My father had been in the process of dying for years before he actually went. Cardiomyopathy, a slow disease, and bearing every inconvenience. He was not supposed to chop wood, among a long list of not-alloweds, like consuming anything with sodium or sugar, or walking the dog down the steep path to the woods, or going through airport security without letting them know about the pacemaker. He was always forgetting the list, or ignoring it. So behind our shed, he took an ax to a dogwood branch, and his heart stopped. Mom found him; as she described it, she was outwardly calm despite the itch in her bones. She called an ambulance and rode next to his dead body, gripping his inexplicably clammy fingers. His pale, pale fingers. Hers full of color. Her black hand, his white hand. She was obsessed with that imagery. After she let go, she signed some paperwork. She called a funeral home and the rest of the family, and we gathered, for the first time in a while, among the familiar faces of Pastor Ryan Hull’s congregation.  

After the service, on the way to the cemetery, my sister and I joked with each other about Mom’s shoes. She had flat arches and no support, so her feet leaned toward each other, and in those stiletto heels, totally inappropriate for a woman of her age and at her husband’s funeral no less, she looked like a farce.  

“She’s Bambi,” Cheyenne said, imitating a baby deer tumbling out of its mother and wobbling into the world on clumsy legs.  

“She’s Lebron!” This was my cousin, Alfred, chiming in. He did Lebron, feet turned out, chest leaned forward. Alfred was slim and lithe, he couldn’t help it, he looked more like a ballerina. We were all laughing at different things. Mom snapped around, tears hanging onto the corner of her eyes, and told us to stop disrespecting the dead. We shut up, quickly, but Cheyenne and I linked our pinky fingers together and I could feel her vibrating with suppressed laughter. We were not that young; Cheyenne was twenty-two, Alfred and I were twenty-eight, but we were behaving like immature children. 

We tossed lazy flowers onto Dad’s casket and sniffled a bit. I rolled my shoulders back, stretched my arms. I was tired of standing in the sun.  

“Look at the tulips,” Mom said. She was really, genuinely crying, tears coming down like unfurled ribbons. She looked pretty. “He loved tulips.”  

In grief, I realized, Mom had gone insane. Dad had never cared about tulips, never mentioned a flower in general, couldn’t tell lavender from burdock, wouldn’t bother to tell a daisy from a willow tree. That was just not the kind of man he was–he was a classic guy, he liked the NFL and the tycoons of the Industrial Revolution. He greeted his old coworkers from the fire station with gruff handshakes. He fished with live bait. Sometimes he admitted an appreciation for folk music, but only the Bob Dylan kind. The most romantic he got was when it came to Captain, his dog.  

“I love tulips,” I reminded her. She nodded into her handkerchief. Grief had also made her anachronistic. The woman before me did not belong in the 21st century, which was weird, because she really was a modern woman. She loved her cell phone more than anything, to talk to her relatives on Facebook and to watch Youtube videos of pets being found after natural disasters. She was young, not yet fifty. But she had left her phone at home and aged ten years. She was wearing those shoes with hideous stockings, her funeral hat resembled those of the ancient church ladies who unabashedly fanned themselves in the back, she had somehow acquired the slight southern drawl of her own mother. Luckily, I was a teacher, and summer break was about to begin. I could stick around until she seemed back to normal. I called my school to explain the situation; I needed to be there. “We need you here,” the principal said. “You haven’t graded anything in weeks.” I asked if a sub could do it. He was unhappy, and I tried to match this tone, to amplify it, even, because wasn’t there such a thing as bereavement leave? “This is an under-funded public school,” he said, as if that wasn’t obvious. My mother tapped on my shoulder and I used her need for attention as a reason to end the call.  

*

In the two weeks following the funeral, flowers continuously showed up on our front porch. It was touching, Mom insisted, until it became disturbing, and then, finally, a nuisance. “They keep dying. It’sa morbid reminder. What happened to casseroles and apple pies?” 

Cheyenne took a bundle of daffodils and a vase from under the sink. “I’ll just keep these. I’ve barely painted since…” She also grabbed a fork and an apple core and a handful of plastic bags. She was always crafting some inane still life on the desk in her room, painting the contours and shadows, revealing, as she said, the interconnectedness and beauty of throw-away things. I couldn’t understand because I wasn’t an artist. Well, I did teach fourth graders how to fold origami cranes. This counted for something, I thought, but not to Cheyenne, who was serious. She didn’t have any money and she lived with our mothers. A serious artist. 

“Open your window,” Mom said absentmindedly. She was at the dining table, petting Captain with her foot and scrolling on her phone. “That stuff stinks.” Cheyenne was in an oil phase. Acrylics were too dry for grief painting, which she intended as a smooth process, an expression of her feelings as porous, movable, an act of letting go like scooping water from a riverbed and watching it fall back through her hands.  

I liked the sound of that, but I just wanted to stop thinking about Dad’s anemic corpse. I knew he was becoming less than a slim root nestled in the ground, and I did not want to know that. His shriveled heart, his palms brushing against the satin casket lining forever–until his skin fell off. I had taught anatomy that spring; the body was on the mind.  

*

Along with the flowers, Myles, a guy I knew in high school, started showing up. It didn’t take me long to put it together–he had sent the last batch of tulips, and they weren’t for condolences. One night, I found Myles outside my bedroom window. His big eyes were staring through me, his chin was pressed against the glass. I wasn’t frightened because it was a familiar sight. That window was where I met my boyfriends in high school, for a quick kiss or a surprise gift or to break up. Back then, Myles had wanted to be one of them, and I entertained it, briefly.  

He knocked on my window. I moved from my bed and slid the glass up so I could hear him. The summer wind was loud, he had to speak above a whisper even though I kept shushing him. 

“Heard you’re in town. Whole summer?” He was wearing a woven bracelet on his left wrist and a chain around his neck. His hair stuck up in a long afro. I had the urge to bury my hand in the dense curls. 

“At least a few weeks. However long mourning takes.” I blinked slowly, dolefully. I tried to make my eyes wet. 

“Right, I heard about that, too. Sorry, Edie. Make it better?” I realized he meant himself, he would make it better, he was stroking my wrist over the window pane. My veins pulsed. 

“Not tonight. Let me see you in the daylight. Tomorrow.”  

He agreed. 

When he was gone, I went to the kitchen and dug the card from the tulips out of the garbage. Through the coffee grounds, I read, “Heard you were around. Let me try to woo you. Love, Myles Clifton.” Well, yes. I was going to let him. 

*

Myles was hungry, not quite desperate, but forceful with desire. His voice dropped an octave the second I touched his thigh. We were on the couch in his trailer. Nothing in the trailer matched, it was all a hodge-podge from garage sales and thrift stores and dead aunts. But the couch was new; it still had the manufacturer’s tape on the feet.  

“Do you remember how we used to do it?” I asked in what was supposed to be a coy, seductive voice. I was thinking of high school. I flipped over on my stomach. He pressed his thumb into the arch of my foot, which was not at all where he was supposed to be. 

“We never did it, Edie,” he said. I heard him taking off his clothes. “That must have been someone else.” No bitterness. He was nice in that way, not too insecure in his masculinity. But he still didn’t want to have me on top or use a condom. This was perfect; I was sort of looking to get pregnant that summer.  

It was a spontaneous idea that bloomed the morning of Dad’s funeral. That day, putting on mascara in the mirror, I looked at my face and saw a perfect combination of Dad’s and Mom’s. I realized how nice that must have been for them–narcissistic, but nice. In my fantasy, this baby was a girl, and she ate adventurous foods even as a child. She let me read long stories to her. When she grew up a little, we spoke to each other in kind, intelligent sentences, she could guess my thoughts and fall into stride with them as easily as breathing. This was the only person I could imagine explaining my hopes and dreams to. My relationship with my father had not been like this, so it wasn’t some reincarnation delusion. Not really. 

I tried not to interrogate whether Myles would be a good father. That didn’t seem like the point, at this stage. He was good at sex, which counted for a lot when I was feeling that hollowed-out, catatonic kind of boredom. I wanted to be full, and he filled me. His passion made me forget other concerns, like death, like the future of my job. He pulled my hair and kissed my shoulder. Afterward, I made him try to braid my hair. “Whatever you want,” he said. “Whatever you need.” He braided well. We were sweating in front of his box fan. I loved him, just a little bit, enough to stick my tongue in his ear and make him laugh, enough to eat dinner with him, reheated Chinese food from his job. We brushed our teeth together, side by side in his small bathroom.  

*

Myles had always captivated me because he was tenderly beautiful and undeniably a loser. From ninth to twelfth grade, he bore the latter reputation with embarrassment–no car, too clumsy for varsity, bad grades, and not even into weed or moonshine. That was the thing in high school: moonshine. Idiotic. My uncle brewed it so I stole jars from family cookouts and was too popular for Myles back then. But his feminine eyelashes, his deep, defined cupid’s bow, his chipped tooth. Beautiful. Years later, everyone could admit it. Even Cheyenne who wasn’t into men, even Mom. I told her I was meeting him for dinner, our third date. 

“Myles Clifton? He was fine.” 

“He was more than fine, Mom. He was a good friend.” That wasn’t really accurate, but I was spinning a thread of nostalgia and sentimentality into our love story. Meant to be, close since childhood. My daughter deserved a love story. 

“I meant fine, Edie. He was fine, like that.” She flipped her relaxer-burnt hair. How odd, her words and actions did not match the tone of her voice. She sounded like a leaky faucet. She turned and shuffled out of the living room. A door slammed. 

“He’s gorgeous, absolutely,” Cheyenne said. She was plucking her eyebrows with a mirror balanced on the arm of the couch. I wanted her to do mine next. “But you always said he was a weirdo. Doesn’t he do drugs?” 

“No, he didn’t do drugs. That’s what made him seem weird.” 

“But now. I see him hanging around the Davis boys, and Chuch. Not to mention Alfred.” 

I groaned. So now Alfred had to be involved; it was a whole family affair. With other people’s opinions commingling with mine, seeing Myles would become blurry, our sex a nebulous exercise of the mind rather than a plain act of the body. That was the big thing I was after–Myles’s uncomplicated body. Some part of me knew that it could never be that simple, because I lived in a different state and hadn’t communicated to him my idea about pregnancy and our lives did not really fit together the way our bodies did when we spooned on his small trailer bed, my knees lightly pressed against the vinyl wall. I wanted things I couldn’t explain. 

*

One Sunday, two months into the summer, Mom insisted that we go to church as a family. Between drinking and writing a poem a day and watching cop procedurals and praying, she was trying out a whole gamut of distractions that seemed farther and farther away from her life that was now over, the one she had with Dad. She called our cousins, and dutiful Alfred showed up at eight in the morning wearing a sky-blue dress shirt and low-slung jeans. His chain was barely visible, his hair was combed; he looked very civilized, according to Mom. “Thanks, Auntie, you know I clean up nice. For you.”  

He wasn’t there for her at all. Throughout Pastor Ryan’s service, he explained what I already knew, what Myles had explained to me on some date when I asked about his job: Myles was Alfred’s employee, so the latter was pissed that I had been distracting the former from his professional duties this summer. He funneled Adderall to Myles which Myles sold to kids at the community college. Myles worked there as a cook. Summer was, believe it or not, a big time for sales, because the kids who did summer school really needed to focus. It was all very indecent.  

Since I’d returned to town, Myles had not once met his quota. In a harsh whisper, I told Alfred it was a good thing I was pulling Myles up from the stupid, dim hole of hometown delinquency; so they were almost thirty years old, it was time to grow up and take responsibility for their impact on society in general and our community specifically. I liked being sanctimonious, but the truth was, I didn’t really mind the drugs. I was a teacher and should have been affronted by the exploitation of poor college students. And the father of my child should not be a criminal, this I knew. But my life was boring and I was grieving. That’s what I would tell anyone, if they asked me to explain myself that summer. I’m grieving. People let you off the hook for most things if you threw death in their faces. My whole family was doing it, to strangers, friends, to each other. 

“Edie,” Alfred whispered, and by the shift in his tone, I could tell he was letting the Myles situation go for now. He showed me a picture on his phone. “Photo app sent me a notification: seven years ago today. Huge!” It was Cheyenne, him, and me standing behind a catfish the size of a toddler, Alfred holding the rod, me on the other end pinching the tail between my fingers. Dad had caught the fish, but he wanted us to pose with it. All three of us looked dark and unhappy, but I guess it had been revised into a pleasant memory for Alfred. I remembered Dad’s lecture on the supremacy of the circle hook, which didn’t hurt the fish. I remembered thinking, how pointless, how ironic. He was going to kill and eat it anyway. 

Toward the end of the service, the part where Pastor Ryan went on a rant about kids these days ignoring the Lord’s call, I shoved past Alfred’s bony knees and hurried to the stairs that led to the basement bathroom. Someone was in the other stall, but I couldn’t stop myself. I puked loudly. Bits of apple skin from my breakfast floated to the top of the toilet bowl. It was exactly as it happened in the movies; I knew I was pregnant. I didn’t feel elation, or terror, or even satisfaction. I was just embarrassed. Being sick had always made me feel that way, a tepid shame, a desire to exit my body until the illness had passed.  

I snuck out of the church and called Myles. He said he would come get me; his voice was viscid and full, like he had just drank a milkshake, or had phlegm in his throat. He was excited to see me. We had been together the night before, and the night before that. And so on. 

I made him drive to the empty parking lot of a deserted KMart. We had sex with my back pressed against the steering wheel. Like sex, that pressure on my spine was painful until it became bearable, and then it became good. “You sure you’re comfortable? We could lean my seat back. Or go to my house.” 

“I want it like this,” I told him. He squeezed my waist, meaning to get a firm grip on my hips, but I laughed. I was ticklish. “Baby, baby, baby,” he kept whispering against my temple, sensual and honest, and I was thinking about what I now knew about my body, the thing I had asked for, the knot of nausea just above where Myles was, inside of me. I almost told him.  

His car had two hundred thousand miles on it and the seatbelts were broken. I watched a loose French fry become unlodged from under the backseat as we rocked the car with our bodies. “How long has that been there,” I asked out loud. He didn’t know what I was talking about. After we were done, we went to a drive-through, and I realized I was the one dropping fries from my bag, dripping my shake into the base of the cup holder. Hopefully, my daughter would not eat fast food or ride in shabby cars or live in the suburbs. Hopefully, she would have normal emotions, ones more like Myles, who got angry and excited and sad at all the right times. 

*

One night, I got home after a poker night with Myles and his friends, and Mom was sitting like a prisoner under the interrogation light in the kitchen. She was a little drunk; the tequila bottle grew emptier, and then filled up again, back and forth throughout the summer, an ebb and flow. I wasn’t drinking because I was protecting the cells in my uterus. Mom’s eyes were pink. 

On nights like this, she wanted to hear about Myles. I was generally distrustful with her about romantic affairs because she was too nosy, too serious. All she cared about was love and grandbabies. I wasn’t ready to get into all that with her. But in drunkenness, it was fun. She got dishy and casual. “He sounds so clean,” she kept saying, through hiccups, through small sips. “He sounds so clean.” I guess he was. He took personal hygiene very seriously and he always wiped the circles I left on his coffee table the second I lifted my glass to my lips. He smelled like soap, not sweat, not flowers, not smoke or liquor. Just soap. She leaned her head on my shoulder and drew what I guessed was Myles’s lips in the spilled sugar on the dining table. “And what did you say his hands were like?” His hands were not fatherly, but his heart was. I said that and Mom was too drunk to notice. I put a pretzel in my mouth to keep myself from saying anything else stupid. “And his shoulders?” she asked. 

Sober, she did not want to know. “Cut that vulgar shit. I do not want to hear it.” It was a few days later, Cheyenne had come back from her girlfriend’s that morning, we were swapping sexual escapades. Mom had stopped me in the middle of my sentence about him biting my nipple like a guppy puckering for fish food. She put her slippers on and let the heavy screen door slam in its frame. “Myles Clifton,” she said under her breath. I liked his full name. Our daughter could have it. “What would your father think,” Mom called through a mouthful of smoke. She invoked his spirit when it was convenient. I didn’t know what my father would think. I hadn’t known him very well. 

When Dad had been dead for three months, I visited his grave. It was August, just as hot as the day we buried him, but now the air was thick with humidity and mosquitoes buzzed around my head. I sat on the ground in front of his jade-green headstone and told him my secret: “I’m eight weeks pregnant. Myles Clifton is the father. It’s going to be a girl.”  

He didn’t respond. I was worried about the fact that my daughter would never meet her maternal grandfather, because I had never known mine, and it seemed like maybe I would have turned out differently if my family had been more complete. And I wanted her to turn out differently.  

I texted Cheyenne and asked her to meet me there because it was the three-month anniversary of his death, and because I didn’t know how to be alone when I got that vibration in my chest, the itch in my nose. She didn’t respond. I sat for a while longer and I was about to leave when someone knocked their knuckles on my shoulder. It was my sister, smiling childishly. 

“Should we say something nice? A prayer or something? It’s been three months.” 

“Dad does not give a fuck about people saying nice things about him, Cheyenne.” 

“Dad is dead, Edie. He doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s just a thing to do.” 

We stood together, staring at the patch of grass in front of the grave, making dumb insensitive jokes about people we knew who had died or grieved. “I never got why people said ‘wrapped his car around a telephone pole.’ It does not wrap around. It crunches. Joshua Davis was squished in there.”  

“So true. And how about, ‘took a bullet,’ as if it were a choice? Auntie Jo said she’d smack the next person who said how tragic it was that Uncle Danny ‘took a bullet.’ And you know she had a hard fucking backhand.” Our hair shook as we giggled. I realized I was keeping her there; her shoulders were anxious, they were bobbing up toward her ears and she kept trying to turn to leave. 

“I have to tell you something. It’s kind of a secret.”  

Her shoulders stilled. She linked our pinkies together. “Swear I won’t tell.” 

I confessed that I had let Myles get me pregnant, that he didn’t even know it yet. “I’m going to keep the baby.” She didn’t act surprised or judgmental; she just laughed gleefully and clutched my hand. 

“Mom is gonna lose it. I think she’s kind of fixated on him.”  

I didn’t know what she meant. Mom barely knew him as anything other than some kid from our neighborhood, some fool. The few times he’d come to our house that summer, she had curled a strand of hair around her finger girlishly and fed him dessert and tried to get him to drink with her, she had shown him memes on her phone, but I thought she was just being drunk and sad. 

“She’s a widow,” Cheyenne explained. “He’s pretty good at making people feel seen.”  

“So he’s been flirting with her?”  

She was giggling maniacally, poking my stomach. “Maybe? To be nice. She’s not in love with him or anything. She needs to put her love somewhere, though.”  

Cheyenne seemed to understand people a lot better than I did. Her revelation complicated things. Moms, apparently, were more than bodies. They contained infinite ultra-fine layers of being, and those layers were often strange and deformed. I wanted to just be a body. I was not sure I was ready to become so incalculable.  

*

I had one week left before the school year started. I had to go back to the city to beg the principal for my job back. Myles was panicked and twitchy, I wanted him to sit still but he kept pacing between the couch and the TV, oscillating like a train with one tedious route. He might have been on drugs, after all. “I feel like there’s a lot we haven’t talked about yet,” he said. I stood up and held his shoulders. I had to reach a little because he was so tall. “Do you want to talk about your dad? I don’t even really know what happened.” 

It seemed he wanted to know because he thought it was important to me to talk about him. I did not know what gave that impression; it was one of those assumptions about death, that to name the thing was to process it, to gather it up and put it somewhere manageable. I was managing, with silence and avoidance, like any normal person. I told Myles to look up cardiomyopathy because I didn’t feel like explaining what had led to my dad’s death. He went into the bedroom, tapped away on his phone to research the condition. I heard the digital clicks of his keyboard and his deep sighs. He called me into the room and made space for me on the bed. 

“It means,” he began, in a drippy, melodramatic voice, “Heart muscle suffering. That’s the translation of the different parts of the word.” 

“Makes sense, I guess.”  

Myles nodded. His face was dark and serious. 

“You know what else?” 

“What.” 

“Those are the three things that define a man, I think. Heart. Muscle. Suffering. Take any one component away, and you’re not really whole. You’re not really, I don’t know, father material. Husband material.” 

Well, I wasn’t going to explain to him, either, that his conception of manhood was annoyingly patriarchal and that whatever he meant by muscle, I didn’t see it in or on him, because he was neither physically strong nor had he ever demonstrated any notable mental vigor or toughness. That was harsh, and if I hurt his feelings he might get emotional, and I didn’t want to wipe his tears away at that moment. I just nodded repeatedly, until my neck hurt. He massaged the side of my throat.  

That time we had sex felt overwhelmingly like the last time. He stroked my hair and the side of my face as he tried to make me come, he licked my eyelids and kissed my forehead. I realized that he was in love with me. I felt bad as he came; his crumpled face, his perfect, O-shaped mouth. All summer, I had wanted to crawl into that mouth when it was wide open. Now, I put my hand on his jaw and pushed it closed. His elbow jabbed into my neck by accident. Suddenly, the incompatibilities of our bodies became clear; one of us was a barbed hook, the other the oily mouth of a fish. We were attached, but not in the wholesome way I had thought. I didn’t have any wholesome attachments. 

I realized I had to get him and his baby out of me. 

“You do have a lot of heart, Myles.” It was afterward, we were half-clothed and tangled in his sheets. I pulled a hair on his chest. He let out a soft, squeaky breath. “That’s actually where the suffering comes in. You need to be meaner. Colder.” 

“That shit gets old. Look at all the dudes from high school who were hard, who didn’t give a fuck. Are you with them, or with me?”  

I hummed against his shoulder. I was thinking about what I wanted to do. I was trying to get him to agree with me, so I could know it was the right choice to not let him be a father. 

“Girls like nice things. They like a warm bed and somebody kind to lean on. Right?” 

I agreed. He was, improbably, right about pretty much everything. I would miss him. 

*

Since it had only been nine weeks, the abortion was in pill form. It made me yawn. I had, briefly, considered throwing myself down the stairs or using a hanger, because I had the urge to be a part of an oppressed, womanly history. But it was perfectly legal this early on. 

So a small tablet was placed in the fold of my palm. I was sitting on crinkly paper in a cold, gray room of Planned Parenthood, a day before I was to head back to my life, my job, my future. The nurse was nice, her hair fell in crisp, immaculate ringlets and her engagement ring was tastefully large, it kept catching the sterile light and glinting in my eye. I felt like we could have been friends. “Do you think I could get your phone number?” I asked her. She stared at me like I had conjoined twins coming out of me. “Or your Instagram handle?” 

“Just take this,” she said. I took the pill. I went to the park near my house and sat under a tree for hours, where I probably looked homeless or like a predator, but I just needed a place to be alone. I knew when the pill had started to work because my insides ached like they were being scraped away by a small but relentless pickaxe, and I bled a lot in my underwear. It leaked through to my pants. I tied a sweater around my waist, and it got on that, too.  

When I got home, Cheyenne was putting the finishing touches on a painting; it was Captain with a crown of dead flowers around his head. It was as hideous as any of the other canvases displayed in the kitchen. Mom was sitting among them as if part of the grief gallery herself. She was drinking. 

“Just tell me,” she said in a fried, uneven voice, “if you’re going to have his baby.” I made my eyes wide at Cheyenne, who I should have remembered was a snitch and a traitor. The rain outside was ringing on the copper gutters and against the gravel, an embarrassing soundtrack to my entrance. 

“Well, no. I wanted to tell you all a little more ceremoniously, but.” It was the type of thing you were supposed to be sitting down to announce. I pulled a chair out from the table with a screech of metal and sat gingerly across from Mom. Cheyenne washed her hands slowly, scooted onto the counter, and balanced her bare feet on the table near my arm. “I was pregnant. And I’ve just had an abortion.” 

Cheyenne let a breath of relief whistle through her puckered lips. Mom broke down. “Edie, how could you?” Grief suited her, she must have realized it by now. She had been weeping all summer, but this moment was big. Despair had taken over her face and imbued it with an arresting beauty. I was jealous. I wanted to slap her.  

“Stop crying over my abortion.”  

I wanted to be the one crying over my abortion, my heartbreak, my dead dad. The closest I got to crying was when I strained my body too hard throwing up. I didn’t have any eyelashes left, because I’d picked them all out trying to make my eyes do more than a single tear. I did other things, like quiver in orgasm, or quiver in panic attack, I had sleepless nights and sat on the floor in the shower with my head between my knees. But crying, the real catharsis, evaded me. 

“I’m not–” she gasped, “Crying over.” She clutched the pendant at her throat. It was a locket with mine and Cheyenne’s baby hair trapped inside.  

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay.” Cheyenne slid off the counter and into a seat next to Mom. She patted Mom’s forearm and moved a withering look between both of us. She had tears in her eyes too, and paint on her wrists. She took a swig from the bottle of Espolòn. 

I couldn’t tell what Mom was so upset about–the abortion, because she was a good Christian? The pregnancy in the first place, because Myles was fine, and she wanted him? The potential for grandchildren, now a dream deferred? “What are you so upset about?” My voice hissed through my angry teeth. 

“What would your father think, Edith? You make a mess of things. He dies, and you make a mess of things.” 

“That feels unfair,” I said, but I guess there was a mess of blood on the seat beneath me, and Cheyenne’s eyeliner was smudged under her eyes, and I had knocked over the salt shaker when I put my elbows up on the table. Mom and Cheyenne probably suspected the pregnancy before I even told anyone because I wasn’t that good at cleaning up after a bout of morning sickness.  

I knew she didn’t mean mess literally. But I was only capable of conceding small things. 

She kept glowering and then spoke through a mouth blurry and blob-shaped with drunkenness. “I hope you didn’t break that boy’s heart.”  

I itched my scalp. Myles was sensitive, of course he would be hurt when I left. But I didn’t want her to be with him, and against me. 

“He doesn’t know about the baby or anything.” She was still blubbering and could no longer sit up straight at the dining table. She leaned her temple against a mango in the fruit bowl. “I’m leaving tomorrow. So you don’t have to be burdened by my mess anymore.”  

Cheyenne kept petting Mom to comfort her, but she looked like she felt bad for me, too. She told me to take a painting home with me, any one I wanted. I stood up from the table and perused my options. A realistic portrait of Dad as a child; I recognized the boonie hat and the yellow slide from the photo that was on our fridge. It was difficult to look at. There was the fresh painting of Captain, and an abstract landscape I didn’t recognize, and a portrait of Mom, inexplicably, holding a trumpet. Some dogwood trees from our backyard. An ax lodged in a stump. A heart with blood dripping from the arteries. This last one was too on-the-nose, too cloying, but I chose it because it would go best in my classroom. It was anatomically correct. 

I told her thanks. She nodded. I sat back down at the table and held the painting on my lap, because I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, Mom allowed me to take her hand. It was a few shades darker than mine. “My pale, pale fingers,” I said out loud. Neither Cheyenne nor Mom realized I was referencing what Mom had said about Dad’s hand in the ambulance, which was for the best. It wasn’t really a joke they could laugh at. 

“Myles Clifton is so weird anyway. If that helps. You shouldn’t have a kid with someone who’s never tried weed.” Cheyenne was trying to make us laugh. I snorted a little, which stirred Mom from her tequila coma.  

“Need a blunt,” she agreed. “Grandbabies…” she mumbled senselessly. “What would your father think?” She started laughing, too, so even though Cheyenne and I didn’t get what was funny, we all giggled against the silence. Mom’s red eyes brightened and she started cheerfully drawing shapes in the sugar, salt, and dust covering the table. Cheyenne watched her, and I made a mental list of the things I had to pack tomorrow morning, including the painting clutched to my chest.