hated fish. Except now she was a person who would pretend she did not hate fish, which meant Gloria was right. He felt his chin quiver, which meant he was about to cry. He did not want to cry, not here in front of his mother. He was no longer the same person either, and he did not want her to think he was, to think he was still the boy who cried about everything. At a dinner party once a doctor had told him a trick she used to keep herself from crying when giving families bad news. She pushed out her jaw. He tried it, and it worked. He turned to Gloria and said, “Supper was very good. Thank you for cooking and for inviting me to join you.”

“You were always so polite,” said his mother. “That was another reason the kids were afraid of you.”

“No, that’s why they didn’t like me,” he said. “When you’re polite to people who don’t deserve it, they think you’re mocking them.”

“I think Aaron has lovely manners, Dee,” Gloria said. “We’re just not used to such things.” She stood and began stacking the dishes, and Aaron rose to help her. His mother sat staring down at her plate, but Aaron took it from her and carried it into the kitchen. A few small bones from her fish were lined up and teetering on the rim.

“Aaron,” said Gloria, “you’ll stay the night.”

It was after eight. He could not imagine leaving now, trying to locate a town big enough to have a motel. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“It’s no trouble,” said Gloria. “We’ll put you in Clary’s room.” They heard his mother’s chair scrape back from the table. She did not say good night.

* * *

It was just as he remembered, the shelves of books with their spines turned in, keeping their titles to themselves. He sat on the bed, Clarence’s bed, and laughed at the memory of his young self advising Clarence to turn the titles outward. In the corner beside the desk, turned inward like a naughty child, was Clarence’s wheelchair, the afghan that had covered his legs folded neatly across the back. Aaron rose from the bed and gripped the chair’s handles, recalling how he had maneuvered it so carefully down the hallway while Clarence berated him for his clumsiness.

He could hear Gloria moving around the house, closing up for the night. His mother used to engage in a similar routine when he was a boy, a routine that had angered his father, who liked bedtime to be a fast transition into sleep. After checking the doors and windows, she would pause longest at the oven, staring at the dials, and then, still unconvinced, she would open the door and put her head inside. From his bed, Aaron had listened for these familiar sounds, even though the routine often ended with his father screaming, “It’s off.” Once, as his mother crouched before the oven, head inside, his father had come up behind her and pushed her in. Aaron had seen it happen. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, needing another glass of water, but he had crept back to bed with his empty glass.

His day had started in a nondescript airport hotel in Minneapolis and was ending in Clarence’s bedroom. He imagined he would lie awake all night, trying to sort through everything that had happened in between. In fact, he fell asleep immediately. When he awakened — minutes or hours later — he moved from deep sleep to consciousness quickly, aware of something, a presence there in the dark. It was the sort of dark that seemed both vast and one-dimensional, and he stretched his hand into it, colliding with something hard — metal and rubber. It was Clarence’s wheelchair, pulled up beside the bed.

In the iron ore mine when he was five, the Finns had pointed out stalactites, which he did not touch, though he had imagined how they would feel: cold and smooth and slick. He had thought of the stalactites when he laid his finger on Clarence’s tusk. But had the tusk been slick? He could not remember, the tactile part of the memory simply gone. How was it possible to lose part of a memory, for one of the senses to stop contributing? If he reached out into the darkness again, would his fingers remember how Clarence’s tusk had felt in the seconds before Aaron said, “I love them,” or in the seconds after?

Clarence had been crying. He understood this only now.

“Aaron,” said a voice from the dark, “why are you here?” It was his mother.

23

She had awakened him like this once before, when he was five. Nearly five. It was New Year’s Eve. His father had had to work the night shift, and he and his mother stayed up late watching television and eating popcorn with an ease that felt festive, neither of them saying aloud what they both knew: it was his father’s absence that made it feel like a holiday. He did not remember falling asleep, but he woke up in his bed, the room dark, his mother beside him. “Welcome to the seventies, Aaron,” she said. She smelled of alcohol, though she was not a drinker, and crackers. He recognized both as she leaned close to kiss his forehead, the latter an everyday smell that he associated with soup and upset stomachs, the former a rarer odor that occasionally wafted from his father’s glass at the supper table. She remained there with him a long while, her breathing unsteady, her hand warm on his brow, before she stood and whispered, “Don’t be afraid of the world.” Years later he thought that she had been talking to them both.

“I’m not sure why I’m here,” Aaron said. “All these years, I’ve never tried to find you.” He could not see her face or gauge her reaction. Maybe that had been her plan all along — to wait for darkness, believing it would make them both braver. “When I thought of you, I sometimes thought of you alive and other times, dead.” Or maybe she had awakened him from the fog of sleep in order to have the upper hand. “But mainly I didn’t think about you.” Only then did he consider that she had no plan, that she had gone to bed, expecting to sleep, but the need to talk had overwhelmed her.

She did not respond, which unnerved him, though he recalled from his childhood this manner of listening that involved silence. It was not particular to his mother. He was the one who had changed, who had come to believe that a person had to say he was listening in order to be listening.

“Walter always felt I should look for you,” he went on, filling the silence. “But that was Walter.”

It was the first time he had referred to Walter. He decided that he would provide no clauses or parentheticals to establish the details of his life, to explain who Walter was, who he was. He would not make it easy for her.

“How did you and Walter meet?” asked his mother, surprising him.

“In the café.” He took pleasure in revealing that Walter was someone for whom she had once cooked. He did not explain the rest of the story, how he had met Walter again after she left, how they had come to live together and be lovers. Let her wonder.

“So you’re a homosexual,” she said at last.

He had always hated the word homosexual, which tended to be used by those uncomfortable with the compactness of gay, those requiring just a few more syllables. “Well, yes,” he said. “I believe that’s been established.”

“It was Walter,” she said.

“What was?”

“Walter was the one who told me things about you — that you were a teacher, that you were good at it, that you had moved to San Francisco.”

“You talked to him?”

“No,” said his mother. “He wrote to me.”

“When?”

“After you left.” She sighed. “But also once before that. Maybe ten years ago. You had just moved to New Mexico, and he wanted me to know that you were fine, that you were a good teacher and a good person. I still remember what he wrote: Aaron’s students love and respect him. He’s great at what he does. He is a compassionate human being.”

“Did you write back to him?” he asked.

“No. What would’ve been the point? He didn’t write because he wanted to make me feel better. He wrote because he was angry at me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Aaron,” she said, sounding sad and wise and like a mother. “He wanted me to know that you didn’t need me, that you were just fine, that you had managed nicely without me. He didn’t say that the two of you were — you know — but I could tell because he was just so angry.” Aaron did not know what to make of this, how to reconcile what his mother was telling him with the way that Walter had always talked to him about his mother, patiently, as though Aaron were a student in need of his advice.

“Did you come here to Gloria right away?” Aaron asked, even though he knew the answer. What he wanted to know — what he was trying to bring the conversation around to — was why she had left.

“It’s not like that,” his mother said. “Why does everything have to be about that?”

“About what?” he said, not understanding her response or the irritation in her voice.

“About”—she paused and even her pause sounded mad—“about love.”

The afternoon that he opened the envelope Bill had given him and looked at his mother’s address, he had not recognized it as Gloria’s. He had gone to Bill’s funeral that morning and then to the hippie café to drink several beers in his friend’s honor, and though he was not drunk, he thought that the funeral and the beer explained what he did next: he dialed the telephone number for Charles Gronseth, which Bill had also included. Charles Gronseth picked up after just two rings, and when Aaron identified himself, there was silence and then Charles Gronseth said, “Just a minute, please,” and Aaron heard him say to someone, his wife he supposed, “It’s a client.”

Bill had told him that Pastor Gronseth was no longer a pastor. He was just Charles Gronseth, married for the third time and living in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he sold insurance, successfully Aaron imagined, for Charles Gronseth had always been good at talking, at making people afraid of the unknown.

On the other end, Aaron heard footsteps, a door closing. “What a nice surprise,” said Charles Gronseth. “I thought you might call.” His voice was hearty, but the two statements contradicted each other: one could not be both surprised by a call and expecting it. Charles Gronseth was nervous, which made Aaron feel oddly better.

“I hear you’re selling insurance?” Aaron said.

“Aaron, let’s cut past the small talk,” Charles Gronseth said. “You’re calling because you want to know about your mother. I told everything to that detective, but I guess it still doesn’t make sense to you, so let me explain it one more time.” He paused. “And then I’m going to ask you never to call here again.”

Aaron felt a shot of rage, but when he spoke, he said only, “Fine.”

“Being a pastor is a very lonely thing,” began Charles Gronseth. “Everyone comes to you with their problems. They tell you about themselves, about their marriages and children, their disappointments and failures and weaknesses. And your job is to listen, to offer advice and encouragement, to tell them to pray. But who does the pastor talk to? Nobody wants to hear about his problems. They don’t want to hear that he and his wife sleep in separate rooms, that they keep their cutlery in separate drawers because they can’t bear the thought of their mouths touching the same thing. And your mother was lonely also.”

“I know that,” Aaron said.

“She didn’t think of me as a pastor. We just talked like two regular people. I understood her. We understood each other. At least, that’s what I thought. I thought we were running away together, to be together. I thought we were in love.”

“Love?” Aaron said. He was not expecting the conversation to involve love.

“Yes,” Charles Gronseth said. “I guess that sounds silly to you. It certainly sounds silly to me now. I’ve had a lot of years to think about it.”

“Whose idea was it to, you know, run away?”

“It was your mother’s, but only because it occurred to her first. Believe me — I was more than willing. Then, it turned out that she was just using me.”

“Using you how?” asked Aaron.

“To get up her nerve, I guess. You know how it is. You realize that you need to do something, but you don’t always have it in you to do it on your own.”

“So you used each other,” Aaron said, not defending his mother but stating what seemed obvious.

Charles Gronseth laughed, a bitter laugh. “I suppose we did,” he said. “My wife and I were barely speaking. I woke up one day and realized that my son had become just like her — petty and complaining. When you live every day feeling disappointed, it gets harder and harder to go about your daily duties, to pretend that you know about God and forgiveness and love of any sort, human or divine.”

“And my mother?” said Aaron.

“Your mother understood these things.” He paused. “She was a very unhappy person.”

“I know that,” Aaron said. He did know it. He did not need Charles Gronseth to tell him. “I guess what I really want to know is about that night. Because the last time I saw my mother, she was sitting in the booth with you the way she did every night, looking like she was going to stand up any minute and go to bed and then wake up and do it all over again the next day.” His voice broke, and he stopped.

“I can tell you about it, about that night,” said Pastor Gronseth, “but it will only be my perspective. Okay? Because what I’ve come to accept is that we can never know another person’s mind.”

“Of course,” said Aaron by way of agreeing.

“We left at midnight. I’d snuck my suitcase over to my office earlier that day, and your mother picked me up in the alley behind the church. We got to Gloria’s around three. I drove, but I didn’t know where we were going. I just followed your mother’s directions. She got out of the car and told me to wait. It was so dark, and the only radio was one of those fire-and-brimstone programs, preaching to the sorts of folks who are up at that hour, people who’re feeling miserable and sorry for themselves and lost. I remember wondering whether this radio preacher would ever imagine that a fellow man of the cloth was out there listening to him at that very moment while he waited for the woman he’d just run away with.

“After maybe twenty minutes, Gloria came out. I rolled down the window, and she put out her hand, so I shook it. She told me that your mother was staying, that she had nothing more to say to me but that the car was mine if I wanted it. ‘I’ve come for her suitcases,’ she said. I sat out there maybe another hour. Eventually all the lights in the house went out again, and I finally realized how it was.”

“And that was it?” Aaron asked.

“That was the last time I saw your mother. You know she cried the whole way there. I kept asking if she was okay. She said it was the first time she’d cried in years.”

“Why was she crying?” Aaron asked.

He knew that he wanted Charles Gronseth to say that his mother was crying because of him, but Charles Gronseth said, “I don’t know.” Aaron heard a door open on the other end of the line and Charles Gronseth say, “Sure, honey. Be right there,” and then he heard the door close.

“You didn’t ask why she was crying?”

“I didn’t ask, no. Maybe I was afraid she’d say she was crying because she could see it was all a mistake. There was one thing she did say that I thought about a lot. Still do. She told me that when you lose the ability, the desire, to make your life interesting, then maybe it’s not worth staying alive anymore.”

“You think my mother was going to Gloria’s to kill herself,” Aaron said.

“I don’t know.” Charles Gronseth sighed. “I better go now. My wife needs me.”

“Do you still believe in God?” Aaron asked. He did not know why he asked, except that it seemed a way to know who Charles Gronseth was now that he was no longer Pastor Gronseth.

There was a long silence on the other end, and finally Charles Gronseth said, “I don’t go to church much anymore, but I guess I still believe. I just find it easier to believe when it’s not my job to make sure other people believe also.”

* * *

“You do know that Gloria loves you?” Aaron said, but his mother was silent. “Of course you know. It’s why you came here. It’s also why my father hated her, isn’t it?”

“Your father,” she said, “hated everyone. Did you know that? Do you remember that about him?”

“I remember that he didn’t like me.” Even after all these years, he could not bring himself to say hate. “I remember that everything I said or did made him angry.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I thought that’s why you’d come.”

“What do you mean?” said Aaron.

She sighed. “What do you remember about that night?”

“What night?” he said, though he supposed she meant the night she disappeared.

“The night before the parade,” said his mother. “We never talked about it, and I could never tell whether you remembered, but I always assumed you must.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t remember being in the closet?” Not waiting for him to answer, she added, “Because it’s all I think about some days.” He heard her tap the armrests of Clarence’s wheelchair. “I’m glad you don’t remember,” she said at last, stood and rolled the chair back across the room. “Good night, Aaron,” said his mother.

He wanted to call out to her, “Tell me about the closet. Tell me everything,” but the door creaked open and then closed, and he had said nothing. He listened to her padding down the hallway, not hesitating or bumping against things because she knew this house. She’d lived here longer than she’d lived anywhere else.

He tried to lull himself to sleep, as he often did, by repeating the last line of his favorite Wallace Stevens poem, It can never be satisfied, the mind, never, and when this did not work, he rose, put on his pants, because it seemed wrong to walk around a stranger’s house in his briefs, and made his way down the hallway to the kitchen. There, sitting in the glow of the stove light, was Gloria, wrapped in a puffy robe. She did not look surprised to see him. He was relieved to be wearing pants.

“Can I make you something?” she said. “Tea or hot milk?”

He shook his head. She gestured toward the other chair with one of her large hands, and he found himself staring, as he had while he watched her cook, the fish fillets tiny in her hands, and again during supper, as she wielded her cutlery and reached for the carrots. “My feet too,” she said, because she had noticed his staring. She held up her right foot, but he could not see it properly in the dim light.

“What happened?” he asked.

She shrugged. “A couple of years ago they just started growing. They ached, so I thought it was arthritis maybe, until my shoes didn’t fit anymore. Your mother wanted me to go to the doctor, but I waited until there wasn’t a shoe left in the whole house that I could still get on.”

“What did the doctor say?” He was trying not to sound horrified.

She shrugged again. “It’s rare.”

“I would imagine so,” he said, and Gloria laughed.

“Your mother told me you had a sense of humor.”

His throat tightened. He wanted to pull his chair up close and demand that Gloria tell him everything his mother had ever said about him. Instead, he nodded in a way that invited her to continue the story. She waved her big hand in the air dismissively. “Something was pressing on my pituitary gland,” she said, “which caused the growth, like I was right back in puberty. It’s under control now. The doctor monitors it. I get measured once a year. I haven’t had any new growth in over ten years.”

“So it’s”—he raised his hands, let them drop—“it’s not serious?”

“I’m still here. Dee always gives me a list of questions to ask the doctor, but I like knowing just what I need to know and nothing more.” She hesitated. “It started right after Clary died, so I thought it was my imagination at first, some psychological thing. That probably sounds silly.”

“It doesn’t,” Aaron said.

“I’m just glad Clary wasn’t around for it,” Gloria said. “He hated giants.” She and Aaron laughed together, and then she sipped twice from her cup and studied the clock on the wall. “That thing just keeps losing time,” she said.

“Gloria, does my mother ever talk about my father? About, you know, what happened the night before he died and the closet?” He was making it sound as though he remembered that night also, but he did not think he was being dishonest, not exactly. He had told his mother that he did not remember, which was true, but as he had lain there, listening to her nervous breathing so close by, a memory had overwhelmed him — a memory of her breathing, panting really, in a small, dark space beside him, the smell of urine and wet wool rising around them.

“When you and your mother visited that summer,” Gloria said, “you came down the hallway and stood in the doorway of the front room. You were eavesdropping on us. Do you remember that?”

He nodded. “You were cracking walnuts with your hands, and she was talking about my father,” he said. “But I was sure that neither of you saw me.”

“Your mother, no, but I knew the sorts of tricks my brother was fond of. I knew he’d send you out to spy. He was very upset about the visit. He didn’t speak to me for two days before you and Dolores arrived.”

“Because he didn’t like visitors?”

“There was that.” She fiddled with the belt of her robe. “But he was especially upset that it was your mother coming.”

“He was jealous,” Aaron said, aiming for matter-of-factness, and Gloria coughed and cinched her belt tighter.

“I guess something like that,” she said. “Anyway, what you heard that day, about what your father said? I was very sorry you heard that. Clary was sorry also.”

“It’s such a strange thing, memory,” Aaron said. “I mean, I’m sitting here with you thirty-five years later, and I remember everything about that visit, everything Clarence said to me, even though I didn’t understand half of it. How does that happen? Why does our memory cling to certain things and just discard others?”

“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “I can tell you exactly what your mother was wearing the first time I saw her, but I have no idea what the weather was like the day I got married.”

“You were married?” Aaron said.

“It only lasted a day. He was a nice enough man. His name was Donald, and he sold tires. That’s how we met. He worked at a place outside Fargo. I was bringing a couple of my father’s spring lambs into the lab at the university there. They’d died suddenly, and my father wanted some tests done, just to make sure there was nothing to worry about. I picked up a nail outside of town, and the back tire went. I had to unload both lambs onto the road to get to the spare. I must have been quite a sight, changing a tire with a couple of dead lambs looking on.”

They both laughed, and Aaron recalled with a twinge that he had been put off by Gloria as a boy, had not liked the way she doted on Clarence, cutting his meat and patting his head. She was a good person, kind, and he felt ashamed that he had not recognized this then.

“And so you loaded up the sheep and limped over to his tire shop on your spare, and while he fixed your flat, you fell in love?” he said.

“Well, he did fix my tire, but the marriage was really just a matter of convenience, maybe not for him so much — men get away with a lot more — but I was twenty-six, and people were starting to talk. He was impressed that I’d changed the flat by myself, and there was something nice about that, about looking at another person and seeing myself reflected as smart and capable. So when Donald started driving out here on Sundays, I didn’t object. It was the first time anyone had pursued me, and there was something nice about that also.” She sounded embarrassed.

“I was tired of my life here, tired of the farm, of taking care of everything and having all the attention go to Clary. The truth is, I was tired of Clary and of my parents’ guilt and sadness. And Donald really was a very decent man.” She tapped one of her giant fingers on the table to emphasize this, to let him know that there had been nothing wrong with Donald. “I thought maybe it could work somehow, so a couple of months later we eloped. We drove down to Minneapolis, got married, and went to a ball game. That was our honeymoon. We were staying with his cousin out in Stillwater, but that night when we got back from the game… well, afterward, I realized it wasn’t for me.”

It took Aaron a moment to understand what Gloria meant: she had had sex with Donald and knew she could not do it for a lifetime, could not do it even one more time.

“The next morning I woke Donald up and told him I just wasn’t cut out for it. I didn’t go into the specifics because I’d heard men feel bad about such things. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t try to stop me. I walked to a bus stop, got on the next bus, and rode until I liked the look of things. I got off, found the job with the electric company the next day, and that’s where I met Dolores. She started a week after me.”

“Did you ever hear from Donald?” Aaron asked.

“No. As far as I know, we’re still married, but he’s surely passed by now. He was an older gentleman, almost fifty when we got married.”

“I could look him up on the Internet,” Aaron said. “Put in his name and see what comes up.”

“Thank you,” Gloria said, “but I’d rather not know.”

Aaron nodded. He thought he should say good night, get some sleep so that he could wake up in the morning, which was only a few hours off, and leave. Gloria took her cup over to the sink, where she spent several minutes washing it, several more rinsing it. Next, she opened a cupboard and took down two plates and retrieved a bag from the bread box. He did not know that people still had bread boxes. Inside the bag were homemade caramel rolls with walnuts. She put a roll on each plate and set one in front of him, the other in front of herself.

“When your mother arrived that night,” she said, “I didn’t know she was coming. You might not believe that, but she just pulled into the yard and knocked on the door. I went out and got her suitcases from the trunk, sent him on his way. I didn’t know he was a pastor, not then. I figured it all out later, that he believed they were running away together, to be together. I guess Dee let him think that, let him burn his bridges. When I leaned in the window to tell him I had everything and to thank him for bringing her, he started crying, just sat there smoking a cigarette and crying. I guess he was accepting the truth, that she’d just needed—” She stopped abruptly.

“A way out,” Aaron said, and Gloria nodded.

“I didn’t ask any questions, Aaron. I should have. I should have asked, first thing, where you were, but I didn’t. I’ve never pushed Dee on things, and I guess that’s why she’s stayed. Sometimes, she feels like talking, and she does, talks and talks, but that’s rare. If I ask her a question point-blank, she gives me the silent treatment for days. So I don’t ask. I’ve made it easy for her, too easy, and I’m sorry about that.”

He thought about what Charles Gronseth had said on the telephone just the week before, that his mother ran away because she had lost the ability to make her life interesting. “She came here to die, didn’t she?” he said.

Gloria’s hands were stacked like baseball mitts on the table in front of her. “Maybe something like that was on her mind, but I don’t know whether she was thinking about, you know.”

“Killing herself?” Then, because he felt he had to know, he asked, “Did she try?”

“There are other ways to stop living,” Gloria said carefully.

“Meaning?”

“She never tried anything specific, Aaron. Still, I can’t help but think she came here because she was ready to… to give up, I guess. She was tired of doing all the things that people do to keep living — working, paying bills, making decisions.”

“Taking care of her son,” he added.

She nodded. “Yes, but also she didn’t want you to go through that.”

“Through what?” he said. “Through wondering where she was, whether she was still alive? Or through wondering, every day for years, whether I was the reason she’d left? What, exactly, didn’t she want me to go through?”

“I’m sorry,” Gloria said. “Clary kept telling me I needed to be harder on her, but I wouldn’t listen. I just thought he didn’t want me to be happy. Anyway, the truth is that having Dee here hasn’t made me happy, or her less unhappy.”

“Has it at least made you less lonely?” he asked. “Because being around people you love, even those who don’t love you back the same way, sometimes that can at least make you less lonely.” He paused. “Though usually it makes you more lonely.”

“You were wise as a boy also,” Gloria said. “Just seven years old, but you understood Clary so well. You had an instinct for people even then.” Gloria did not want to talk about her feelings for his mother, and that was fine. He was not even sure that talking about the past helped. Maybe it did allow you to clarify things so that you could move on. Or maybe it just kept pulling you backward. “I told her plenty of times that she needed to find you,” Gloria said, “but I should have insisted.”

“Did you know that Walter wrote to her?” he asked.

“Not the first time, but she showed me the letter that came last month.”

Gloria picked at the nuts on her caramel roll, and he thought again of her cracking walnuts on the couch beside his mother all those years ago. How strange it must be for her to have him here, a boy who had returned a man.

“I left him,” Aaron said. “I left Walter.”

Gloria nodded. “I figured as much. You know, from how the letter sounded.”

“Right after she disappeared, I moved in with a family in town, the Hagedorns. I don’t know how I would have survived that year if they hadn’t taken me in, but all I could think about was how to get away. I wanted to go to college, but she’d left just five hundred and two dollars behind in the bank for me. And then Walter came along. He gave me a home. He paid for me to go to college. He taught me everything. This life I have, who I am today? I owe it to Walter.”

“Walter sounds like a fine man, but you had something in you, Aaron, something special. You made Clary laugh, and nobody ever made Clary laugh. You were a good, sweet boy, a smart boy. That much I know.”

“Thank you, Gloria. I appreciate that, I do, but it doesn’t change the fact that Walter made it possible for me to have a different life. And how did I repay him? I got in a truck in the middle of the night and disappeared. I haven’t called or written. Nothing.”

“Walter did the things he did because he wanted to,” Gloria said. “People pretend otherwise, but they almost always do what they want to do. I let your mother stay because that’s what I wanted. Anyway, I’ve learned the hard way what happens when you stay with someone out of guilt or feeling beholden. People do it all the time, sure, but they end up angry or bitter or worse, hating the other person.”

“By the end, I felt like I hated Walter,” he said quietly. “I kept a journal of all the things he did that drove me crazy. It was a way to make sense of it, I suppose, but also a way to see the evidence lined up, as my friend Bill would say, and to give myself permission to leave.

“Years ago, when we were still living here in Minnesota, I knew this woman who had three cats she loved more than anything, but she also had a husband who did not love the cats. They were always underfoot, he said, doing things — shredding his papers, peeing on his clothes, swiping at him every time he walked by. They didn’t do stuff like that to her. One day he’d had enough, so while she was at work, he loaded the cats into his car, drove out in the country, and just left them there by the road. That night, when my friend got home from work and couldn’t find them, she asked her husband if he’d seen them. He said no at first, but finally she got it out of him, what he’d done. She left him that very night. When she told me the story later, she said that every time one of the cats peed in his shoes or hissed, she wondered what it was about him that they sensed, so when he got rid of them like that, she was actually relieved because she finally knew what the cats had known all along.

“I used to wish Walter would do something like that, something so terrible or unjust or cruel that it made leaving the necessary thing to do. But that’s the thing about Walter. He’s a good person. All those years he did everything I needed, but the more he did for me, the more I started to hate him for it.”

He was crying now, and he tried to stop himself by taking a bite of the caramel roll, but that only made it worse, his throat tight with his tears and the dryness of the bread.

Gloria nodded. “You wanted Walter to be wrong so you didn’t have to be, but there isn’t always one person who’s right and another who’s wrong. Sometimes — usually — it’s not that easy.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time, until finally Gloria said, “Here’s what I know, Aaron. When your mother left, she wasn’t thinking about you — for better or worse, she wasn’t. She was thinking about herself. Maybe she was planning to end her life, or maybe she was trying to salvage it. I don’t know which, but I do know that sometimes the most you can do is save yourself.”

24

“Gloria,” he said, “I’m sorry to ask, but I need to know about the closet, about what happened the night before my father died.”

Gloria pushed her plate with the half-eaten caramel roll aside. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I’ll tell you the whole story, but only if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Was that what she was telling you when Clary sent me out to spy?”

“She told me just part of the story that day, but when she came to stay, that’s when she told me the rest, over and over until I was worn out from reliving it with her. Then, one day she just stopped talking about it. She hasn’t mentioned it since.”

“But you still remember what happened?”

“I remember every detail,” Gloria said.

As Gloria told him the story of what had happened in the closet the night before the parade, he felt like he was watching a movie, a movie that he thought he hadn’t seen before, except as he watched, he realized he had because he already knew what was going to happen just before it did. She began with their return from the Englund family vacation. In the week after he kicked the sitting-down Paul Bunyan, the three of them had maintained a truce that primarily took the form of silence. He remembered the silence, the way that conversation was tossed like a hot potato around the supper table, and the relief that he and his mother both felt when his father went back to work. He remembered his mother telling him that on Saturday they would be attending the SummerFest Parade, in which his father would be participating on behalf of the police department. It would be Aaron’s first parade, but his mother said that she liked parades and thought he would like them also.

“You’ll see,” she’d said. “There’s something nice about standing on the sidewalk and watching everything move past you, floats and marching bands, clowns and regular people.”

“Why?” he asked. He meant why were all these people going to line up in the street and march past them? Why was his father going to join them? What his mother described made no sense.

But she thought he was asking how she knew he would like it, and she replied with something unworthy of her, something about all children liking parades. “Right after the parade,” she added, whispering but excited, “everything will change.”

The next afternoon his mother produced his suitcase, just as she had that first night in the cabin after the standing-up Paul Bunyan. It was neatly packed and almost full. “You can choose three more things to put in,” she said, “but you need to do it quickly, before your father gets home.”

“My father doesn’t know about my suitcase?” he asked.

“Not yet,” said his mother. “It’s a surprise for tomorrow, after the parade.”

She made the finger-to-lips gesture that meant this was their secret and then stood by as he hastily chose a blue sweater vest, a book about a boy called Silly Billy, and his stuffed giraffe, whose neck he liked to sleep on. The giraffe was a gift from some people his mother had once worked for. She closed his suitcase, which was not easy with the giraffe neck, and once this was done, she set it in the closet and told him not to touch it.

“When your father gets home,” she said, “I want you to stay in your room.” He said that he would, and she pulled his door shut behind her.

When he heard the squad car pull into the driveway, he went to the closet and checked on the suitcase that was a secret from his father. He could hear his parents in the kitchen, the low rumble of their voices, and then his father yelling and the sound of glass breaking. His father did not like to be talked to when he first got home.

His mother had said only that he was to stay in his room. She had said nothing about not opening the door. He opened it quietly. “Where?” he heard his father say. “You have nowhere.” His mother responded, her voice too low to hear, and just like that Aaron found himself out in the hallway, pulled steadily toward the kitchen, where things were being said that he was not meant to hear.

His mother stood at the stove heating something in a pot, and his father stood nearby, still wearing his uniform, hat on his head, holster on his hip, handcuffs at the ready. Aaron stood to the side of the doorway, for the trick was not to be seen, or else his father would widen the scope of his anger to include him, and that he could not bear, not with the memory of his father’s hand on his head, ruffling his hair in front of the sitting-down Paul Bunyan, the other parents applauding what they called his pluck in standing up to the giant because people admired pluck.

Even though his mother’s back was to him, Aaron could hear her clearly now. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “I just can’t.”

“I said, ‘Where?’ ” demanded his father, but she kept stirring, and his father moved up close behind her. “I have a right to know. You’re not going to your parents, so where? To that chickenshit brother of yours? To the dyke? Or maybe you think the Jews will be waiting with open arms?” His father laughed. “You could start a baseball team with the band of misfits you’ve got, Dolores.”

His mother continued stirring, and his father grabbed the pot from the stove and dumped the contents onto the floor. It was stew.

“There,” said his father.

His mother stood with the dripping wooden spoon in her hand. She still did not speak. “You’re not going anywhere ’til that’s cleaned up,” his father said, his voice smug.

His mother crouched with a handful of paper towels and swabbed up the stew, but her calmness seemed to anger his father even more and he snapped open the refrigerator and began flinging food onto the floor until they were surrounded by a moat of broken eggs and mayonnaise, leftover hotdish and milk. He squirted mustard and ketchup on top, the colors creating a festive icing.

“Jerry,” said his mother. “You’re just making a mess for yourself.”

“You want to see a mess?” said his father. He was panting. “Fine, you go ahead and leave, but Aaron stays with me. Then you’ll see what a mess I can make.”

His mother rose with the stew-filled paper towels and turned toward the garbage can. “Try to stop us,” she said. “I’ll call your friends at the station and have them escort us out of the house.”

His father lunged, grabbing his mother and twisting her right arm behind her until she was bent over, her upside-down face peering at Aaron. He could see that it hurt, but his father yanked her arm higher.

“Jerry, please,” his mother said, and his father stepped back, releasing her. “Let’s go,” she said, talking to Aaron now, and his father turned and saw him there. His mother walked fast down the hallway to his room, and Aaron trotted to keep up. She boosted him onto the bed and picked up his shoes, the shoes with which he had kicked the sitting-down Paul Bunyan. “They’re getting tight,” she said. She gripped his ankles hard and forced them onto his feet.

“My suitcase,” he said.

“I know,” said his mother, and she went over to the closet and bent in.

Aaron saw his father come in and move toward the closet. He could have called to her then. “Watch out,” he could have said. “Watch out for my father.”

Instead, he watched his father place his hands on his mother’s buttocks and push her into the closet the way he had pushed her into the oven, as though he were Hansel and Gretel, and she the witch. Her head hit the wall, and his father scooped him up and dropped him inside with her. The door shut. He heard his father fumbling for the key that they kept above the door, fitting it inside the lock.

“Jerry,” called his mother. She jiggled the knob and banged on the door.

Aaron heard his bed creak loudly as his father settled on top of it. And then they waited.

Eventually — Aaron was not sure how long it had been — they heard his father rise from the bed and leave the room. His mother spoke to him then, whispering, “He’ll let us out. He will. He’s just trying to teach us a lesson.” She reached for his hand, but there in the dark he imagined that her hand was a snake or a mouse, not his mother at all. He pulled away, startled, and she did not try to touch him again. When his father returned, the smell of bacon and eggs came with him, wafting under the closet door. They could hear him setting things — a plate, cutlery, a glass — on the nightstand and the bed creaking again.

“Jerry, Aaron is hungry,” said his mother. He had not said that he was hungry.

His father did not reply, but they heard his fork scraping, the sound of him chewing and swallowing, the glass knocking against his teeth each time he drank. His father belched, as he did at the end of every meal.

“What did you have?” asked his mother encouragingly. “It smells like bacon.”

“Did I ever tell you my favorite bacon story?” his father said.

“Why don’t you open the door and tell me while I clean up that greasy pan?”

“The pan is fine,” said his father. He sounded relaxed, like he was enjoying himself. “Once the grease sets, I might spread some on a slice of bread. I’m going to need a midnight snack.”

“I can make dessert,” said his mother. “I’ll make a crisp. We still have some of those apples left from the motel.”

His father snorted. “And have him puke all over my arm again? Anyway, I have my own dessert,” he said, and they heard him take another drink.

“Jerry,” his mother said, “you know you don’t like drinking.”

“Actually,” said his father, “I do like drinking, and this is a special occasion.”

“What’s special about it?” said his mother.

His father laughed. “How can you ask such a silly question?” he said. “First of all, do you spend most nights in the closet?” His father paused to take another drink. They heard the steady expulsion of his flatulence. “No,” said his father. “You don’t spend most nights in the closet, because you have a bed, and Aaron has a bed, but you don’t care about that, about how lucky you both are to have beds.”

“Jerry, are you drunk?” his mother said.

“I’m celebrating,” said his father. “Tomorrow I’m going to be in a parade, and tonight I’m having bacon and eggs for supper, and I was just about to tell you my favorite bacon story. Don’t you want to hear my story? Do you have something else to do?”

“No,” said his mother. “I do want to hear it.”

“It’s short, but it’s very funny. When I tell the story, I want you to laugh for once in your goddamn life. Okay?”

“Okay,” said his mother. “Tell me the story, and I’ll laugh.”

“Okay,” said his father. “It’s about the Jews. Do you remember the first time I met the Jews?”

“Yes,” said his mother. “You came by to pick me up. We were going out — bowling, I think.” She paused. “What does this have to do with bacon, Jerry?”

“Well,” said his father, “that’s the funny part. You see, I brought a slice of raw bacon with me when I went to pick you up from the Jews. They probably thought I didn’t know anything about Jews — they were snobby like that — but I had the bacon wrapped up in tinfoil in the glove compartment, and just before I went up and knocked on their door, I took the bacon out and rubbed it all over my hands, and when the Jews opened the door, I shook hands with them, both of them.” From the other side of the closet door, Aaron heard his father laughing while beside him, his mother remained silent. “I don’t hear you laughing,” said his father. “Don’t you get it? I had bacon grease all over my hands, and they didn’t even know it. They just acted so polite and pleased to meet me.”

His father grunted. “You see — not a damn shred of humor between the two of you.” His glass kept clinking, but he did not speak again. Soon, they heard his deep snores on the other side of the closet door.

His mother wet herself first. When Aaron smelled it — a wild, frightening odor amid the smells of dust and wool and moth balls — he thought that it was his own bladder betraying him, even though he had been focusing on holding it in. He relaxed, a defeated letting go, and felt the sudden warmth of urine seeping across his thighs, pooling beneath his buttocks.

“Jerry,” called his mother, “we need the bathroom.”

His father rolled over heavily on Aaron’s bed. “How am I supposed to sleep with all this racket?” he said, his voice thick.

“We need the bathroom, Jerry. Please.”

After a very long silence, his father said in the same thick voice, “What if I can’t live without the two of you?”

“You don’t need to, Jerry,” said Aaron’s mother. “Open the door so we can all go to bed. In the morning, I’ll clean everything up, and then we’ll go to the parade.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said his father.

“Understand what, Jerry?” said his mother. “Tell me.”

Aaron heard his father moving around on the bed, heard him mumbling. “I don’t think the two of you understand what a good life I gave you,” he said at last.

The gunshot came immediately, an exclamation point on his father’s words.

“My god,” screamed his mother. She began to kick at the closet door, calling his father’s name.

It was August, a humid month. The heat from their bodies was trapped in the closet with them and gave substance to the smell of urine and sour clothing and fear. Aaron could not breathe. It was like being in the iron ore mines, like being underwater.

“Aaron,” his mother said, “ask your father to let us out.”

“Can we come out?” Aaron whispered.

“Remind him about how you kicked Paul Bunyan,” said his mother.

“I kicked Paul Bunyan,” he said.

“He did that for you, Jerry,” his mother said, but there was no reply, no sound at all from the other side of the door. His mother’s sobs settled into a steady whimper, and the whimpers gave way to silence. Inside the closet and out, there was only silence.

* * *

Aaron awakened to the sound of birds. There were nests in the eaves above his window, which his father sometimes sprayed with the garden hose, blasting them loose, eggs falling to the ground along with bits of feather and twigs and dried grass. But new nests always appeared. Aaron never told his father about the new ones because he liked waking up to the cooing of birds. The closet was still dark, but the light beneath the door had changed. It was morning. His stuffed giraffe nudged his chin, though he did not remember taking it out of his suitcase during the night. His mother breathed steadily beside him, asleep on his leg.

He heard a key in the lock, and the closet door swung open. His father stood over them, haloed in light, still wearing his police uniform. His shirt was coming untucked, the belt hanging undone. His gun was snapped into its holster. Aaron’s mother sat up, the smell of urine rising with her, a stench like gas station bathrooms.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, her words breaking into sobs.

“I was just having some fun,” said his father. “But as usual, you two don’t get the joke.” He laughed and stretched in a leisurely way, then brought his hand up over his nose. “Jesus, did you two shit yourselves? Get up and get changed,” he said. “In five minutes we’re leaving for the parade.”