That evening the floods come down, big ripped clouds bouldering with thunder, rattling the brass mirrors that hang in my mother’s sitting room. I’ve got all the windows open, the smell of rain whooshing through, clean as chalk. Somewhere, a door slams shut. Behind the house, the darkening hills meet the sky in a series of uneven ridges, like a herd of sleeping camels nestled muzzle to flank. In the darkness, I step onto the covered porch and sit down in the wicker peacock chair where my grandfather used to read Louis L’Amour and smoke Marlboros. I wonder what he would say if he knew his only daughter got a face lift. Even though he was a wholly timid man, a wearer of corduroy jackets with elbow patches and a player of bridge, I like to imagine that he is the one sending down this deluge, punishing my mother for her frivolity. I have decided to do a little role play in order to get through my anger: I will be the nurse, and my mother will be a soldier who has taken shrapnel to the face.

I watch the lightning whitewash the sky, coming down in skeletal fingers. To me, its silence is one of nature’s greatest triumphs. I cannot think of another thing that approaches destruction with such muted quickness. Except perhaps a falling bomb, but even that whistles before its spectacle. My bomb never whistled, never gave us any warning. It lay in wait, wrapped in foam to look like a rock, a typical EFP — Explosively Formed Penetrator. A formal name for a casual killer. But I don’t like the term “roadside bomb” either. Sounds like a goddamn tomato stand.

But what about man’s ability to reconstruct? I suppose I will see once I take the bandages off my mom’s face. I lost my leg to man’s innate talent for killing, perhaps she will salvage her beauty through our talent for restoration. I walk inside. Blood pools on the bandage at the base of my mom’s neck. I’ve forgotten the screaming red of new blood. I sit down at her feet. It is strange to see her prone, she who is so outwardly self-possessed. She is making soft noises, moaning, all lip and hum.

“How are you doing?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Ma, are you OK?”

Still, no words, but slowly, she reaches her arm up to the side of her face.

“Fair?”

“Yeah, Ma.”

“What have I done? What is it that I’ve done?” she says, her voice like paper on paper, barely audible.

“You want a Vicodin?”

“No,” she says. “Come here and sit by me.”

I scoot along the edges of the couch until I’m sitting next to her. She fumbles around until I realize she is trying to grab my hand, so I give it to her. I try to make her a soldier but fail, because this is the house where I grew up, not the desert; the house where I came into my body, my face; where I snuck skinny boys into my room and learned the human landscape. I can’t imagine my mother as government issue in this house. So I just hold her hand. I hear her sigh.

“Am I hideous?” she asks.

“I’ll know tomorrow when they take off the bandages,” I say. She laughs, or tries to.

Thunder rolls its way through our small canyon out back. Lightning fills the windows with its blue light and then we are in darkness.

“Damn,” I say.

“What is it?”

I realize she can’t see our darkness, so I say, “Nothing,” and then continue to sit with her, holding her hand, watching the lightning make our oak trees into wizened monsters. We sit close, and I can feel her breathing. I close my eyes and feel her put her arm around my waist, pulling me deeper into her stomach. We were never the embracing kind, so it’s a little awkward at first, but then I just relax into her.

“You smell good, Fair.”

“I took a shower,’” I say.

She rubs my arms, up and down like she’s trying to make me warm.

“You’re all muscle,” she says. “How did your body get so strong?” She sounds almost childlike now.

“Army’ll do that to you,” I answer, thinking of the thousands of hours I’ve spent sweating and kneading and pushing my body into its current shape. But my mother has never been too interested in what my body could do. I’ve stopped working out since the attack, and a thin layer of flesh has formed over my muscles. I’ve gone up a cup size.  Though I’m hardly voluptuous, I like it.

“Fair?”

“Yes?”

“May I touch it?”

“What?”

“Your…your leg.”

I hesitate. I don’t really want her to touch it.

“Ma…”

“Honey, let mama,” she says. “There now. Let mama. Let mama.”

She’s holding me and beneath the strange antiseptic smell, I smell her skin. That mother smell that takes me back to the start before things became complicated. I untangle myself from her arms and start to unbuckle the prosthesis. After I remove it, I brush off my stump, which is sticky with sweat. I take her hand and place it on my knee so she can feel her way down. She moves her fingers over my kneecap. And then she is cupping it in her palm, trying to smooth the ruffled skin. I close my eyes.

“My Fair. My dear. My Fair,” she repeats, her hand still on my stump, and I feel a wrench move around my heart. I open my eyes, but I can’t see my leg in the dark. I can hear her crying.

“Ma, you can’t get your bandage wet,” I whisper.

“Lie down with me. Here. Lie down with mama,” she eases my shoulders down horizontally so that I’m lying beside her.

I lie down next to her, and she pulls me close.

“I’ve forgotten what another body feels like,” she says.

“I’ll take care of you, ma,” I say.

“Honey, I know. I know you will. Aren’t we a pair of aces.” She laughs weakly. “You’re a good girl, Fair.”

Good. Just. Adequate. I am happy to be these things other than beautiful. We lay silently for several minutes. Slowly, my eyes adjust to the dark. I can see the outline of the hydrangea on the porch. I know under the bandage, my mother’s face is turning itself inside out, pus and blood finding their way beyond her skin. I hold onto this image of her soldered face. The sight of her blood brings fear, then a sudden tenderness. Like I do for my wounded friends, I pray for her to get her face back so that she might recognize herself.  She squeezes my hand, and I feel hers, hot with the blood it contains; whole. I am grateful for the touching, the ritual in it. The laying of hands. The blessing of two bodies meeting in quietude.

Even before the Army, I pursued a messy, physical life, wrapping myself up in men who didn’t bathe or whose tattoos threatened to rub off on my skin. We dirtied ourselves together, lay in our filth, fucked in ways that made love seem something clean and dry and distant. I lived a life in sullied sheets and torn jeans, but always, I could take a hot shower and emerge alone with my cheekbones, reminding me of decency and balance and beauty. Then I would go home to my mom, or later, when I lived on my own before joining up, go back to my small loft, which was Japanese in its minimalist cleanliness. I could retreat into my nothing space and lay naked on my crisp white sheets, running my hands from my toes, over my ridgepole shins to my thighs, then rest my hands on my knobby  hips. In this way, I dangled myself over the precipice — I faced down unsightliness and retreated unscathed. I loved unbeautiful men, felt that they were somehow closer to the reality of things than me. I think ugliness was one of the primary reasons that I joined the military. It promised unending fields of rough-faced men with bodies they’d beaten into submission. I knew I would have to beat my feminine body, too, iron out the curves that marked me soft and undisciplined. When I was discharged, I had a cruel stomach and dictatorial biceps, my changed body telegraphing its ability to snuff out life. Only my leg betrayed vulnerability.

When I left Unit 57 after six months of physical and psycho-therapy, I wasn’t prepared for the strain of the unspoken deadline. Leaving the hospital meant, unofficially, that the state was done with me. That now I had to make my way in the world without the help of nurses and aides, not that they had been around that much when I got moved to “outpatient” status. Budget cuts, I’d heard. Walter Reed was due to be shut down in 2010, but sometimes it felt like it had already been closed. Like we were living in a ghost town. Once I became an “outpatient,” I lived in a building across the street from the hospital. Occasionally, caseworkers would come by to check on us, but we were essentially on our own. We were stuck in a purgatory bulging with the limbless.

On my last day there, standing awkwardly in front of the sliding glass doors, waiting for Helen to pull the rental car around, I felt the familiar, cloistered hospital world falling away rapidly. I felt freakishly disproportionate. Clyde, my physical therapist, told me that when you lose a leg, you have to learn to walk all over again. You become balanceless as a baby. As my left side, I felt my face slowly following, my left cheek slouching. I would ask Clyde if he saw the tick, and he told me that those physical twitches, those feelings of absence and presence, were a normal part of recovery. We heard the word “recovery” a lot in the hospital. I often wondered what exactly we were trying to recover, but no one would say. I had a recurring dream that I was the leader of a search and rescue mission at sea, and I would plummet to the bottom of the ocean, bubbles forming a tower over my descending head. At the sea floor, I would find my leg, tangled in a plume of seaweed, green with the phosphorescence of drowned plant life.

On the flight home from Washington, my mother and I didn’t talk. She flipped through Vogue, and I read “The Stranger”. It was the same copy Jed had read and sand would occasionally slip out when I turned the pages.

My first morning home, I awoke to a ripped-out magazine page taped to my door. It was from Vogue — a woman in a green jersey knit sheath with a peacock feather in her hair. One of my mom’s old tricks. She’d put up photos she found particularly captivating and talk about the model’s “air of mystery,” her intelligent mouth and clean posture. I took the page down, balled it up and threw it in the trash. That night at dinner, my mother spoke about a charity ball she would attend.

“I just don’t know if I should wear the navy taffeta or the lavender crinoline,” she said.

“I’m not sure, Ma. What makes you feel the best?” I asked.

We didn’t discuss my leg. I felt I had failed her in some way, and now the only way she could function was to avoid discussing it altogether. At the time, I accepted it. I wasn’t ready for depth. I wanted to float, to skim, and by the time I was ready, her indifference was habitual and I’d become immune.

After that first dinner back, I went up to my bedroom. It was on the second floor, so I leveraged my way upstairs on crutches, which took a quarter of an hour. I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep until I’d concocted a beauty recovery plan. I had to find a way to restore myself — a way to take that hot shower and clean off the crust of my experience again. I had to get clean again. Clean, even and symmetrical. As I fell asleep, I determined I would learn the name of every Texas wildflower. I would learn the constellations, too, and be able to point them out to people, to future loves. I couldn’t be lazy anymore, couldn’t just win men on the promise of waking to loveliness every morning. I would let the wildflowers bloom in my ruined body.

After the surgery, I can’t tell just how smashed up my mother’s face is because the doctor has her wrapped up, mummified in white gauze. Only her mouth and nose poke through, upper lip inflated like a little sofa for her nose to sit on. I half expect the doctor to bring in a hook and pull her brain out through that strange, isolated nose, tell me to hand over my gold bracelet to add to her tomb’s treasure horde. But instead he says:

“I took two inches of skin out of her chin and tweaked her eyelids a bit.”

He smiles, inviting me to complement him on a job well done. Because I’ve recently made up my mind to be less slavishly decorous when dealing with authority figures, I return his smile with a nod.

I sit across from my mother, whose feet are bundled in dirty socks and tucked into gold ballet flats. This is my mom. Still vain enough to wear ballet flats to surgery. I’ve always attributed her vanity to the fact that her name is Helen. For a woman born poor in El Paso, that’s a lot to live up to. I suppose that, given the name, this surgery was inevitable. I am suddenly thankful that my name can also mean just. Even adequate seems a better destiny than beautiful.

“Mom?” I say.

She doesn’t respond, her breathing heavy and wet. She sounds like Jed did, trying to get breath past his pulped tongue; like he was eating really messy spaghetti. I am seized by the desire to find one of those suction devices that dentists use to suck out all the impeding saliva. The nurse comes in to check on us. I’m feeling uncharitable.

“So,” I say, peering at her nametag, “Brandi. Will my mother suffer from phantom chin syndrome?”

I’ve worn shorts on purpose, and I know she’s seen my leg. I ache to make her uncomfortable. My mother’s rattling continues loudly. Brandi gives me a sidelong look as she checks the bandages. She is quick but not rough. She reminds me of the drill team girls I used to know in high school. The Raiderettes. To make the team, your name had to end in “i” or “ie” or “y.” They danced at pep rallies before football games, neatly choreographed moves that suggested an ability to direct and contain the body. It was strangely appealing, dance as science rather than art, the girls moving like falling dominoes. They called each other “sweetie” and “sweetheart,” and then they would secretly stab and shred each other, whispering in the hallways. That was when I came to hate “sweet” and “neat.” False premises.  Human bodies, and humans, are unruly. And nothing is ever arranged.

Even before Brandi can respond, I know she will say something that suggests her belief in beauty’s preeminence, because she is lovely. Younger than me, possessed of the common prettiness you see in clothing catalog models — her eyes suitably wide-spaced, her ears and nose small and seemly. Already, I know she believes in what she does, because she cannot imagine a life devoid of prettiness. So she enables other fading beauties to clutch and cling to the faintest suggestion of bedroom eyes; the hint of a Nefertitian profile beneath the cruel sag. She probably sees herself as some sort of charity worker.

“I see this as an act of self-preservation. Your mother has chosen to look as young as she feels,” Brandi says.

I am restless, so I reach for a cigarette.

“There’s no smoking in here, Miss Deacon.”

“I prefer Miz,” I say, buzzing out the Z extra long.

“Well, Ms. Deacon. You shouldn’t smoke around your mother for at least two weeks. Slows the healing process.”

She’s unflappable, and people who cannot be flapped really don’t interest me. I come from a family of amateur thespians, hysteria and hyper-sensitivity passed down from generation to generation like china. My father left us in a flurry of raised voices and arms, a balletic rage, slamming the door so hard that the screen fell off its hinges. We Deacons consider unflappables to be emotionally unwell. Only after I joined the military did I learn the value of the straight face, the still hand. I take the mummy that is my mother by the elbow and walk slowly to the car. My balance is almost completely restored now and I barely limp.

Brad’s gone, and I hear my mother slide out of bed, her raw silk duvet rustling softly.

“Fair? Are you getting ready?” she calls.

“I’m up,” I say, clutching the side of the bed as I strap on my prosthesis.

As we drive toward town, I see that it is a morning of smashed things. A toad, freshly squelched, guts like a broken watermelon spread over the pavement, all green skin and pink flesh. A dead cat in the middle of the highway, its ringed tail flattened by long-gone tires. Helen and I are on our way to the hospital, and I hope she doesn’t see the cat sashimi in the turn lane. It wouldn’t be pleasant to be reminded of the body’s limitations so soon before surgery. On the car radio, the announcer says that according to a new study 650,000 Iraqis have died since the start of fighting, according to a new study. So Iraq makes number four on the morning’s list, a whole country splattered on our windshield.  Soon to complete this litany of ruined things: my mother’s face. At that moment, I think of Maurice and his face like meatloaf as he lay dying. I wonder how many plastic surgeons it takes to undo the ugliness inflicted on the soldiers in Walter Reed. I am suddenly angry at Dr. Vincent, the plastic surgeon my mother is going to see, for not being overseas, helping the teenagers who have unwillingly parted ways with their features as they knew them; for instead being here, in Texas, in an office done up in faux Versailles grandiosity, peddling vanity.

The March rains have come, and I know they will wash away the debris of all these broken things. Although my mother’s face and Iraq pose bigger problems than can be solved by thunderstorms. The rain builds until it sounds like hail against the car, obliterating the radio, filling the air between us. I haven’t spoken to my mother since last night, when she announced her intentions to have a facelift. She’d been planning it for months but failed to inform me because she said she didn’t think she would be imposing since I never leave the house.

“I just think it’s too good a value to pass up,” she shouts over the rain on the windshield, reasoning against my silence.

“Ma, fuck value. It’s your face,” I say.

Saying fuck feels good. I’m glad I broke my silence for the word’s gratifying consonance; a consonance we relied on in the desert. We lived in curses, their clip and crack quick, severe, like automatic weaponry. Pop! Shit! Crunch! Fuck!

“Honey, don’t be silly. It hasn’t been my face for at least ten years. All my features have melted away. Don’t you miss my chin? Besides, I’m starting to look a little like a drag queen.”

I wonder why I feel so possessive of her face. A face I learned in one day, one moment, really, after opening my eyes for the first time; a face that peered over crib’s edge until it became milk and warmth and softness. To stop the natural progression of that face seems criminal, censorial.

“Besides, I hear it’s more like a pedicure now. Isn’t science wonderful?” she says.

I think of the forty titanium screws holding my left femur together. My “good” leg. My remaining leg. Thanks to science, I’m alive, but most days, I feel like Frankenstein’s monster. Living at home since my injury, I have realized that my mom has somehow sidestepped ugliness all her life. Like many middle class suburban people, she lives in a place where the body’s integrity is rarely compromised. When it is, it happens slowly, privately. So different from the developing world, where maiming, killing, and decay are practically street theater; where a house collapsing, or a bomb, or a riot can bring carnage straight into the living room. The intact, medically-maintained body is an assumption here, and so it becomes a matter of buffing and waxing and painting and trimming. Luxuries of development — like formal gardens. It’s been hard for me to adjust to this attitude, after Iraq. Where life is a scramble and a heartbeat makes you the big winner. I wonder if Helen is ready for the cruelty that ensues when the body is compromised; because it’s the same whether you’re cutting to remove excess skin or a leg. The blood, the pus. Scar tissue. Bruising. By any account, thoroughly unpretty.

“Have you even researched this guy at all? Dr. Vincent?” I ask.

“Well, his mother-in-law is in my bridge group, and she just raves…”

“Oh Jesus, Ma. Are you kidding me?”

“Fair, come on. He has his degree. I’ve seen it right there on the wall of the office. Plus, I like his face. He’s handsome,” she says.

She laughs, but her timing is off. I have read about women dying from botched plastic surgery, and here is my mother, entrusting herself to some guy because she has a crush on him. She reaches over the console and puts her hand on my thigh. At that moment, I catch the scent of her fear.

I turn left at the gas station, up into the refined strip mall where she will have her operation. I have finally realized why she can never talk to me about my leg. To acknowledge it would somehow destroy her illusion that we are the blessed, the beautiful. Only her reflection has the power to make her second-guess her blessedness, and it must have been doing just that recently. It must have revealed her chin for what it is, the repository of a life’s expressions, weighing on her jaw. Ugliness has always terrified and fascinated her, and she’s probably been watching it approach from deep in the mirror for years. When I was a child, she referred to the unpretty girl I played with as unfortunate. As if it was not just a matter of aesthetics but one of fortune. And now she is finally willing to bring ugliness into her life, if only briefly, as she strives to reverse the age-induced depleting of her own substantial fortunes.

“Fair, dear,” she says, “It will still be my face when I come out.

She doesn’t sound very sure. I sense her embarrassment. For a natural beauty to stoop to this most unnatural thing. I loosen my grip on the steering wheel slightly. Quickly, I glance at her. She has gathered the hem of her blouse and folded it into triangular edges, which she rubs furiously. It’s what she does when she’s nervous.

The doctor’s brochure, which she showed to me last night, proclaimed “Roll back the decades with Dr. V!” I feel like she’s angling to erase the nineties, when two of her three divorces transpired and Grams died on New Year’s Eve, 1999, going out in a grand finale of diabetic fireworks: lost limbs, milky eyes.

But if she loses that decade, she’ll lose the night I lost my virginity. She told me it aged her three years cold.  She would also lose the creases from all the arguments we had, which tic-tac-toed nearly all of my teenage years. It was an angry time, but with the anger came the pure exhaustion of our tears, the joy of our spent fury, when we would find our way back to each other, take one another by the shoulder and say, “Love.” The face as palimpsest, where we write and rewrite but never entirely erase. And she is prepared to lose all that.

We pull into the parking lot in front of Dr. Vincent’s practice. I cannot call him Dr. V, like some funhouse doctor or sports commentator. Not when he’s going to etherize and slice open my mother and suck out her physical memories. I fold my arms up against the steering wheel, rest my chin on top.

“I’ll see you in three hours, OK, Fair?” she says.

“OK,” I say, watching her as she darts through the rain-tinged, bullion-colored morning. “Tell him not to screw it up.”

She’s subsumed into the fluorescent light of the hospital.

Now that I’m home, I’ve picked up with a handful of high school friends like Brad. They still linger around the lake, buzzing like mosquitoes over a still pond. They know it’s a stagnant sort of life, working as waiters or tending bar, getting high before their shifts so that the glow from the spread of bottles behind the bar yields whatever meager magic to their empty, stoned eyes. “It’s like Christmas,” Brad said last night. “All those blues and golds and oranges and greens.” They tuck the memory of those illuminated bottles into their back pockets to help them get out of bed in the morning. Every night, with help from a spliff and some single malt, the bottles shine newly seen, my friends moving inside the restaurants like post-Lapsarian Eves and Adams. When Brad told me about the bottles that was when I asked him to sleep with me. I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. I’d had three whiskey sours and my lids were heavy and my stomach warm, and I could imagine it was Christmas and that Brad wanted me.

Helen, my mother, snores on in the next room. She hasn’t shared her bed with anyone since her third divorce was finalized a few years ago. She claims it’s because her face looks like a balloon that’s slowly losing its air.

“Nobody flirts with me like they used to,” she complains.

She never asks me why I don’t go on dates anymore. The smell of shit from outside settles in my hair. Brad’s cum crusts on my thigh. I’m starting in on my second year back in my childhood bed, and I can practically feel the pollen from the raging trees outside settle on my face. I hope it won’t be the last time that Brad can look past my nubbin of a calf and see the face he wanted so much when we were in high school. I must have denied him a thousand times back then, rebuffings for which I’m now grateful because my sexual life depends on the desire that the delayed gratification has swelled in him. When he came, I could feel the ten years flowing through us, his post-coital euphoria almost enough to make me forget my stump. I was ready to let him take whatever he needed, didn’t even complain that he hadn’t helped me climax. I hid my half-leg under the comforter and let him collapse on top of me, bracing my bones for his 225 pounds, holding him up with a taut stomach and veined forehead until I was entirely out of breath and had to roll him off me. Since the bomb, I seek out pain from unlikely places.

Before he ran out the door he said, “You’re sweet, Fair.” It’s a word I’ve always despised. So innocuous and soft. In the Army, I never heard anyone use it. We pulled and ran and pushed and fired and fought “sweet” far the fuck away. It’s probably why I liked the Army so much. It was a place where a girl, even a pretty one, could be mean and not apologize.

I touch the soft mound of hair where my legs are splayed out, my hips still open. Brad is also the first man I’ve slept with who didn’t tell me I was beautiful. Even the captain with a face like anger itself complimented me, after he snuck in my bunk and fucked me, just like he’d promised me the day before — mercilessly, until I cried. Then he had leaned in, kissed the spot above my left eyebrow, and said: “You’re fucking beautiful, you little cunt.” I knew it was a game, the way he talked to me; that it had something to do with the eighteen-year-old PFC he’d lost the week before; that it had to do with needing to create ugliness in spite of his desire for me, which had been palpable for weeks and had our whole company on edge. I knew my fellow soldiers were spending themselves in the shower every night, in anticipation of what I would do with the captain. We were a unit. We did everything collectively, even fuck, I suppose.

“Fair,” the captain had whispered the morning before he came to me. “Do you know the Egyptian fable about Naela?”

“No,” I’d said.

“She was the beautiful wife of the king of Egypt. Then the king was killed because his successor knew the king’s wife was a legendary beauty and wanted her for himself. Do you know what Naela did after she was forced to become the concubine of her husband’s murderer?”

“No,” I’d said.

“She knocked out every single one of her teeth with a brick, leaving her with a ragged smile that disgusted the man. He cast her out into the street. But at least she didn’t have to sleep with the motherfucker,” he’d said, laughing.

“So?” I’d said.

He’d leaned in really close, so that I could smell the Listerine on his breath. For all his toughness, he was always meticulously groomed. He’d once said it’s what kept him from becoming a complete animal — the civilizing power of Listerine and floss. I learned that trick from him and never failed to brush my hair before putting on my helmet.

“So what I’m saying, Fair,” he said, “is that when you get taken hostage by those goat fuckers and they’re lining up to rape you into tomorrow, you’re going to take a rock and knock your lousy teeth out.”

He took some dry cereal from the bin above the kitchen sink, grabbed a spoon, and walked away. I knew he wanted to use my face for escape. That’s the problem with tough guys. They give themselves away so easily and they are never aware they’re doing it. I made up my mind to let him take me, mostly because I knew he would help me escape. It would be a fair trade, which is more than could be said for most transactions in Iraq. Two days before, my friend Maurice lost the right side of his body, and later his life, when an RPG hit his Hummer. As far as I knew, all he’d gotten in return was a well-folded flag. When he was attacked, I rationalized that his uneven features and porcine eyes had made the strike possible, if not invited it outright. That was how I was raised. Beauty was not only my namesake and my birthright, but also, I believed it could lift me up above the plain and protect me. When I enlisted, when my mother and neighbors and friends told me I was being foolhardy, I felt an alien calm. My beauty was unimpeachable. I had no doubt it would bear me up and sail me over the sweating combatants.

It’s summer. Jed is saying something. It travels slowly through the air, which is so thick you could slice it up and have it for breakfast. I can almost see the words undulating through the atmosphere, a mirage of letters. “It’s so hot I could kill an Arab.” That’s what comes out, when the letters piece themselves back together and find their way to my ear. He can’t stop saying that, “It’s so hot I could kill an Arab.” He says it has to do with Albert Camus.

A few weeks ago, a package arrived at the barracks from a widower in Seattle. We broke it open eagerly and “The Stranger” fell out, unceremoniously, next to some condoms, three packs of sugarless gum, and some banana-flavored energy gel which tastes like banana toothpaste. Jed says that the Army website lists it under the heading, “Things to Put in Care Packages,” and he’s trying to figure out a way to hack the system so he can take the gel off. He puked up all the brown yellow guck after eating twenty-two packets trying to stay awake one night on patrol.

Jed took “The Stranger” and read it on a slow afternoon. He says he isn’t sure if the widower has a sick sense of humor or is just stupid. Apparently the main character kills an Arab for no reason, and feels no remorse, and Jed doesn’t understand why the man acted as he did, especially because he had a beautiful girlfriend and got to swim in the Mediterranean every day. I ask Jed, ‘If there were sense to the world, why would you have been born so damn ugly?’

This conversation happens on our way through a sticky area of Baghdad. It’s called “sticky” because when blood dries, it leaves a residue behind that would be sticky, if you ever touched it. I’ve only ever touched blood when it’s still wet. Jed’s talking to me, and it feels like we’re the only people around. But, before his words can reach me, I hear a sharp popping sound and a crunch, both of which make it to me faster than his words. And then the humidity and the quiet are gone, replaced by flames and a noise that takes up all of the night’s spaces. I’m on my back and my face is hot with fire and my leg is burning, and even my body is making sounds, sending up a shriek like a missile coming home, and I realize that it’s me shrieking, it’s my mouth. Near me, Jed’s mouth hangs open, and there’s blood where his tongue should be.

*   *   *

Now it is spring, and there’s the wet scent of new growth — buds and leaves sprouting. I am no longer in the desert. I am in the Texas Hill Country, where I was born Fair Mae Deacon, and where Ma and Dad were born, too. I am getting used to seasons again. I like to drive and look at the wildflowers along the roadside. I appreciate that nature is so honest in its rituals, its beauty existing for the express purpose of getting laid, or pollinated, or whatever.

As I lay in bed, the green smell of budding plants drifts in through my screened window, along with the unmistakable smell of fertilizer, newly laid in the flower beds of the neighboring house. Yesterday, I watched the gardeners lay the manure out in mounds resembling coffee grounds before they procured an extension cord, plugged in a small microwave, and nuked their lunches right there on the front lawn. The smell of tamales mingled with the fecal stench for a moment, rancid but familiar. While the workers ate, they watched me. Not as gardeners or construction men or other laborers used to watch me. Instead, they eyed my prosthetic leg with their eyebrows raised.

Rolling over, I stare at Brad’s face. His eyes look puffy, probably from the drinking we did last night. I throw his resting arm to the side and nestle up in his armpit, which smells of bourbon and Old Spice. His pores are speaking to me and I want to fuck him. He is the first man I’ve slept with since getting out of Reed more than a year ago. Unit 57. The amputee unit. Which really is something of a misnomer, because I don’t think you can technically amputate a face, yet some of the soldiers there had all their limbs, tree-trunk strong, but were missing their faces. I used to wonder if their wives ever tried to kiss them anymore, since the teeth still told you where the lips should have been. I was one of the best cases in Reed since my brain was undamaged. The doctors put me there because they thought I was dumb, mute, and legless. After the attack, I didn’t talk for two weeks. When I finally opened my mouth and asked a nurse for a Coke, she looked disappointed.

One time, I jerked off one of the single guys in the unit. He was crying out of his blind eyes when I wheeled past his door, and I knew he had no girlfriend to come and remind him of his stallion days. So I just spit on my hand, took hold of him, very businesslike, and finished him off. When I turned to leave, he’d stopped crying and asked me my name. I said, “It’s Fair.” He laughed and said, “You’ve been a sight more than fair, I’d say.” I was about to correct him and say that it was Fair as in beautiful, not Fair as in just, but then I let it go. With my mottled stump quivering over the edge of the wheelchair, beauty seemed an impossible concern. Maybe naming your daughter Fair is like naming your dog Bumper.

“Hey,” I say, jolting myself back to the present. “Time to scoot, Bradley.”

I grab his chin and pull it side to side.

“Erghh?” he says.

“Up, up and away, Bradley.” I try rolling him toward the edge of the bed, but he’s a substantial guy; a former offensive lineman whose high school nickname was “the Continent.” With a tectonic shift, he is out of my bed and out the door. There wasn’t much to it, our night together. Not by my old standards of thrill and danger and epic, and sometimes even love. But he was the first man to hold me in my new form. And how can a person be expected to go two springs without laying deep into someone else? There were nights I would wake up shivering with pleasure after dreaming of a male arm slung around my shoulders, my waist: the animal smell, the power present in that most casual gesture of possession. And I would cry at the realization that there was no such arm, and I would wrap my arms around my stomach, hugging myself so that my flesh wouldn’t grow completely unaccustomed.

Publishers Weekly calls it a “gripping, well-crafted debut tracks the awakening of a Saudi Arabian family to the dangers that lurk within.”

Scott Spencer says that Parssinen “uses her first-hand knowledge of the cross-roads where U.S. and Saudi Arabian economic and political interests intersect, and sometimes collide, and she directs the human and historical traffic with a maestro’s sense of pace, and a true storyteller’s sense of consequence.”

She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote fellowship, a Teaching and Writing fellowship, and was the student editor for the Iowa Short Fiction contest. After finishing the program, she received a Michener-Copernicus award for the “The Ruins of Us.”

Keija lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she is the director of the Quarry Heights Writers’ Workshop, a community for Columbia’s creative writers.

Visit her online at www.keijaparssinen.com.

Oh it was all too much for them.  Dinner beforehand — Marv said let’s pick a place we know from home, the Olive Garden, T.G.I.Friday’s, but Mim said no, a new place, anyplace, please — and now a show, one with old-fashioned costumes and a spotlight that followed the leading man around the stage while in the background his castmates froze, still as trees, feigning invisibility, until the song was over.  Think they get stiff up there? Marv whispered to Mim, and she knuckled his leg and held one angry finger to her lips.  I’m just saying, Marv whispered again.

It was too much — too much.  Mim had a feeling inside her like a train approaching.  She was seventy last week.  She had seen plays before, but she had never seen anything like this.  Never up close.  The theater was huge, a palace, with little white lights lining the aisles and a ceiling that was painted like the sky.  She became very still, and a tear fell down her cheek when the leading lady sang her final song.  She’ll die, she’ll die, thought Mim, without breathing; she’s going to die!  Sure enough, one scene later, dead on the ground.  And so pretty, too — wearing a blue dress that came to her ankles, with little black shoes beneath. The skirt swung heavily when she danced and formed a pool about her when she fell to the floor in her final scene.  Mim had made a dress like that for Sherry once when Sherry was a girl, six years old, wanting a Cinderella costume for Halloween.  Sherry would look lovely onstage too, thought Mim, though she was never much of a singer.  The leading lady came out with everyone else afterward and bowed twice, and twice again. Then the curtain parted in the middle and the lady walked out, alone this time, not scared at all, and received a bouquet from a man who climbed up the stairs at the side of the stage.  Red roses.  Two dozen or more.  She’s alive!  It’s a miracle! said Marv.  He was always joking, but this time it didn’t matter how loud he was, because everyone around them was clapping.  Oh Marv, said Mim.

*   *   *

In her purse was a camera for taking pictures of Sherry and Sherry’s new boyfriend — maybe even Sherry’s apartment, if she invited them — along with a tube of lipstick that Mim was going to apply in the bathroom on their way out.  Now don’t get too excited, said Marv; you always get too excited.  Also a change purse, and a wallet, and a small pack of tissues, and her reading glasses and a comb.  And something called Mr. Cheap’s Guide to New York, which Marv had insisted on getting back in Utah, and a prepaid, disposable cell phone — she had not known such things existed — that they would share to keep in touch with Sherry, who had said that visiting New York without a cell phone would be a recipe for disaster.  But so far New York had been better than she could have expected.  Only eight hours since they had landed at the airport, only six since they had checked into their hotel, and already they had befriended the young couple staying in the room next to theirs on the way down in the elevator, and a taxi driver who told them that the best place to go for cheap shopping was Canal Street.  Mim wanted sunglasses and a scarf, and Marv wanted a wallet he could fit all his cards in — he joined organizations compulsively; the library, the AARP, AAA, USAA — along with stamps and the photos he had of Sherry at ages four, ten and seventeen.  Where’s Canal Street? Mim had asked Sherry, when they called her earlier from their hotel phone.  Sherry had said she would show them on a map.

They were shuffling out of the theater now, one foot in front of the other.  Two thin young women pushed past her on the right, saying silly things to each other breathlessly.  Because, because, said one, you love him!  And the other nearly fell apart laughing.

This was New York.

Last week, out to dinner on Mim’s birthday, Marv had presented her with two plane tickets in a Hallmark card that said: To My Loving Wife. Just for the weekend, he said, because did she know how expensive hotels in New York were?

She had phoned Sherry when they got home and asked her if she knew what her father had done.  Yes, said Sherry, and my present to you guys is tickets to a Broadway show.

With you? asked Mim.  Could you come too?

Sherry had said she wished she could, but work was killing her, and Fridays were hard.  She said they could all meet up afterward and go out together.  She’d show them the city on Saturday and Sunday.  Think about what you guys want to do, she said.

Maybe your new friend can come out with us, said Mim.  After the show on Friday.

He might, Sherry had said.  But let me double-check.

Mim had spent the week packing and repacking.  She had called Sherry twice more than was necessary: once to ask about the weather, and once to ask about what people wore to Broadway shows.

*   *   *

Outside the theater Mim was surprised by how light it was, still, at eleven o’clock.  There were men selling things everywhere.  A policeman on a horse.  A man on a bicycle with a little carriage behind it that could fit two people comfortably.  Look, Marv! she said, and he said, A bicycle built for three! Then he was bumped forcefully by a man who walked past them in a rage, shouting about the teachers he had had as a boy, how they picked on him, how they all called him names.  Well, said Marv, excuse me. He rubbed his shoulder where the man had made contact.  He would sulk for a while; he was as unforgiving as a child.  Give me that phone, Marv, said Mim.  It was eleven o’clock  already, and time to call Sherry.

It was so loud in Times Square that she couldn’t even tell if the phone was ringing.  She couldn’t hear anything on the other end, though she plugged one ear and dove through the crowd for a nook in the building behind her, so she could stand facing it.  Sherry? she said, but then from behind her she heard Marv cry, There she is! and she spun around to look.  There she was, Sherry, walking toward them with her arms folded and her shoulders up by her ears, looking down at the ground and then, every tenth step or so, up at them; weaving in and out of the crowd gracefully, shorter than average but noticeable, striking, a real stand-out.  There she is! Marv said again.

She had a short haircut now, and she was wearing her after-work clothes, flats and jeans and a T-shirt with writing on it.  As she got closer Mim saw it said Grandview Elementary, and she took a deep breath in happiness — it was the school Sherry had gone to as a child in Provo.  She had kept it all these years.  Who could have known she would?  She was a mystery to Mim, sly as a doe since early childhood, all of her actions furtive and therefore special and dear.

Marv was hugging her hard, his great arms pinning both of hers to her side.  Hi, sweetheart! he said.  She’s too skinny, he said, to Mim.  Isn’t she too skinny?

Part Two

Sherry told them that her new boyfriend was going to meet them at the Carnegie Deli.  Mim was delighted; everything was going right.  For a piece of late-night pie! she said, and Sherry said, Cheesecake.  Not pie.

Marv said, Boyfriend? Boyfriend? I should have brought my shotgun!, which wasn’t right, didn’t make sense, but Mim understood that he had been waiting to say it for years.

They had never before met a boyfriend of Sherry’s.  Her senior year of high school there was a boy who called a great deal, and once, when they were on campus at BYU, a very eager young man had walked quickly toward Sherry, and had introduced himself to them as if he thought they would know his name.  Sherry had been unkind to him, had nearly pushed him away.

But Sherry was older now: twenty-seven.  It was different.  They were in New York; she had invited them there.  She was inviting them to meet a special friend of hers.  It meant something.  This, and the warm air, and the crush of people around her made Mim feel heady and alive, though it was very late for them.  Normally they were asleep by ten, but she didn’t care. The lights in Times Square made it look like mid-afternoon; she was ready for anything.  The train inside her whistled.  She felt younger and stronger than she had in years.  She felt thrilling and thrilled.  A little shiver of joy ran up her when she caught the eye of a man on the street.  She wondered why she had waited so long in life to do any real traveling; imagined going other places, too — to Europe.  She had ideas about Paris and Rome.  She was seventy a week ago.  Seventy years, most of them spent in one small city.  A waste, a waste.

The whole of New York seemed to wrap itself tightly around her, the buildings that loomed above her to beam down upon her.  Everything in the world was swollen.  Did Marv feel it?  Sherry did, she felt sure — Sherry had always.  So this is what’s been keeping her here, thought Mim, and forgave her spontaneously for an offense she had never before allowed herself to register.

Sherry had lived here for five years, but she’d always come home at Christmas except this past one, spending it instead with a friend in Connecticut, saying she was too poor to afford the airfare.  But we’ll pay for it, honey! Mim had told her on the phone.  Of course we’ll pay for it! Sherry had declined the offer, saying she’d already told her friend’s parents that she’d be there, and besides, she was so busy with work that she wouldn’t be much fun.

She was walking ahead of Mim now, and Marv was on her heel, saying things to her, taking a running step every few to catch up.  He looked silly, like a boy, and Mim noticed for the first time that he was favoring his right leg over his left.  He was exerting himself too much.  She would ask him about it later.  She allowed herself to drift back, just a little — she did not want to be lost — and looked up at the buildings above her, and imagined, inside them, older versions of Sherry.  The lit windows, the unlit ones — there were people who lived in those apartments.  People were doing things in the light and in the dark that excited Mim.  She felt feverish with joy.  Ahead of her, Marv and Sherry dodged a man wheeling a vendor’s cart full of roasted nuts.  Four different kinds, it said.  They had nothing like that at home, nobody selling things to you from carts.  Would Sherry live here all her life?  Probably, yes.  Probably she would never come back to Provo.

*   *   *

At the Carnegie Deli, waiters were shuttling meals around, quick and efficient as spiders.  On their trays were sandwiches that looked to Mim like food for the week, and those obscene pieces of cheesecake, sodden with cherries or liquid chocolate.  The room was long and bright, with a counter to the left and tables in the back.  Signed pictures of celebrities covered every inch of the wall.  Most of the tables were full, even at this time of night.  They stood near the door.  Where’s Howie, dear? asked Mim, and Sherry said, Not here yet.  Well, we’re just so excited to meet him, said Mim.  Aren’t we, Marv?

Sherry had said Howie worked late a lot at his job.  Mim couldn’t figure out what a psychologist would do after hours.  Does he see patients late at night? she’d asked, and Sherry had said no.  He’s just a hard worker, she’d said.  He thinks about things more than we do.

Mim tried to picture him: a tall young man with dark hair, wearing a suit and a tie — no, people didn’t wear suits anymore.  An oxford, maybe, and nice pants.  He would come in and shake both of their hands, Mim’s first — and then once they had their table she could ask him all about himself.  She was good at making friends; she always had been.  When he got there, he would like them, she felt sure.  It was important to her that he liked them.

Mim didn’t believe in psychology, but she was impressed when Sherry had told her what Howie did.  It was something she was able to pass along to the girls in her office the next day, a little piece of Sherry that she could present to them casually, at lunch.  Often she was jealous of them; most of them had daughters who called them multiple times a day, daughters whose weddings they planned as if they were their own, daughters who had daughters themselves, or daughters who came to the office after work to meet them for dinner.  One time Lolly Mather had invited Mim along, and Mim was shocked at the way they talked — about everything, about sex.  Lolly’s daughter Laura was Sherry’s age; they’d gone to school together.  How’s Sherry? she’d asked, and Mim said, She’s good; she’s in New York City.  Oh, said Laura.  New York City.

Mim did not often allow herself to drift into melancholy, but when she thought of Sherry — constantly, but especially when driving — she thought next of Sherry’s distressing distance from her, more than geographic, which had existed from the time she came to live with them at four years old.  She was their granddaughter, technically, the child of their boy Bailey, dead twenty-five years now.  But Mim had changed the sheets when Sherry wet her bed night after night, missing her mama.  She had put on Band-Aids, sewn costumes for school plays, loved her as if Sherry were her own child.  Better than that — better than she had ever loved Bailey, if she was telling herself the truth. Bailey moved out at sixteen and rarely spoke to them after that.  When he died it seemed like the dreadful fulfillment of some dark prophecy issued at his birth. With Bailey they were used to pain; it had occurred to Mim at the time that his destiny had simply been realized, that this was his final and vengeful blow to their hearts.  It was a comfort to her to think there was nothing they could have done for him.  Sometimes, when Sherry was growing up, she had reminded Mim so much of him that she became afraid, but then she had to reassure herself that Sherry was a nice girl, a good girl who had always done well at school and who still sent them thank-you notes for the care packages she received.  If she was private, it was fine; it was decent.  Yet there were times — the wild cries in the night when Sherry was eight or nine, the little things she hid from them that seemed so unimportant as to be comical — when Mim wondered whether Sherry had been damaged in some way by the ghosts of her father and mother.  She wished always to rescue Sherry from the time she had come to them, but Sherry had never wanted rescuing.  Mim told herself often, and sometimes aloud, that all she could do was love her.  She told Marv the same thing when he came to her hurt by some childish unintentional slight of Sherry’s.  He was ribbing her now, telling her she’d better eat two of those sandwiches going by or dinner was on her.  It’s on me anyway, Dad, said Sherry.  My treat.

The door opened behind them and a middle-aged man walked in.  He had a close-trimmed, graying beard and very blue eyes behind small gold-framed glasses, and he was carrying a folder.

Excuse me, Mim said, moving out of the way.

Well, maybe we should ask to be seated? asked Marv, turning to Sherry.

Hi, Howie, said Sherry, to the man in the door.

Marv took a step forward as if to shield her; Mim took a step back.

Hi, sweetheart, said this man, Howie, to Sherry, and then turned to Mim and said, You must be Sherry’s grandmother.  Maryanne Miller, said Mim.  She was shaken, and her hand faltered when she reached for his; no one had called her Sherry’s grandmother for years and years.  From the time Sherry was five, she was Mama; Marv was Daddy.

Marv Miller, said Marv.  He was very upright with his hands behind his back.

I’m Howie Plank, said the man. He smelled like cigarettes.  He was short.  Marv towered over him.  His skin was the deep brown of an outdoorsman.  His hair, the only boyish thing about him, was lighter than his beard, and tousled forward.  One tiny gold hoop was lodged in his left ear.  He wore a T-shirt, just like Sherry, and jeans that ended at his anklebone.  Below them, boat shoes with no socks.  He looked something like a pirate, thought Mim; a pirate or a sea captain.  He put an arm around Sherry’s waist and kissed her on the forehead like a child.

Well, said Sherry, I guess we should ask for a table!

Part Three

Mim felt breathless.  For a moment, she stood still in her spot by the door.  Howie and Sherry walked away from her, hand in hand behind the host; Marv followed.  Mim asked herself some questions: the first was this man’s age — to her he looked fifty, maybe older; the second was what he wanted with Sherry; the third was of Sherry herself, and how she could misjudge a situation so badly.  There were times, when Sherry was growing up, that Mim had suddenly asked herself: Who is this child?

Those things she had hidden things from them when she was small — physical things, little stones and shells she had saved over the years, and candy she took home from parties — had she thought they would be taken from her?  Mim had snooped; it was terrible, but she had.  She found Sherry’s treasures amidst her socks in the dresser, or in boxes under her bed.  Once, when Sherry was twelve or thirteen, Mim had found a journal between her mattress and box spring.  Sherry was at school, and Mim had opened it and read the first line — I am alone a lot — before slamming it shut, her pulse thumping in her neck.  She had put it neatly back in its place, and the next time she checked, it wasn’t there.

What did he want with her?  What had she told him about them?  They were sitting now, and she still hadn’t moved. Marv looked back over his shoulder at her questioningly.   She fumbled in her purse to look busy, and told herself to be kind and decent, to rekindle a certain generosity in herself.  She thought, Mim, give this man a chance.  Howie Plank.  There were worse things in the world than being middle-aged.  There were worse things in the world than being middle-aged and underdressed.

*   *   *

Howie ordered a roast beef sandwich, though it was almost midnight.  Mim and Marv decided to split a piece of cheesecake and each ordered a glass of milk. The waiter said, Milk with cheesecake?  Sherry asked for a half-sour pickle and a glass of ice water.  Sweetheart, are you sure? asked Mim. I already had dinner, said Sherry.  Well, so did we! said Marv, and patted his belly.  But that sure won’t stop us!  He wasn’t looking at Howie. Make it two pieces of cheesecake, said Mim to the waiter, and if you could please bring three forks.

My little bird, said Howie Plank, affectionately, and placed his heavy arm across Sherry’s shoulders.  Mim could think of nothing to say to him. He was gazing at Sherry as if he had won her at a fair.

So, said Howie, finally.  How was the show?  Long?  Boring?  He laughed.

I think they liked it, said Sherry.  Right, Dad?

Your mother did, said Marv.  And I did too, I guess, he admitted.

Maybe I’ve just seen it one too many times, said Howie.

Howie’s lived here all his life, said Sherry.  Her short haircut made her look boyish and even younger than twenty-seven.  She’s really just a girl, thought Mim, and had a sudden memory of Sherry at twelve years old, getting her braces on, crying and crying for days because she didn’t want them.  They hurt, she had said.  They hurt so bad.

Now Howie was holding her hand, and Mim felt her tongue becoming immobile and mute as a sponge.  This was unusual for her; she prided herself on her conversational skills.  She thought of herself as a person who loved making new friends.  She could talk to anyone.  Marv teased her about it: strangers on the bus, seatmates on airplanes.  She kept in regular contact with a nice woman she had met at an RV park in Arizona.  She was a people person; it was what others always said about her, anyway, and what she liked about herself.  If she admitted it, this aspect of her reputation was a particular vanity of hers.  But Howie Plank was a different sort of person.

Tell us about your work, she said at last, and Howie smiled knowingly.  Oh, boring, he said, and laughed.  I guess Sherry’s probably told you all about it.

You’re a psychiatrist? she asked.

Psychologist, Mom, said Sherry quickly.  She knew that.  She knew that.  But Howie was nodding already.  Common mistake, he said.  At least you didn’t call me an astrologer!

Sherry laughed.  She looked as if she wanted more from them, so Mim tried to think of a question.

What’s it like listening to people’s problems all day long?  Doesn’t it make you sad?

No, said Howie, thoughtfully.  It makes me — grateful.  It sure keeps things in perspective, anyway.

How nice, said Mim.  She was trying so hard to be herself that a small film of sweat had broken out on her upper lip.  Howie, that’s a really nice way to look at it.  Isn’t it, Marv?

Marv was contemplating the paper placemat.  He nodded, not looking at anyone.

Part Four

When the food came, Howie rubbed his hands together, looking at his monstrous sandwich, and said he had forgotten all about the Carnegie Deli until Sherry had suggested it.  It’s nice to have tourists in town, he said, because you get to see the best parts of New York all over again!  He picked up his knife and fork and held them upright at the sides of his plate, and then dug in with a vigor that surprised Mim.

That’s quite a sandwich, Howie, she said, and he nodded with his mouth full.

Sherry, said Marv, how’s the magazine?

Howie released a little exhalation through his nose and rolled his eyes.  Oh, jeez, he said.  Don’t get her started.

Mim was shocked.  She wished very much that Sherry would, in fact, get started.  The bits she got from Sherry about her job were minimal, though she asked her every Sunday evening when she called.  That Howie — that anyone—  would take for granted any part of Sherry’s life, would consider any aspect of it unworthy of discussion, infuriated her.  Sherry had never been forthcoming.  Anything she revealed was a gift to be treasured, and this was something Howie would know if he really cared about her.

Politics, politics, said Howie.  Sherry just has to learn to lay it on thicker.

What’s going on, Sherry? said Mim.  Is everything OK?

Yeah, said Sherry.  She bit into her half-sour pickle and said, I just don’t really want to talk about it right now.

*   *   *

Howie was done with half his sandwich before Mim had taken four bites of her cheesecake.  They talked about his childhood in New York, and Mim asked him, for some reason, whether they had school buses in Manhattan.  No, they have bus-buses in Manhattan! said Howie.  He winked, and told her yes, they had school buses too.  For the public school kids, he said.  He fiddled with his earring.  His left hand, Mim could tell, was resting on Sherry’s leg beneath the table.  She tried to keep her gaze at eye level. He was more than fifty, decided Mim.  Was he more than fifty?  There was no way to ask Sherry that.  There were many things about which she couldn’t ask Sherry: her job; her friends in New York — she had made the mistake, on the way to the Carnegie Deli, of inquiring after Sherry’s actress friend Carla. Sherry had said, We’re not really in touch anymore — her safety; her finances; and now Howie’s age.  Anything about Howie, Mim knew, she would have to extract from Howie himself.

Tell us about your family, she said at last, and Sherry looked at her sharply.  Throughout the meal, Mim had felt she was saying the wrong things, but she couldn’t stop herself, and she couldn’t tell how to fix it.

Well, said Howie, my youngest is twelve, and my oldest just turned seventeen.

Marv, who had been silent for most of the meal, put his fork down very gently on top of the cheesecake.

Or did you mean my parents?  asked Howie Plank.

Oh, said Mim, who was beginning to feel an unsettling trembling in the core of her, as if her breath had suddenly left her, Now, I don’t really know what I meant.

Sherry said, Howie has three children from a previous marriage.  Tomas is twelve, Peter Phillip is fourteen, and Alexandria is seventeen.

Do they — live here?  In New York City?  asked Mim.  She had given up trying to know what was right, or what she shouldn’t say.  A swarm of tourists had just entered the restaurant, happy and raucous and familiar to her, like old friends. Three older couples and what looked to be their grown children.  Stop it, one of them was saying, over and over, but she was shrieking with laughter. If they were standing next to her, Mim would certainly ask them where they were from.  She would ask them where they were staying, and for how long.

Tomas and Alexandria do, said Howie.  They live with me, actually, and go to school here, and visit their mother in Connecticut every other weekend.  Peter Phillip lives with his mother all the time.

Oh, said Mim.  Now why doesn’t he live with you, too?  She was a train; she was unstoppable and swift.

He has autism, said Howie, cheerfully.  I guess he just feels more comfortable with his mother.  He does better when he’s there.

A long and dreadful silence settled about them.  Howie made a funny little face at Sherry that they weren’t supposed to see.  Mim tried to picture Sherry as a mother of teenagers, one of them handicapped, wrong in some way.  Did they like her?  Were they kind to her?  And was Howie kind, all the time?  What did they talk about when they were alone?  The mystery of Sherry’s life seemed to unfurl itself before her, and for once she allowed herself to acknowledge the great expanse between them.  Every night, Sherry was doing things they weren’t supposed to know about.  Every day, Sherry went to work and spoke to friends they had never heard of.  Every day.  Everything was so strange and gray to her suddenly that she didn’t quite know what to do.

There was a great din in the place and she pretended to tune into it, for a moment, to obscure the fact that her words were failing her.  She prayed that Marv would say something, but instead he excused himself to go to the restroom. She watched him as he walked away, and noticed again that he was limping.  He was older than she was by five years. Probably it was just from sitting for too long.  Probably it was another of his maladies, like his cataracts, like the arthritis that had plagued his hands for years.  He had also been going deaf slowly for some time now; she had grown accustomed to raising her voice when she spoke to him.  Only at night, in bed, when the world around them was soundless and still, did she feel she could lower it again.  These were her favorite times: the whispering, the near-silence.

Part Five

Howie tried to pick up the bill when it came and Marv growled, Oh no, you don’t, and snatched it from him, literally, took it from his hands.

Daddy, said Sherry.

What? said Marv.  I’ve got it.

It’s been a pleasure, Marv. Thank you, said Howie Plank.

*   *   *

Outside, the four of them stood facing each other in front of the tall front windows of the Carnegie Deli.  It was one in the morning.  She realized suddenly that in Utah it was only eleven. Wrapped in a box in her hand was the second piece of cheesecake, which she and Marv had not come close to eating.

Is your place far from here, Sherry? asked Mim.  She shifted her weight from one leg to the other.  She was thinking about her camera, how there were no pictures on it yet.

It is, said Sherry, and looked at Howie.  He tipped his head.

Where is it? asked Marv, suddenly.

Oh, said Sherry.  It’s — on the Lower East Side.

The phrase was meaningless to them.  They did not know where they were, geographically; they knew their hotel was near Columbus Circle, and that the show had been in Times Square, but they did not know where Times Square was, nor how far they had strayed from it in coming here to eat.  The Lower East Side was a phrase like Aspen or The Poconos. Standing there in front of the Carnegie Deli, Mim felt very lost.  She wished for the first time to be home in Provo.  She felt the weight of her purse acutely, the weight of the guidebook and lipstick and camera in it.

Well, we’d like to see it, said Marv.  His forcefulness was unexpected.

You’ll have to! Sherry said.  Next time you visit, for sure.

*   *   *

They left then, jumping into a cab, Sherry after Howie, waving goodbye. Mim had a sudden devastating vision of Sherry as a newlywed — it was in the lift of her heel as she entered the car, the small hand on the rear window as they pulled away — and she held onto Marv’s arm.  The world seemed to open around her like an ocean.  She had no pictures on her camera, nothing to bring back to Utah as evidence of her trip.  No little token to show the women in her office.  Nothing to frame.  Sherry had said nothing about tomorrow or the next day.  As they said goodbye, Mim had considered asking her, but something had stopped her and now she was plan-less.  She didn’t do well without a plan.  Sunday night they were to return to Utah.  What would they do until then?  It was impossible to say.  The world was so open and new — the world was larger than it should have been.  It was too warm, too windy, too loud on the street.  What were they going to do?  Right now they would walk to the hotel — they would walk three blocks north, and three avenues west, as Sherry had instructed them.  They would avoid the subject of dinner.  They would do what was right and proper.  If Sherry called them tomorrow — the thought of it lifted her momentarily and then dropped her again, as it always did.

Marv.  Beside her was Marv.

It’s so warm still, said Mim.  All she wanted was to make a noise.

But it was.  The sky was green and glowing.  The buildings that were lit up before had darkened. It was impossible, she realized, impossible — that people lived in those buildings.  Nobody could live in buildings like those, towering impersonal buildings like those.  The lone low hum of the subway sounded beneath them, and she thought suddenly of Bailey and how he had been as a small boy, the soft blonde down on his cheeks and legs, the perfect half-moons of dirt beneath his babyish fingernails.  It had all changed — when he was twelve, it had all changed.

Are you limping, Marv? she said.

He didn’t respond; perhaps he hadn’t heard.  The street around them was so crowded, still, at one in the morning.  It was unnatural.

Are you limping? she asked again.  Marv shook his head no, but it was distinct: he was hitching to the right with every step, grimacing as if in pain.

I don’t believe you, she said quietly.  She felt tender toward him, and squeezed his arm to tell him so.  She felt he was her only ally.

The world was open. Ahead of them, she thought she saw Central Park — there were horses and carriages lined up one after another in front of a high stone wall — but she wasn’t certain what it was.  It could be anything.  New York stretched endlessly around them in all directions, and she couldn’t see the edge of it.  There was no knowing where they were.

Howie tried to pick up the bill when it came and Marv growled, Oh no, you don’t, and snatched it from him, literally, took it from his hands.

Daddy, said Sherry.

What? said Marv.  I’ve got it.

It’s been a pleasure, Marv. Thank you, said Howie Plank.

*   *   *

Outside, the four of them stood facing each other in front of the tall front windows of the Carnegie Deli.  It was one in the morning.  She realized suddenly that in Utah it was only eleven. Wrapped in a box in her hand was the second piece of cheesecake, which she and Marv had not come close to eating.

Is your place far from here, Sherry? asked Mim.  She shifted her weight from one leg to the other.  She was thinking about her camera, how there were no pictures on it yet.

It is, said Sherry, and looked at Howie.  He tipped his head.

Where is it? asked Marv, suddenly.

Oh, said Sherry.  It’s — on the Lower East Side.

The phrase was meaningless to them.  They did not know where they were, geographically; they knew their hotel was near Columbus Circle, and that the show had been in Times Square, but they did not know where Times Square was, nor how far they had strayed from it in coming here to eat.  The Lower East Side was a phrase like Aspen or The Poconos. Standing there in front of the Carnegie Deli, Mim felt very lost.  She wished for the first time to be home in Provo.  She felt the weight of her purse acutely, the weight of the guidebook and lipstick and camera in it.

Well, we’d like to see it, said Marv.  His forcefulness was unexpected.

You’ll have to! Sherry said.  Next time you visit, for sure.

*   *   *

They left then, jumping into a cab, Sherry after Howie, waving goodbye. Mim had a sudden devastating vision of Sherry as a newlywed — it was in the lift of her heel as she entered the car, the small hand on the rear window as they pulled away — and she held onto Marv’s arm.  The world seemed to open around her like an ocean.  She had no pictures on her camera, nothing to bring back to Utah as evidence of her trip.  No little token to show the women in her office.  Nothing to frame.  Sherry had said nothing about tomorrow or the next day.  As they said goodbye, Mim had considered asking her, but something had stopped her and now she was plan-less.  She didn’t do well without a plan.  Sunday night they were to return to Utah.  What would they do until then?  It was impossible to say.  The world was so open and new — the world was larger than it should have been.  It was too warm, too windy, too loud on the street.  What were they going to do?  Right now they would walk to the hotel — they would walk three blocks north, and three avenues west, as Sherry had instructed them.  They would avoid the subject of dinner.  They would do what was right and proper.  If Sherry called them tomorrow — the thought of it lifted her momentarily and then dropped her again, as it always did.

Marv.  Beside her was Marv.

It’s so warm still, said Mim.  All she wanted was to make a noise.

But it was.  The sky was green and glowing.  The buildings that were lit up before had darkened. It was impossible, she realized, impossible — that people lived in those buildings.  Nobody could live in buildings like those, towering impersonal buildings like those.  The lone low hum of the subway sounded beneath them, and she thought suddenly of Bailey and how he had been as a small boy, the soft blonde down on his cheeks and legs, the perfect half-moons of dirt beneath his babyish fingernails.  It had all changed — when he was twelve, it had all changed.

Are you limping, Marv? she said.

He didn’t respond; perhaps he hadn’t heard.  The street around them was so crowded, still, at one in the morning.  It was unnatural.

Are you limping? she asked again.  Marv shook his head no, but it was distinct: he was hitching to the right with every step, grimacing as if in pain.

I don’t believe you, she said quietly.  She felt tender toward him, and squeezed his arm to tell him so.  She felt he was her only ally.

The world was open. Ahead of them, she thought she saw Central Park — there were horses and carriages lined up one after another in front of a high stone wall — but she wasn’t certain what it was.  It could be anything.  New York stretched endlessly around them in all directions, and she couldn’t see the edge of it.  There was no knowing where they were.

When the food came, Howie rubbed his hands together, looking at his monstrous sandwich, and said he had forgotten all about the Carnegie Deli until Sherry had suggested it.  It’s nice to have tourists in town, he said, because you get to see the best parts of New York all over again!  He picked up his knife and fork and held them upright at the sides of his plate, and then dug in with a vigor that surprised Mim.

That’s quite a sandwich, Howie, she said, and he nodded with his mouth full.

Sherry, said Marv, how’s the magazine?

Howie released a little exhalation through his nose and rolled his eyes.  Oh, jeez, he said.  Don’t get her started.

Mim was shocked.  She wished very much that Sherry would, in fact, get started.  The bits she got from Sherry about her job were minimal, though she asked her every Sunday evening when she called.  That Howie — that anyone—  would take for granted any part of Sherry’s life, would consider any aspect of it unworthy of discussion, infuriated her.  Sherry had never been forthcoming.  Anything she revealed was a gift to be treasured, and this was something Howie would know if he really cared about her.

Politics, politics, said Howie.  Sherry just has to learn to lay it on thicker.

What’s going on, Sherry? said Mim.  Is everything OK?

Yeah, said Sherry.  She bit into her half-sour pickle and said, I just don’t really want to talk about it right now.

*   *   *

Howie was done with half his sandwich before Mim had taken four bites of her cheesecake.  They talked about his childhood in New York, and Mim asked him, for some reason, whether they had school buses in Manhattan.  No, they have bus-buses in Manhattan! said Howie.  He winked, and told her yes, they had school buses too.  For the public school kids, he said.  He fiddled with his earring.  His left hand, Mim could tell, was resting on Sherry’s leg beneath the table.  She tried to keep her gaze at eye level. He was more than fifty, decided Mim.  Was he more than fifty?  There was no way to ask Sherry that.  There were many things about which she couldn’t ask Sherry: her job; her friends in New York — she had made the mistake, on the way to the Carnegie Deli, of inquiring after Sherry’s actress friend Carla. Sherry had said, We’re not really in touch anymore — her safety; her finances; and now Howie’s age.  Anything about Howie, Mim knew, she would have to extract from Howie himself.

Tell us about your family, she said at last, and Sherry looked at her sharply.  Throughout the meal, Mim had felt she was saying the wrong things, but she couldn’t stop herself, and she couldn’t tell how to fix it.

Well, said Howie, my youngest is twelve, and my oldest just turned seventeen.

Marv, who had been silent for most of the meal, put his fork down very gently on top of the cheesecake.

Or did you mean my parents?  asked Howie Plank.

Oh, said Mim, who was beginning to feel an unsettling trembling in the core of her, as if her breath had suddenly left her, Now, I don’t really know what I meant.

Sherry said, Howie has three children from a previous marriage.  Tomas is twelve, Peter Phillip is fourteen, and Alexandria is seventeen.

Do they — live here?  In New York City?  asked Mim.  She had given up trying to know what was right, or what she shouldn’t say.  A swarm of tourists had just entered the restaurant, happy and raucous and familiar to her, like old friends. Three older couples and what looked to be their grown children.  Stop it, one of them was saying, over and over, but she was shrieking with laughter. If they were standing next to her, Mim would certainly ask them where they were from.  She would ask them where they were staying, and for how long.

Tomas and Alexandria do, said Howie.  They live with me, actually, and go to school here, and visit their mother in Connecticut every other weekend.  Peter Phillip lives with his mother all the time.

Oh, said Mim.  Now why doesn’t he live with you, too?  She was a train; she was unstoppable and swift.

He has autism, said Howie, cheerfully.  I guess he just feels more comfortable with his mother.  He does better when he’s there.

A long and dreadful silence settled about them.  Howie made a funny little face at Sherry that they weren’t supposed to see.  Mim tried to picture Sherry as a mother of teenagers, one of them handicapped, wrong in some way.  Did they like her?  Were they kind to her?  And was Howie kind, all the time?  What did they talk about when they were alone?  The mystery of Sherry’s life seemed to unfurl itself before her, and for once she allowed herself to acknowledge the great expanse between them.  Every night, Sherry was doing things they weren’t supposed to know about.  Every day, Sherry went to work and spoke to friends they had never heard of.  Every day.  Everything was so strange and gray to her suddenly that she didn’t quite know what to do.

There was a great din in the place and she pretended to tune into it, for a moment, to obscure the fact that her words were failing her.  She prayed that Marv would say something, but instead he excused himself to go to the restroom. She watched him as he walked away, and noticed again that he was limping.  He was older than she was by five years. Probably it was just from sitting for too long.  Probably it was another of his maladies, like his cataracts, like the arthritis that had plagued his hands for years.  He had also been going deaf slowly for some time now; she had grown accustomed to raising her voice when she spoke to him.  Only at night, in bed, when the world around them was soundless and still, did she feel she could lower it again.  These were her favorite times: the whispering, the near-silence.

Mim felt breathless.  For a moment, she stood still in her spot by the door.  Howie and Sherry walked away from her, hand in hand behind the host; Marv followed.  Mim asked herself some questions: the first was this man’s age — to her he looked fifty, maybe older; the second was what he wanted with Sherry; the third was of Sherry herself, and how she could misjudge a situation so badly.  There were times, when Sherry was growing up, that Mim had suddenly asked herself: Who is this child?

Those things she had hidden things from them when she was small — physical things, little stones and shells she had saved over the years, and candy she took home from parties — had she thought they would be taken from her?  Mim had snooped; it was terrible, but she had.  She found Sherry’s treasures amidst her socks in the dresser, or in boxes under her bed.  Once, when Sherry was twelve or thirteen, Mim had found a journal between her mattress and box spring.  Sherry was at school, and Mim had opened it and read the first line — I am alone a lot — before slamming it shut, her pulse thumping in her neck.  She had put it neatly back in its place, and the next time she checked, it wasn’t there.

What did he want with her?  What had she told him about them?  They were sitting now, and she still hadn’t moved. Marv looked back over his shoulder at her questioningly.   She fumbled in her purse to look busy, and told herself to be kind and decent, to rekindle a certain generosity in herself.  She thought, Mim, give this man a chance.  Howie Plank.  There were worse things in the world than being middle-aged.  There were worse things in the world than being middle-aged and underdressed.

*   *   *

Howie ordered a roast beef sandwich, though it was almost midnight.  Mim and Marv decided to split a piece of cheesecake and each ordered a glass of milk. The waiter said, Milk with cheesecake?  Sherry asked for a half-sour pickle and a glass of ice water.  Sweetheart, are you sure? asked Mim. I already had dinner, said Sherry.  Well, so did we! said Marv, and patted his belly.  But that sure won’t stop us!  He wasn’t looking at Howie. Make it two pieces of cheesecake, said Mim to the waiter, and if you could please bring three forks.

My little bird, said Howie Plank, affectionately, and placed his heavy arm across Sherry’s shoulders.  Mim could think of nothing to say to him. He was gazing at Sherry as if he had won her at a fair.

So, said Howie, finally.  How was the show?  Long?  Boring?  He laughed.

I think they liked it, said Sherry.  Right, Dad?

Your mother did, said Marv.  And I did too, I guess, he admitted.

Maybe I’ve just seen it one too many times, said Howie.

Howie’s lived here all his life, said Sherry.  Her short haircut made her look boyish and even younger than twenty-seven.  She’s really just a girl, thought Mim, and had a sudden memory of Sherry at twelve years old, getting her braces on, crying and crying for days because she didn’t want them.  They hurt, she had said.  They hurt so bad.

Now Howie was holding her hand, and Mim felt her tongue becoming immobile and mute as a sponge.  This was unusual for her; she prided herself on her conversational skills.  She thought of herself as a person who loved making new friends.  She could talk to anyone.  Marv teased her about it: strangers on the bus, seatmates on airplanes.  She kept in regular contact with a nice woman she had met at an RV park in Arizona.  She was a people person; it was what others always said about her, anyway, and what she liked about herself.  If she admitted it, this aspect of her reputation was a particular vanity of hers.  But Howie Plank was a different sort of person.

Tell us about your work, she said at last, and Howie smiled knowingly.  Oh, boring, he said, and laughed.  I guess Sherry’s probably told you all about it.

You’re a psychiatrist? she asked.

Psychologist, Mom, said Sherry quickly.  She knew that.  She knew that.  But Howie was nodding already.  Common mistake, he said.  At least you didn’t call me an astrologer!

Sherry laughed.  She looked as if she wanted more from them, so Mim tried to think of a question.

What’s it like listening to people’s problems all day long?  Doesn’t it make you sad?

No, said Howie, thoughtfully.  It makes me — grateful.  It sure keeps things in perspective, anyway.

How nice, said Mim.  She was trying so hard to be herself that a small film of sweat had broken out on her upper lip.  Howie, that’s a really nice way to look at it.  Isn’t it, Marv?

Marv was contemplating the paper placemat.  He nodded, not looking at anyone.