Night at the Fiestas: Stories

THE GUESTHOUSE

JEFF STANDS WITH HIS SISTER IN THEIR GRANDMOTHER’S kitchen, still in his funeral clothes, but barefoot now. He heard the stroke had been painless and decisive, yet, judging from the state of the house, his grandmother had clearly been in decline even before the clot wedged itself into that tight corridor in her brain. She was always tidy, but the place looks awful: the floor is sticky and grainy, the sink full, and on the stove smelly water stagnates in an egg pan. In the cupboard beneath the sink, there is a leak. The wood is buckled and soft, stinking of spores and damp garbage. He thought his grandmother was doing fine, and his obliviousness pains him.

“Why didn’t you tell me things had gotten this bad? Didn’t you ever check up on her?”

“Excuse me?” says Brooke. “Are you blaming me for Grandma dying?”

“Of course not,” Jeff says, although he is. The house is ten minutes from UNM. Brooke couldn’t stop in once? He blames his mother, too, and himself, even if he does live two thousand miles away, because he should know better than to expect anything of the two of them. He forces a laugh. “At least the house is standing. At least it hasn’t been pillaged by obit-scouring meth-heads.”

“Yet,” says Brooke. She takes a handful of cashews from the cut-glass candy dish that has been on the counter since Jeff can remember. It occurs to him that it’s a little creepy, eating a dead woman’s nuts, but he doesn’t say so. Brooke is squeamish about these things, and if she’s not thinking about it, he won’t point it out. She wears a baggy linen skirt with a bunched elastic waistband, wrinkled everywhere except at her bottom. Nineteen years old and already middle-aged.

“You okay?” he asks, his concern for his sister a reflex. “You can leave if you want.”

“I’m fine,” she says. “Quit asking if I’m okay.”

He nods and flips to a new page in the steno pad, refusing to linger on the lists and notes and telephone numbers in his grandmother’s looping cursive. Jeff is awash in an enervating, aching nostalgia, his limbs thick with it. There’s so much that needs to be done before he flies back to New York: he has to cancel his grandmother’s cell phone and credit cards and order more copies of the death certificate for the insurance companies, sort through her files. And he’ll need to get in touch with a real estate agent. Not that the house will fetch much in this market. It’s just a slump-block two-bedroom ranch with brown carpet, ratty grass in the yard, and a few scraggly potted geraniums on the concrete porch. Jeff’s grandmother was certain the land would appreciate — and it should have — other neighborhoods on the edge of the city did — but instead, trailer parks sprouted around her. Occasionally there are shouting matches, drug busts and gunshots and sirens, misery constantly turning over.

It’ll be awful to sell. Everything about the house is suffused with significance, Jeff thinks, looking around: the orange enameled pots and pans, the brown velveteen throw pillows, the bedspreads with their polyester ruffles. Everything touched by her, everything bereft. In the shadowed living room, the coral couch waits, fabric rumpled where she used to settle under the lamp. They spent hours deliberating here, Jeff and his grandmother, the adults of the family, sorting out his mother, sorting out Brooke. Jeff and his grandmother were the doers, the fixers, and now Jeff is alone. The fact is, he doesn’t know if he’ll survive the loss of her.

Brooke tosses her head and shakes a handful of cashews into her mouth. “If Grandma was here she’d point out how fattening these nuts are. We should have buried her in her jeans with that patent leather belt cinched tight.” She draws herself up and strikes a Vanna pose. “I’ve used the same notch since 1960,” she mimics in a voice totally unlike their grandmother’s. “You’d think by eighty she’d have grown out of that kind of vanity.”

“You’re being mean,” says Jeff, then softens. Their grandmother could be hard on Brooke. Brooke isn’t pretty like their mother and grandmother — she is plain and pale, small-breasted, with a cap of short dense hair and a loose paunch. She is regularly mistaken for a lesbian. He wishes she were one. Women are so much more forgiving, it seems to him, so much more likely to let his sister be a little ugly.

“Lisa couldn’t come?” Brooke asks.

He listens for a trace of spite in her voice, but doesn’t detect any. Brooke chews blandly. This fall he flew her to New York to stay with him and his girlfriend. The trip wasn’t a success. Lisa was hurt by Brooke’s reserve, but soldiered on, cracking terrible jokes, insisting on standing in line for hours at the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, efforts that made Jeff feel self-conscious and faintly embarrassed by his girlfriend. Now he wishes he’d had the chance to introduce Lisa to his grandmother.

“She couldn’t get away,” he says. “But she says hi.”

Brooke licks her finger and runs it through the salt in the bottom of the bowl. “Weird how you quit seeing stuff, you know? I never realized just how much crap Grandma had.” She flicks at a souvenir tea towel pinned to the wall. It features a coy brown child in a hula costume with one suggestive hip cocked. “Like, this is so offensive on so many levels.”

Jeff nearly defends the tea towel, but catches himself. He forces a smile. “You know Grandma and her finely tuned ironic vision.”

Initially, Jeff thought they’d rent out the house — the extra income would be good for his mother — but he doesn’t think she has the emotional wherewithal to be a landlord. She doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to handle most things, really. She’s in England now, on a walking tour of the Lake District. When he asked when she was coming home so they could arrange the funeral, she cried, “But I’ve been saving for this trip for years!” Then she added resentfully, “Besides, my mother would rather you be there than me,” as if the church could accommodate only one of them. She’d told him to go ahead with the funeral, claiming she couldn’t bear it, claiming she’d rather mourn alone, neither of which stopped her from calling all morning and texting throughout the service to tell him about her devastation. He sees her gesture for what it is, a last childish assertion of her independence, despite the fact that the intended audience — his grandmother — is no longer paying attention. Honestly, he’s glad to have his mother offstage, and he’s glad for the time difference, too, which means that for the next seven or so hours she’ll be safely asleep in some chilly floral B&B in Grasmere.

Jeff has heard it said that teachers reach only the emotional maturity of their oldest students. His mother, then, is a kindergartener, launching out stubbornly on her own, and then rushing back, crying, for comfort. She calls Jeff nearly every day, unless she’s feeling fragile, in which case Jeff is supposed to call her and to keep calling until she picks up. Small problems loom large for Jeff’s mother and require endless discussion — whether or not to replace the microwave, what to do about the stray cat that has begun to linger at the patio doors. Just a few months ago, she called Jeff in tears because she’d run into Jeff’s father at the gas station. She hadn’t even talked to him, just glimpsed him, or thought she had. Almost twenty years they’ve been divorced, and she’s still ready to fall to pieces.

Jeff thinks, not for the first time, that maybe he should move back to Albuquerque and finish his dissertation here. Lisa wouldn’t be happy, but she couldn’t object, not with his suicidal sister and bereaved mother needing him. He could live right here — or, better, in the guesthouse out back. That would make a certain kind of sense. He’s always felt proprietary toward the guesthouse. When he was a kid he played out there among the remnants of his grandmother’s New England life: his dead grandfather’s clothing, his mother’s childhood toys, everything she’d dragged with her across the country. It occurs to him for the first time how unlike her it was to save all that stuff, since he’d never known her to be sentimental, unlike Jeff himself, who mourns even memories that aren’t his. “Can I live here when I grow up?” he asked when he was ten, and his grandmother laughed. “Consider it yours.”

Jeff swallows hard and thumps his list. “We’ve got to unload this place, pronto.”

“Maybe we should discuss it?” There’s something rigid in his sister’s tone that makes Jeff look at her more closely.

“What’s to discuss? Mom needs the money.”

“Well,” says Brooke, straightening a pile of junk mail, “I don’t want to sell, and I don’t think you do, either. Also it’s not your decision.”

Jeff exhales. “You think Mom’s going to step up?”

“You know, being the favorite may have meant something when Grandma was alive, but it doesn’t grant you total authority now.” She raises her head in challenge.

“Oh, stop.” This is an old accusation, made by both Brooke and, less frequently but with more bitterness, their mother. But it isn’t fair, attributing Jeff’s closeness with his grandmother to favoritism — unearned, undeserved — given how much Jeff put into that relationship. For years he stopped by most days after school and, once he’d left home, called every other day. By comparison, Brooke and their mother barely tried. “You want to find renters? Deal with inspectors and repairs and leases? Run a little property management company on the side while you finish up your gen-ed requirements?” He pushes the steno pad at her so hard the pages riffle, then immediately feels foolish.

“You know,” Brooke says, “Grandma would have hated that service. The preacher or whatever looked at his notes before he said her name.”

The funeral, which took place in a flat-roofed brick monstrosity moored in an expanse of crushed rock, was terrible, dreary and sparsely attended. “I did my best.” Jeff’s voice cracks, and he’s glad, because his sister should feel bad about giving him a hard time.

Brooke’s tone softens. “You did a fine job.” She leans on the counter with her knuckles, rocks back and forth, then laughs a single harsh bray. “But if my funeral is like that, I’ll kill myself.”

“Christ, Brooke,” Jeff starts, but he’s stopped by the ringing phone.

She answers, listens a moment, then says, “Talk to Jeff.” He gives her a puzzled look as he takes it, but her face reveals nothing.

“Jeffy, honey. I’m real sorry your grandma died. She was a great lady.”

His stomach seizes even before Jeff consciously places the voice. Victor, their father: unemployed and undependable, obstinately friendly, chronically drunk.

“Don’t you recognize me? It’s your papa, man.”

Jeff closes his eyes. “We appreciate your thoughts, Victor.”

“Listen, there’s stuff we got to talk about.”

“I’m afraid now’s not a good time. As you’ve pointed out, my grandmother just died.”

A silence follows, through which Jeff can almost hear his father scheming. Victor says, “Well, I’m probably dying, too. Cancer.”

Jeff laughs. Brooke’s hands on the counter are still; she watches him, impassive. Jeff half-turns, leans into the receiver, as if to protect her from the conversation. “I can’t help thinking this is a coincidence, Victor. Your calling now.” His grandmother’s phone is equipped with a foam shoulder rest, which Jeff crushes in his hand. With effort he relaxes his grip. “The funeral ended two hours ago.”

“That’s what I’m saying. A death really makes you think about mortality and all that. Man, poor Becky. I’m just saying you might want to see me. It’s my stomach. They say that’s a bad one.”

“What’s this about, Victor? Do you need money?”

“No.” Victor sounds offended.

Jeff doesn’t know why he asked. His father has never asked for money, not even after the divorce. He could tell Victor to screw himself, but part of him is curious to know if his father actually is dying. The man’s history of manipulation doesn’t exempt him from real cancer, Jeff supposes. He wonders if his father’s illness will trigger grief and catharsis, forgiveness and reconciliation. He shudders, then flips to a new page, clicks the pen. “Fine. We’ll say our goodbyes. You still at the same place? Give me your address.”

“No need!” His father’s tone is cheerful. “I’m right out back.”

“What?”

“Just look.” And, indeed, there he is, their father, in the middle of the dry lawn in their grandmother’s backyard. He waves sheepishly, cell phone pressed to his ear. “I could see you two standing there. I almost came in, but I didn’t want to freak you.”

Jeff hangs the phone on the wall but continues to steady himself against the receiver. “He says he’s got cancer,” he says, jerking his thumb at the window. “So make of that what you will.” There’s something almost pleasing in the anger Jeff feels toward his father. He feels beleaguered, wronged, and also energized, because once again he has to take charge.

Brooke turns and shrugs her hunched shoulders, crossing her arms over her breasts, matching Jeff’s show of nonchalance. Her whole life she’s had bad posture; she even slumped as a defeated little toddler. Outside, Victor is taking a leak in the tomato bed, squinting into the colorless sky.

“I should see what he wants. Care to join?”

Brooke looks at her stubby fingernails and shakes her head.

“How long do you think he’s been lurking out there?” Again Brooke shrugs, and he feels his frustration mount. “Well, if I’m not back in twenty minutes, send a search party.”

Jeff turns the deadbolt on the back door and steps outside.

THIS CALL SHOULDN’T BE a surprise. As if driven by an instinct for calamity, Victor pops up when Jeff and Brooke are at their most vulnerable. Two years ago, for instance, when Brooke was just home from the hospital, still trying to keep down clear fluids, Victor arrived to announce he was getting clean, moving to Alaska to work on a commercial fishing boat, and wanted to make amends before he left. While Victor wept and wrung the hem of his t-shirt, Jeff blocked the doorway, trying to prevent his father’s voice from reaching his mother and sister at the back of the house.

Jeff remembers more of life with their father than Brooke does. He had eight years of it, while she was just a year old, too fat to walk, when Victor left. Jeff is glad she was spared the memories, but he knows she just feels excluded.

Victor has never been the kind of father to demand visitations or parental rights, and seems to accept his role as failed father and human with remarkable good humor, holding no one — not his ex-wife, not his children, and least of all himself — responsible.

Jeff encounters his father about once a year, never by choice. Now and then when back in town Jeff will bump into relatives of his father or see them on commercials or the evening news. Victor’s family is immense and tangled: half of them are drunks and the others have had success in real estate and local politics. All their children go through the public school system, so periodically one ends up in Jeff’s mother’s classroom, where she guides its little hands, tracing letters on a table dusted with flour.

She came to Albuquerque from New Hampshire for college, hair in a long braid, full of enthusiasm for the desert flora, the vistas and dry air, what she called the realness of the place. That same realness presumably drew her to Victor, an electrician rewiring the Education Building, and they were married within a year. There are pictures from this time, his mother dragging playfully on Victor’s shiny tanned arm, her braid swinging.

This was before Jeff was born, before Victor punched Jeff’s mother in the throat and stomped on her hand, breaking six of those matchstick bones. This was before his grandmother moved to join her only child. “Your mom needed help,” she said. “She’s always needed help.”

“HEY, MY MAN!” Victor comes in for a hug, but Jeff puts his arms up, absurdly defensive. Victor laughs and waves his hands in mock surrender, then slouches against the cinder-block wall of the guesthouse. He squints into the kitchen window, where Brooke’s dim figure is bent over the counter. “Make your sister come out. I haven’t seen her in forever.”

Jeff shrugs. “She will if she wants.”

Victor seems about to argue, but instead he says, “How’s your mom?”

Jeff hesitates. “How do you think? She’s a wreck.”

Victor perks up. “She’s not doing good?”

Jeff hooks his fingers in his pockets and pretends to survey his grandmother’s backyard. Victor doesn’t look sick, doesn’t seem to have aged at all. His hair is wet and a little long, combed straight back, curly at the nape. The man isn’t even balding, which Jeff finds galling, since his own hairline has been in retreat since college. Victor’s undershirt is worn thin enough that Jeff can see his dark nipples, a queasily intimate sight.

“How’s Lupe?” Jeff asks, then regrets taking responsibility for the conversation, making things easier on Victor.

“Didn’t work out. She just wanted my money. But was she fine.” Jeff’s father purses his lips and bobs his head as though appreciating good music.

Lupe was Jeff’s twenty-three-year-old stepmother. The one time Jeff met her, last year, she served saltines on a plastic TV table in the dirt outside their travel trailer. While Victor swigged his beer and talked about his plans for fixing up the place, building a deck — no mention of Alaska — she and two pit bulls watched Jeff sullenly as he sipped warm orange juice. When Jeff made to refill his cup, she moved the carton away.

“Yep,” says Victor philosophically. “Went back to Chihuahua. Took the dogs and car and TV and everything.” He shrugs. “She was mad the whole time, anyway. She married me ’cause she thought I had a pool. The city one was just down the street, but it wasn’t good enough for her.”

“So,” Jeff says, because he doesn’t have all day. “Cancer.”

Victor bats the word away and turns abruptly to the guesthouse. He pushes hard on the door, and it scrapes along the concrete. He stands aside and extends a formal arm to let Jeff pass. “Come in, see my place.”

Jeff steps inside automatically, but his brain seems to be taking a very long time to process the information before him. The dusty, comfortable jumble is gone, all of it. The boxes and bureaus, his mother’s childhood dollhouse, the Victorian cabinet filled with his grandfather’s mineral collection. Victor has robbed them. Sold their history. With real grief, Jeff remembers the pleasure of finding a set of little wooden village pieces belonging to his grandmother when she was a child, remembers how she’d brightened when he brought them to her.

The violation is astonishing. “What have you done, Victor?” Jeff’s voice comes out strangled.

“I knew you’d flip out,” Victor says, as though once again disappointed by the sheer uncoolness of his son. “Shit.”

The dim air smells of urine. A square of brown shag covers the concrete between the couch and the TV. Daylight falls on an open microwave crusted with exploded food, a plastic trashcan stuffed to overflowing, a bag of pork rinds scattered across the floor. Three or four metal restaurant chairs with brown vinyl backs are covered in beer cans, clothing, fast-food wrappers, plastic empties of cheap vodka.

Victor is also surveying the place, and he looks a little uneasy. “I let it go a bit, I guess, but it’s usually real cozy. Home sweet home.”

Jeff turns to his father, disbelieving. His father in his grandmother’s home. None of this makes sense. “You broke in. You’re squatting.”

“Would you quit?” Victor screws up his face in annoyance. “I didn’t break in anywhere.”

“Oh, God. You don’t have cancer. Did you really think I wouldn’t press charges if I thought you were dying?”

“Becky let me stay. She said if I cleaned it out it was all mine. I’m telling you, she’s one nice lady.”

There is no way his grandmother let Victor stay here. There is no way. She didn’t even know Victor anymore; if they’d had any contact at all, she’d have told Jeff, he’s certain. The last time they saw each other was when? Jeff’s high school graduation? Almost ten years ago. He remembers them talking, briefly, smiling and standing apart like strangers, while Jeff kept his hand on his mother’s arm and involved her in a conversation with his English teacher. “I’m calling the police,” he says without conviction. Then he hears it: a snuffling, squeaking noise.

Along the back of the dim room is a huge terrarium. At first Jeff is under the impression that Victor has a dog living in there, one of his pit bulls, maybe. As his eyes adjust, however, he sees that the tank is filled with rats. A wire top is held down with bricks. The rats are glossy gray and brown and black, teeming behind the glass with their obscene naked tails and intelligent faces.

“Jesus,” he breathes.

Victor grins proudly. “There’s probably twenty or thirty now. They keep breeding — brothers and sisters, sons and mothers, every which way — but half the time they eat each other. I don’t even have to feed them.”

The rats scramble over one another’s heads, impossible to count. Jeff is riveted. “Jesus,” he says again.

“Disgusting, huh?” Victor says. “You should see them flip their shit when the snake gets near. You gotta wear special gloves or they’ll bite through your hand. Even leather won’t hold them back. I got to stun them”—he demonstrates dashing an imaginary rat against the concrete—“or they try to bite her.”

“What do you mean, snake?” asks Jeff faintly.

Victor leads him to the bedroom, which is even darker and more fetid. Orange light slinks through the slats of the blinds. In the corner, heaped like laundry next to the unmade bed, is an enormous boa constrictor.

“She’s digesting,” says Victor, nudging it with his work boot.

The snake unwinds until it’s stretched to full length. Jeff steps back. The boa constrictor is huge and butter yellow, shining like something moist that lives underground. It watches Jeff and his father through dull pinprick eyes. A black tongue as glossy as plastic flicks in and out.

Jeff has never been afraid of snakes; he’s used to seeing them in the desert. Once he ushered a rattler out of his mother’s garden with the tip of a shovel. But this is a monster.

“Hey there, Sabrina, honey.” Victor squats, rocks on the balls of his feet, and lifts the snake. The muscles in his arms strain. “Want to hold her?”

Jeff shakes his head, a single jerk.

Victor seems hurt. “She’s not going to go and strangle you. She’s not hungry. And besides, she’s gravid. That’s why she’s slow.” He hoists the snake over his head and drapes it around his shoulders, stroking the thick creamy flank. It moves with muscular silkiness, lifting the weight of head and tail, curling itself around Victor’s body. It’s languid and sensual and Jeff is repulsed by the thought of his father and the snake living here together.

All at once he remembers something he hasn’t thought of in years: staying overnight with his father soon after the divorce, being tucked into his father’s bed, and waking in the dark next to him. On his father’s other side lay a woman Jeff had never seen. He sat up, watching his father asleep on his back, belly high and bare, and the woman beside him, whom he knew was naked under the sheets. She opened her eyes and looked right at Jeff until he clamped his eyes shut and lowered his head to the pillow. In the morning she was gone; his father stood at the tiny linoleum counter making coffee, no mention of her at all. Jeff is sweating.

“She’s my new business, Jeffy. Three thousand bucks every time this lady births. More even. You haven’t seen anything cuter than thirty baby snakes.”

Under the anger and revulsion, Jeff can’t deny a thrill of fascination, because Victor is always, always surprising him. The marvel of Victor is that for all his malefactions — and after today, Jeff can safely add criminal trespass and animal cruelty to the catalogue — still he manages to play the role more of fool than villain. Even this scenario — Jeff shoots another glance at the tank full of incestuous, cannibalistic rats — is darkly, appallingly comic. The story would make for excellent entertainment at the bar with Lisa and his graduate school friends, except that telling it would be a public admission of Jeff’s genetic link to this man.

“She’s incredible, I’m telling you, a real miracle of creation. She lays eggs, but inside. Ovoviviparous! Shit, I love that word.”

Jeff hears the door push open in the front room. It’s Brooke, blinking in the dark. “Holy crap,” she says.

Victor rushes forward, remarkably nimble under the weight of the boa, his smile almost heartbreakingly eager. “Hey, Brooke, baby. Good to see you.” He makes as if to embrace her, but Brooke backs up in alarm and presses against the door, arms crossed. Victor shakes his head with sad affection. “It’s been forever, girl! When’d you cut your hair so short?” He turns to Jeff. “She’s not a, you know?”

Brooke’s presence shakes Jeff from his stunned inaction. “You’ve got to leave, Victor. Now.” He gestures at the room, the rats.

“But that’s what I’m trying to explain. Your grandma said I could stay.”

“There is no fucking way she said that.”

Brooke laughs.

“Jeffrey, your grandma always liked me. She used to tell me, ‘Victor, you got potential. Victor, you need to make something of your life.’” Victor is talking like he’s about to close a sale. “I’m telling you, every time I ran into her, she inspired me. Over the years we kept in touch on and off. When I saw her in Albertsons maybe six months ago, I’d of recognized her anywhere but she recognized me first, said, ‘Victor, honey, how are you?’ She told me how you two were doing, college and Columbia and everything, and you know, that was real considerate, seeing as you two never tell me nothing, my own kids. She offered to buy my groceries, but I told her, ‘Becky, you keep your money,’ and I carried her bags out to the car. Ever since, it’s been great between us.”

“Does Mom know about this?” Brooke steeples her hands over her nose, gaze fixed on the snake. “Oh my God, that thing is so creepy. Can I touch it?”

Victor brightens. “A beauty, isn’t she? They’re America’s fifty-fourth most popular pet.”

Jeff is tempted to slap Brooke’s hand away. She extends an index finger, hovers, then makes contact. The boa regards her coldly and tastes the air.

“You need to leave now. A real estate agent is coming tomorrow. You need to clean this shit up and get out.”

Victor looks stricken. “You’re selling Becky’s house?”

“We haven’t decided,” says Brooke.

Victor massages the snake’s tail, which flicks obscenely between his fingers. After a moment, he says: “Tell you what. You can sell it, man, fine by me. I’ll be your real estate agent, show it to buyers. I know all about property from my cousin Yvette. I’d keep the bathroom and kitchen real clean. I only got to be here until Sabrina has her babies, two months max, and then I can sell them off and get my own place.” Victor is jittery, running his free hand through his hair, over and over. “It’s the ideal setup, Jeff. You go on back to your school, and I’ll take care of everything. You can’t sell the house like this, anyways. It needs work. Have you seen under the kitchen sink? Must’ve been leaking for years.”

“You think someone’s going to buy this house with you and Animal Planet out here? No fucking way.”

“Are you really dying?” asks Brooke.

“Of course I am! Where’m I going to go, Jeff? I don’t have a deposit or nothing.”

Jeff tries to picture the cancer coiled in his father’s abdomen, but he can’t make himself believe it. The man is indestructible.

Victor swivels to Brooke. “You want to know the truth, I’m scared. It was awful seeing your grandma get weak like that. Know what I found in her closet?” Victor lowers his voice to a tragic whisper. “Depends. God, poor Becky.”

“I didn’t know that,” Brooke says softly. “That’s so sad.” Her eyes fill, her first real sign of grief, and Jeff is almost annoyed at her for allowing herself grief at a time like this.

“You went inside the house?” Jeff demands.

“The bathroom out here hasn’t been working too good. Would you relax? I didn’t go and sell nothing. I’m no criminal. Listen, Jeff, what you got to understand is that I’m not the same guy I was when you were a kid.”

Jeff is bilious at the thought of Victor in his grandmother’s house, moving with a snake among her belongings. “So you exploited her? You threatened her? Did you punch her in the throat?”

Victor is perfectly still for a moment, and when he speaks his voice is careful. “I made mistakes in the past, Jeff. That’s on me. Your grandma gave me a key. I helped her out, it wasn’t just a one-way. Dishes, vacuuming, I did it all. Every single day I made her breakfast.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jeff says. His grandmother was supposed to be hardheaded and practical. She used to say, enjoying her own bawdiness, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.” He supposes she might have been capable of a shrewd calculation: an unused shed for the presence of a grateful man. But what’s more impractical than trusting Victor?

“I believe him,” says Brooke. “I do. Grandma loved having a man around worshiping her.”

“Would you stop it, Brooke?” Jeff snaps.

“She never respected me or Mom. You just didn’t want to notice.”

“You’re being a child. She loved you.” Brooke is right, though. His grandmother liked her men. But to allow her daughter’s abusive ex-husband to move in because she liked him?

Maybe. Maybe she told herself she was being broad-minded, not letting social conventions or her family’s narrow ideas about loyalty get in her way. It’s horrible imagining his grandmother so weak: so hungry for attention that she would turn to a man thirty years younger, so cruel that she would choose Victor.

Victor puts a hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. She was old.” Jeff can smell his soap and cologne, and he understands that his father showered in preparation for this encounter. “She was sick. Things weren’t easy for her.”

Jeff smacks Victor’s hand away harder than he means to. This is the first time he’s touched his father in years.

Victor grins mirthlessly. He rubs the snake’s head with his thumb. “You think she needed your permission, Jeff? Where were you? Off at your fancy university, with your fancy girlfriend. Oh, Becky had lots to say about you.”

Jeff wants to scroll back to a time — less than an hour ago — when he was mourning the grandmother he knew. Victor is telling the truth, Jeff understands this. His grandmother betrayed him, betrayed all of them. Once, not long after the divorce, he walked in on a conversation between his mother and grandmother. “Maybe he’ll take you back,” his grandmother was saying, and Jeff had known how wrong she was to say it even before he saw his mother’s stricken expression.

“You know, maybe I’m sad, too,” says Victor. “Ever think of that? Ever think how you’re not the only one who lost an important person? Don’t you think I wanted to be at Becky’s funeral? I only stayed away for you two. You and your mom.” He turns his attention to the snake, stroking his thumb across the flat shiny skull. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

Brooke’s mouth twists. “You and Grandma, you weren’t, like, in a relationship, were you?”

“I’m not going to apologize.” Victor draws himself up, but won’t look at them. “She helped me out. She helped me with my drinking.”

“Not much, she didn’t,” says Jeff viciously. He kicks a beer can harder than he means to, and it rattles across the concrete, bounces off the glass front of the terrarium. The rats freeze, then resume their scrambling.

“You mean you loved her?” asks Brooke, and her tone is more wondering than disgusted.

“Brooke,” Jeff says. “Let me handle this.”

“Will you quit bossing everyone?” Her voice is low, her cheeks reddening. “I don’t need you handling things. Always calling me—‘Are you okay, Brooke? Are you dead yet, Brooke?’—fishing around until you find something to handle. Mom doesn’t need you.” She laughs meanly. “And apparently Grandma didn’t need you either. What do you think we did all those years you were off getting your degrees?” She clenches and unclenches her fists, looking helpless and pathetic.

Jeff is stung. Two years ago, when his grandmother phoned with the news that Brooke was in the hospital, Jeff flew home immediately. He can picture his sister exactly, despite the fact that he hadn’t been the one to find her, had in fact been two thousand miles away: unconscious in her giant sleep shirt, cheek pressed into the bathmat, some of the pills undissolved in the Technicolor vomit. The image still pains him.

The animal smell in here is so rich and awful, Jeff thinks he might throw up.

“Oh, that’s right,” Brooke says, “stomp off. Go nurse your precious ego.”

Jeff pushes past her to the door and bursts into the yard and the sun’s assault. Shaking, he gulps at the clean, dry air.

IN HIS GRANDMOTHER’S KITCHEN, Jeff circles the table, trying to locate her presence in this house. But she is gone. He feels wet and heavy. Years ago, when his grandmother’s aunt died, he’d caught her here weeping. “Well, I’m up next!” She laughed through her tears and dragged a Kleenex hard across the fragile skin pouched around her eyes. He watched the skin slide back into place, not knowing how to comfort her. “And that’s not the scary part. The scary part is there’s no one to turn to. Who will take care of me?”

Mother, sister, Jeff. His family is just too small. Someone should have foreseen that this would be a problem, someone should have made other arrangements. Jeff senses isolation waiting for him, a yawning, sucking nothingness, a dark wind blowing at the edges of this bright, solid world. He can feel its gust.

When Brooke came home from the hospital, Jeff knew he had to talk to her, but had been too afraid. So instead, his grandmother sat Brooke down and said, “No more of this nonsense. This can’t happen again.” And miraculously, it hasn’t. All the while Jeff lingered in the kitchen, a coward, safe in the knowledge that if he, like his sister, should ever let slip his grip on life, his grandmother would be there to boss him back into shape.

Jeff knows he has to go back out there, deal with Victor, untangle this mess, but instead he wants to cry at the injustice. No one should have to be responsible for these lives. “You love it,” Lisa told him once. “Who would you be if they didn’t need you?”

WHEN JEFF OPENS the guesthouse door, Victor is on the couch, leaning over his thighs. The snake is on the ground, making her deliberate way across the concrete to the terrarium. Jeff shudders, seeing her in motion like that, and when he steps into the house he positions himself behind one of the vinyl-covered restaurant chairs.

“Jeffrey,” says Victor, his voice subdued. “Your grandma and I didn’t, you know. If it makes you feel any better.”

This does, in fact, make Jeff feel better, but he resents the ebbing of his outrage.

“I don’t want to hurt you, honey. I’m asking a favor. Please.”

“You can stay, Victor,” Brooke says. “Jeff, you don’t want to sell, I know you don’t. Victor can help get the house ready to rent, and then he can manage the place.”

“Manage.” Jeff’s voice is flat. The snake has arranged herself into a pile next to the terrarium. She gazes through the glass. The rats watch her warily, motionless.

“Thank you, baby,” says Victor, his voice slack with relief. He exhales and drops back against the couch. “I thank you.”

“When Sabrina gives birth,” Brooke continues, “he can sell the babies, and then he can pay Mom rent, too. It’s the solution that makes the most financial sense. And apparently Grandma was okay with it.” Her expression is bland and controlled, but she keeps tucking the same short piece of hair behind her ear. “So.”

“Mom will never go for this.”

“I’ll convince her.” Brooke watches him steadily. It’s the same expression Jeff imagines she wore when she stood before the mirror with her full glass of water and smorgasbord of pills. He imagines she held her own gaze as she swallowed.

“I cannot believe you’re taking his side, after everything he’s done.”

“I’m not taking sides.”

The snake’s head glides closer to the glass, and the rats scramble and squeak.

It won’t work. Brooke will make a hash of it, Victor will disappoint, their mother will weep and rant, and Jeff will be called in to set things straight. He laughs acidly. “You’re as bad as Grandma, trusting him.”

His sister’s tone is calm. “People change, Jeff. I changed, not that you notice. I’m not still seventeen years old and suicidal. Grandma changed. Maybe Papa has, too.”

Brooke doesn’t even know Victor, not really, but it seems she sees some other version of their father, the version, perhaps, that Jeff himself missed so desperately after the divorce. For over a year after, Jeff cried soundlessly in his room, longing for his father: his father of the infectious exuberance, his father of the surprising generosity. Possibly this is the Victor Jeff’s grandmother saw, too.

Gently, Brooke says, “You shouldn’t always have to deal with everything,” and Jeff feels that something essential has been wrenched from him.

“Come on, son,” says Victor. “We’re family. We’re all still family.”

Jeff whips around, pulling the chair with him, the metal legs scraping the concrete. He understands that somewhere deep in his reptilian brain, he is still afraid of this man. “You’re not family, Victor. You forfeited that right.” He holds the chair before him like a shield. Rage catches inside him. He wants to maim and destroy, like Victor, like Brooke. He and Brooke, they’re both their father’s children, Jeff thinks, his heart crashing around behind his sternum. The snake adjusts her head imperceptibly and eyes him. He thinks of his father’s hands on her body, that revolting gentleness. He lifts the chair over his head.

For once the man isn’t grinning, isn’t smiling and sliming his way through life. Maybe this is the Victor his grandmother knew: open and vulnerable.

“Oh, no,” says Victor. “Please.”

Jeff understands how Victor must have felt just before his fist met the frail give of throat. But even as he throws the chair, Jeff is aware that he intends to miss the boa constrictor, because even now, feeling as he does, he can’t hurt an animal, can’t give himself so fully to this destruction.

“No!” Victor cries in anguish.

The chair does indeed miss the snake. The shock flashes across the glass of the terrarium and the whole sheet pauses, holding its shape and breath. The rats freeze for a single stunned moment. Then the spell breaks, the pieces rain down, and the rats spill like river water from the terrarium.

As if they’ve waited for this moment, the rats swarm the snake, plunging their sharp teeth and snouts into her flesh.

The boa contracts and strikes outward, over and over, whipping across the cement, trying to fling them loose, and though some of the rats are cast off by the force of her panic, most hold fast. The boa constrictor throws back her head and opens her fanged mouth wide, and Jeff sees all the way down her pale blue-white throat.