The memory is barely a memory. The night is a wound healed over, skin knit back together until it’s almost eerily smooth—a silky stretch of scar tissue betraying its otherness. It’s flashes of light cutting through trees, hot salt on my tongue, gurneys bumping over the curb and sliding into the backs of ambulances. It’s needles stabbing flesh, hands examining every inch of me, searching for answers. But by the time these questions came I’d already swallowed the story down, fragmented shards scraping the back of my throat, shredding my insides, settling deep in the pit of my stomach and roiling quietly within me. The story is a sharp edge to maneuver my body around now; the glimpse of a memory is nothing more than a scab to worry beneath my fingertips, a nearly imperceptible patch of tenderness.

That summer, time was enormous. I moved in with my father at the beginning of August, when the air was still thick with heat and urgent, fleeting freedom: children running half-naked down the streets toward neighborhood pools, families rushing off to the beaches, girls angling their lounge chairs toward the sun, browned limbs slick with oil. I could feel the sad tug of fall as weeks passed and the days shortened and darkened, but time splayed out in front of me, empty and boundless.

My father’s nurse had made me a list of tasks and presented it with a sheepish apology, but the paper contained a list of nothings, chores that real people crammed into the spaces between real things. The nurse came over twice a day, and my father had a physical therapist who came three times a week and friends whose wives seemed to be constantly stopping by with food. There was an elaborate choreography to his recovery and my role in it seemed to be purely invented. He’d love to have you there, Joni. It would be so helpful for you to stay with him. I imagined the hushed explanations offered when I wasn’t around: At least it will keep her busy. At least we’ll know where she is. Confining me to my father’s house seemed to be as integral to the plan as healing his broken body.

Life with an invalid was both slow and frantic, the house alive with the clicks and beeps and chatter that come with assisted convalescence, and then suddenly screaming with silence. When people were there, I felt as if I moved among them in slow motion, oozing invisibly past as they rolled in medical equipment or stacked casserole dishes on the countertops. The inertia was exhausting and viscous, pooling in my organs and hardening to lead in my head and hands and feet. Some days I felt as paralyzed as if I too had broken my neck.

My father drifted in and out of lucidity in the evenings, loopy from the painkillers that had to last him until his nurse’s morning visit. There was a safety in talking to someone so medicated, like telling your secrets to a friend who’s already a six-pack in, like teaching the rhythms of language to a newborn baby. His large wooden bed had been replaced with a steel- framed medical cot that rotated up and down, and his body was wrapped in elaborate swaths of white, intricate as the weave of a blanket. His face was shaved clean now, a task his nurse dutifully took on each morning, and it jarred me; he’d shaved his beard once when I was a child, before a job interview, and I’d been terrified of him. His exposed face had looked raw and unfinished, as if he’d peeled away a layer of skin and were showing me the twists of muscle and bone beneath. He’d left the shaved-off hair in our bathroom, wiry curls fluffing up out of the sink like a wild animal, and it felt to me like he’d left a limb behind.

It was my mother who had convinced me to move in that summer when my dad was still in the hospital, and they were preparing to discharge him. “You need to get out of this place anyway,” she’d said to me. “It will be good for both of you.”

My parents had divorced nearly ten years earlier, but my mother had become particularly invested in his recovery when she realized it would give me a reason to move out of the studio apartment I still shared with my soon-to-be ex-husband.

“It’ll be so depressing,” I had told her, though amid the tumult of unwashed clothes and takeout containers—evidence of the fractured life I had not intended for my mother to see—I realized how ridiculous I sounded. “I don’t know how to take care of him.” I sat on the drooping mattress that my ex and I still—unwisely, absurdly—slept in together, and my mother stood above me, arms crossed, weary but steadfast. I felt the way I always did in her presence: childish, helpless, foolish. This was a routine I had been through with her a hundred times before, testing the limits of my flimsy little life, poking and prodding at it until something broke, and then letting her push me aside and put it all back together.

“He lives too far from work,” I offered limply, though I was in the last week of my current temp assignment and suspected I would not be given another. Temping was a shaky arrangement for me, because there was nothing at stake. The bosses weren’t my bosses, and the employees weren’t my co-workers; any missteps felt as though they’d just be instantly wiped clean.

“So, you’ll take medical leave,” my mother said, so dismissively that I could tell she didn’t believe I had a job to take leave from. “If you stay with your dad, you won’t have rent or bills to pay. It’ll be a fresh start.”

My father lived in a labyrinthine complex of condominiums tailored to the 50+ community. He had made fun of it when he’d moved in a few years before, mocking the people he saw shuffling their way through geriatric yoga classes and puzzling over games of chess in front of the fireplace all day long. But the first time I had come to visit, I could tell that he’d adapted to this benign, slowed-down version of things. I liked the idea of my father, always so hard and untethered, hopping up and down in the heated pool, his aging body straining to keep up with the graceful movements of an aerobics instructor. I imagined him swimming neat laps each morning alongside other men who had lived similarly reckless, feral lives, and who now, in the last act, were allowing themselves the calm of banality.

A few of his friends lived there too, men who had one by one given up the chore of independence and moved to the complex, lured there by the promise of grass that seemed to always be freshly cut, houses that required no upkeep, happy hours that materialized in the courtyard each afternoon. I had grown up knowing these men, could still recall the roar of their bikes coming down the street when I was a child, the hum of motors as they idled in our driveway. Often, they’d all come inside to drink beers after a ride, and I’d look out at the row of motorcycles in front of our house: gleaming, muscular creatures in perfect alignment, all leaning the same direction as if they were blowing in the wind. Most of my father’s friends had sold their bikes years ago, though a few held on to them for nostalgia and for the occasional Sunday ride. My father had kept his, vowed to keep it forever, though even a quick ride usually left him sore and weak. He was a wild man being tamed, viciously, by age.

When his accident happened, it shook the group of men in a way that youthful wrecks had not. Over the years the gang had weathered accidents, and recoveries, and even deaths, but by the time my father tipped his bike on a curve of highway and slammed headlong into a cement median, everyone had already settled into the comfort of their cautious lives. His accident had been an improbable fluke: a corner taken too quickly on a routine ride, a patch of ragged road, a series of injuries he had barely survived.

His friends came by the house almost daily now that he was out of the hospital, and their wives operated on an inscrutable schedule of meal deliveries that left me feeling useless and in the way. Karen would arrive at 9 a.m. three days in a row, but as soon as I discerned the pattern and resolved to be helpful, Susan would knock on the door at 7 a.m., and I would feel like a useless teenager again, answering the door in my pajamas, clawing down my matted hair, slinking back to bed while she flitted around the kitchen as if it were her own.

“You just leave this to me, sweetie,” she’d say, like I was the invalid. Everyone in my father’s life tiptoed around me, treating me as though I too were nursing a host of injuries that were simply not as apparent.

Some of the wives in the group had once been bikers themselves, flaunting sleeves of faded tattoos, leather vests, bandanas, skulls. Others had been more like my mother: anxious but nurturing, fueling the gang with plates of food, replacing the ever-present beers in their hands, following them around with ashtrays and coasters, and then silently worrying about all the ways this sort of life might kill a person. My mother had a single tattoo from her early days with my dad, a pierced heart on her calf with his name scrawled across its center, and over time the black edges had frayed and turned the green of aged copper. When I was little, my mother would point to the bleeding ink of my father’s name, words melting indecipherably into her soft white skin, and tell me to never, ever get a tattoo. This was often the way she mothered, pointing to herself as a cautionary tale, a snaking map of what not to do. But I was fifteen when I got my first tattoo, a rose chosen off the wall of a tattoo parlor and etched crudely onto the hard angle of my hip. When I’d come home that night, Bactine in hand, my jeans unzipped and rolled down below my hips to protect my puffed, raw skin, my mother knew immediately what I’d done. Kneeling down on the floor beside me, she’d stared wordlessly at this new part of my body as if memorizing its jagged dimensions, and then reached up and slapped my face so hard that the pain in my hip drained instantly.

That night I’d written my parents a farewell letter, stuffed it into the mailbox before taking a bus across town to stay at my best friend Lia’s house, and my teenage voice had read like the melodrama of a Dear John letter: Hello from somewhere. I love you but I am not happy. Please don’t find me. My parents came and brought me home that night. My father’s anger was always mild and detached, as if my childish attempts at transgression were simply an inconvenience. “Off with her head,” he’d say, the cigarette in his mouth bobbing up and down when he spoke as if in agreement. But my mother’s anger was treacherous.

“The two of you,” she’d said on the drive home, as though my father were somehow guilty in this, another runaway she had to wrangle. It seemed odd to me, since she was the one always threatening to leave. Packing up my things earlier that night, I’d imagined myself as my mother, pictured her delicate hands folding clothes into a suitcase, tucking hairsprays and perfume bottles into zippered pockets, sitting down at the kitchen table to write a list of all the reasons she refused to stay.

*

At night, after my father succumbed to whatever intricate cocktail of medications his nurse had given him, I’d sit in the dark of the living room, the springs of his pull-out couch squeaking beneath my weight. The nights were long and empty without the salve of a few drinks or a joint to lull me to sleep. I’d open the window and press my lips to the screen to blow smoke out into the darkness, watch the tufts of silver-blue dissolve into the black, feeling a million miles away from my adult life. My father only lived about fifteen minutes from my apartment, but the distance seemed like a gap in time, wide and unnavigable. It seemed inconceivable that ten miles down the highway my friends were likely gathered in a booth at our local bar, my usual place beside them already forgotten; that Lawrence was perhaps standing at our apartment window, also breathing smoke out into the hot night air. I felt lonesome for the minutiae of what I’d left behind: crowded happy hours and the sticky heat of bars, talk radio in traffic, the anemic glare of office lights. On the rare errands I ran for my father now, the sight of people dressed for work—frenzied by the fullness of their lives—made me homesick for things I’d always hated.

The day I moved out, Lawrence had helped me load my bags into the back of the car and then we’d gone back into our apartment together, as if we’d just been testing out what it would feel like for me to leave. He’d pulled me onto the couch and poured us each a tall glass of whiskey. “To recovery,” he’d said, and clinked his glass against mine. “Go out with a bang.”

“I can’t show up wasted, Law.” My mother was meeting me at my father’s house to get me settled in; I leaned away from him but didn’t get up.

“This may be your last chance. Everyone gets plastered before they get clean.” I rolled my eyes. “You make it sound like they’re sending me to rehab.”

He shrugged. “Might as well be.”

“My dad broke his fucking neck, Lawrence. I’m going there to help him.” I took a sip. The burn of it warmed my throat.

“Pretty convenient,” he said. “You being desperately needed all of a sudden.”

“Maybe they just want to get me away from you.” I took another sip.

He laughed and put his arm around me, pulling me tight against him. “You’re right, Joni. It’s all my fault.” He kissed my forehead. “You were perfect, and I ruined you.”

*

Patrick came over several afternoons a week to do physical therapy with my father. He was quiet and compact, with pale, rutted skin and messy hair that hung in his eyes when he worked. At the start of each session, he would lift my father up and arrange his limbs in a tangle of harnesses next to the bed, a confusing pulley system that seemed oddly industrial, as if my father’s body were the piston in a piece of elaborate machinery. The sight of Patrick lifting my father was almost as disconcerting to me as the therapy itself: my father, a beast of a man rendered delicate and hulkless, scooped up like an infant.

“How do you think he’s doing?” I asked Patrick one afternoon when I found him sitting out on the stoop for a smoke break. We’d barely spoken; Patrick wrote up a report at the end of each session but didn’t bother to share any updates with me, as if even he could tell how little my role in this mattered.

He shrugged, took a hard pull on his cigarette. “Good, considering.” His hands were small and gritty, black film pushed up under his nails like he’d been raking his fingers through mud; I wondered how a physical therapist ended up so grimy by 10 a.m. When I’d first heard my father was getting an in-home therapist, I’d pictured some perky, cheerful woman with a clipboard and a slew of optimistic mottos who would flirt sweetly with my father, her shiny blond ponytail bobbing as she moved through the exercises.

“So, good for someone whose alternative is death,” I said. Patrick was the opposite of this: grim and perfunctory and almost begrudging. I sat down beside him and lifted my chin toward his pack of cigarettes. “Can I bum one?”

He slid a cigarette wordlessly from the pack and handed it to me, then stubbed his out onto the concrete. He glanced up at me, then looked back down at his hands, a chunk of greasy hair dropping down over his eyes. “You went to Kennedy, right?”

I lit the cigarette and exhaled a long line of smoke. “Did you?”

He nodded. “I remember you, I think.”

I shrugged. “I went there for a couple years.” Kennedy was the public high school two towns over, where I’d gone up until my junior year. “I don’t think I knew you.”

“Yeah, we didn’t have class together or anything. I was the year below you.”

“High school’s kind of a blur to me,” I said. My memories of school were dreamlike, fragmented: textbooks wrapped in swatches of brown paper, the reflexive spin of a combination lock, the jumble of messages scribbled in yearbooks. I wasn’t sure which memories were real and which were impressions gleaned from what I believed high school was supposed to look like. Did I write secret notes to my friends, fold them into fussy angles, my fingers greasy with pencil? Had I met with a guidance counselor to talk about test scores and college? For me, life had been neatly bisected into a before and after; high school had occurred on the cusp.

“Yeah, not much worth remembering in that place,” Patrick said. He hesitated. “I remember when you left though.”

I looked out across the square of lawn in front of my father’s stoop. Each townhouse had a small stretch of grass out front, and there was something pitiful to me about the tidy, uniform patchwork of green, as if it were attempting a rough approximation of authentic suburban life. “It caused quite a stir,” I said, because there wasn’t much else to say. I ground out my cigarette and stood up.

Patrick stood too, digging his hands roughly into the pockets of his jeans. Usually his reserve seemed chosen, as if he couldn’t be bothered with sociability, but I could tell he wanted to ask something else—that there were probably questions he’d been formulating since the day he first recognized me.

“Thanks for the smoke,” I said, and he nodded.

I pulled open the screen door. He looked at me, shading his eyes from the sun with the back of his hand. “So, where did you go?”

I turned back to him, letting the door slap shut. “When?”

“When you left school.” He seemed almost apologetic, like a rookie reporter looking down at his list of hard-hitting questions and realizing he was in over his head. “There were all these stories around Kennedy about what happened to you.”

“Oh,” I said, leaning back against the door frame. I’d heard most of the rumors before, wondered at how kernels of truth had reached the outside world, how the stories had been shaped and reinvented, as if the facts of my life were pliable. I pulled at the frayed hem of my jean shorts. I’d cut them off the day before, when the heat had become unbearable, but now regretted the large swath of thigh they left exposed. Spending my days alone had made the chore of taking care of myself seem silly and unnecessary; I sometimes went days without showering, knotting my hair into a slick gnarl at the back of my head, running my hands along the prickle of my unshaven legs, the freedom of my irrelevance almost luxurious.

“I’m sure it was all bullshit,” he offered, though I imagined the lies and half-truths solidified by my silence. I knew I should give him some alternate account, an innocuous explanation to report back to his friends—boarding school, a lonely, faraway aunt in need of companionship—but a part of me liked the idea of people still wondering about me, still guessing at what had happened.

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug, and pulled the door open again. “Anyway, it was a long time ago.” I stepped inside and the cool air raised a stipple of goosebumps on my arms. I felt grateful for the wash of cold on my skin.

Patrick came inside behind me. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll head back up to your dad.” He slipped past me toward the stairway. “Hey, I didn’t offend you, right?”

I shook my head. “Let me know how he does today,” I said, like we’d been talking about my father all along.

*

I was still in elementary school the first time I rode a motorcycle. My father always insisted that I’d begged him for it, that I’d followed him around until he agreed to take me for a loop around the neighborhood, but I only remember my fear. One of his friends had hoisted me up to sit behind him, had tucked a too-big helmet over my head; the engine was idling and the thrumming leather was hot on my thighs. I’d wrapped my arms tight around my dad’s body, wishing they were ten times longer—that I could wrap them around and around until we were bound together like thread on a spool.

We didn’t ride for long, but I’d felt certain we’d never make it home. It seemed impossible that one moment you could be hurtling around a bend of road and the next be sitting in the calm of your house. That danger and safety could exist in such close proximity. I was a careful kid—inching my way into pools rather than jumping in, sitting on the lowest branches of trees while my friends clambered high above me—and the motorcycle ride had felt like being loosed into the world unarmored. I’d screamed the whole time, but the sound was muffled by the deafening push of wind against us. I’m sure my dad thought I was shrieking from the thrill of it and so he kept going, the same way he’d always keep tickling me despite my protestations, futile in the midst of the traitorous giggles I couldn’t control.

When we got home, I’d stared hard at my reflection, as if maybe the experience would register on my face, show some sign of a new wildness in me. At dinner that night I’d expected my mother to somehow read what had happened in my tangled hair or my pink, wind-stung hands. But she didn’t find out until years later, when a boy drove me home from school on his motorcycle. She’d been alarmed at the idea of her fourteen-year-old daughter on the back of a bike, and I’d laughed darkly as if there was already so much she didn’t know about me.

“This is nothing new,” I’d said, like I did it all the time. The truth was that even years later I’d felt the same terrifying sense of freefall, though by then I’d begun seeking out chances to be reckless.

“What does that mean?” my mother asked, snatching the curtains aside to watch out the window as the boy—someone from school, no one I really knew—sped away from the house. “Who is that?”

“I don’t mean with him,” I said, as if her question were moronic. My realization that my mother was intolerable had hit me out of nowhere the spring of my fourteenth birthday, like a hot shower turning suddenly cold: I adored her, then I hated her. The puff of her outdated bangs, the quiet burps at dinner that she’d cough to smother, the way her laugh was just sharp intakes of breath, over and over like she was hyperventilating. Every detail made my skin crawl. “With Dad.”

Her hand dropped from the curtains and she slammed her fist down on the windowsill so hard the panes shuddered. “Excuse me?” Her neck and cheeks were blotched with red, the crawl of anger immediate. I turned away, disgusted by the plainness of her emotions, how quickly her skin betrayed her .

“Dad took me for a ride,” I said. “Years ago.”

“When?” she asked. “Where was I?”

I shrugged. “Out. It wasn’t a big deal. He took me to Freddy’s for fries.”

“He took you on the highway?” She looked dumbfounded, and the shock on her face was satisfying. When it happened, I’d been desperate for the comfort of her, for the balm of her warm hands on my cheeks and her reassurance that I could never have been hurt, that the threat was imagined. But my father—so calm, so full of bravado—had asked me to keep the day a secret, and this had quieted me. I’d felt brave with the knowledge of our shared adventure, buoyed by childish integrity.

“How old were you?” she asked.

“Like ten,” I lied. “It was a birthday present. He didn’t want to do it.” I pictured my dad across town, working beneath the belly of a car or fitting a plate of glass into a windshield, hands streaked with grease, oblivious to the fallout waiting for him at home. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut, let my mother believe this had been my first ride. It would have been so easy: a long-winded lecture and a week of doubled chores, followed by my father’s quiet admiration of my martyrdom.

My mother turned wordlessly away from me and went upstairs. I waited a few minutes and then followed her to her room, stood in the doorway and watched her as she packed, the phone cradled beneath her chin.

“I’m done with that bastard,” she said into the receiver, twisting the cord around her fingers. Her nails were coated in chipped pink polish, the remnants of a cheap manicure, and I could see the branched rise of veins beneath her skin. “This time for good.” She slammed her suitcase shut and it popped back open; I crossed over to her, ready to kneel on it the way I always did—digging my knees into the coarse vinyl while she slid the zipper shut—but she shooed me away. “Now he’s got Joni lying for him,” she said into the phone, cutting a glance at me and then tossing a pile of clothes on the floor. She closed the suitcase again and this time it stayed shut.

When she’d walked out on my dad before, she’d always taken me with her: bundled me into the car with a mess of our belongings, as if we were escaping from some immediate threat. But this time, she left me behind. She didn’t put a note on the kitchen counter or call my dad at work to tell him what a piece of shit he was; she drove away by herself while I stood bewildered on the front stoop, left to testify in her absence.

That night my dad poured me a shallow glass of beer, and we sat side by side on the couch, eating slimy rounds of bologna wrapped in cheese, watching Three’s Company and wiping the grease from our hands on the undersides of the couch cushions. Perhaps my mother had left me there because she sensed the alliance between my father and me, a fundamental sameness. Maybe I was part of what she was trying to escape.

The first few weeks without her were like a vacation. At night I’d hear the rumble of my dad’s bike in the drive and pull a beer from the fridge, sucking away the foam that bubbled up when I cracked it open for him. Then we’d sit together in the living room, eating delivery pizza or stacks of saltines with slabs of cheese and cold cuts while we played cards, the hum of the TV a constant in the background. I gambled for sips of beer and puffs of my dad’s cigarettes, though he gave me whatever I wanted whether I won or lost.

Sometimes his friends would come over to play poker, and my dad would bring home buckets of wings and lay a square of green felt down on the kitchen table, anchoring it with ashtrays in each corner. The wives never came, perhaps in solidarity with my mother, but I liked it better when I was one of the boys anyway. They lavished me with attention and showed off for me, exhaling wispy rings of smoke, one-upping each other with far-fetched stories.

My dad never seemed to mind the way his friends acted around me. Most of them were his age but they flirted with me like teenagers. “You’re in trouble with this heartbreaker,” they’d say to my dad when I walked into the room. “Get the shotgun ready.”

One night, late into a heated game, my dad’s friend Charlie asked me to sit next to him as his good luck charm. I’d just come in from outside, carrying a fresh case of beer from the shed. “Forget the beer, Joni,” he said, pulling a chair up beside him. “I need your help.” Charlie was my dad’s oldest and closest friend: the best man in my parents’ wedding and my godfather. There was a picture on our mantel of Charlie and my dad wearing matching plaid suits on my parents’ wedding day in Vegas, their hair uniformly shaggy and their mustaches combed straight and long over their upper lips. I put down the case of beer and sat down beside him. He bent his cards toward me and I studied them seriously, then looked up at the other men.

“Should I fold, Joni?” one of them asked. “Blink if I should fold.” Pat was a burly guy with a ponytail that snaked down his back and silver discs the size of pennies nestled into piercings in both ears. Once I’d seen him take one of them out and the skin of his earlobe had drooped limply, the hole gaping open like the neckline of a shirt worn too many times.

“Get the hell out,” Charlie said, lighting a cigarette. “Dirty cheat.”

“Spread the love, man,” Pat said, then grinned at me. “He doesn’t have shit, does he, Joni?”

I smiled back. “I have no idea.”

The men laughed. “Pfft, sure.” Pat tossed his cards on the table. “I’m out.”

Charlie cupped my chin in his hands, holding his cigarette between his teeth. “Look at this face,” he said. “Would she lie? Face of a goddamn angel.” He kissed my forehead.

“That face could start a fucking war,” a guy named Wynne said, taking a long swig of beer, and I looked over at him, surprised. Wynne usually stayed quiet when I was around, never calling me pet names like the others did or joining in when the men chided my father about all the boys he was going to have to run off. Wynne was the youngest of the group, a late addition, and I always assumed that was why he left me alone. The other men had known me for years, had watched me grow up, and many had their own kids around my age. Wynne was ten years older than I was, but the divide felt blurrier, as if the line between playfulness and sincerity could somehow be crossed accidentally.

“Look who’s a fucking poet,” my dad said, ripping open the case of beer I’d brought inside and emptying the warm cans into the cooler beside him. Wynne was both babied and bullied by the older men, teased for the flashy licks of fire he’d stenciled along the flank of his bike and the way he always lost all his poker money in the first half hour. “Wynne blew his load again,” they’d say, dealing him out.

Charlie handed me his beer with a wink and then turned to Wynne. “You got any other brilliant insights, Wynnie, or we gonna play some cards?”

“Hey, now,” my dad said. “No booze for the babies.” He pointed his cigarette at Wynne. “That includes you, kid.”

The men laughed and Wynne shook his head. “Jesus Christ, man.”

Wynne was handsome in a scrubbed, calculated sort of way, his shirts always neatly ironed, his dark hair shaved into a high-and-tight even though he’d been out of the Marines for as long as I’d known him. Hey, hospital corners, I’d heard my dad say to him once, laughing at the way he used Windex to clean the windshield of his bike before a ride. You gonna cry when it’s covered in bird shit and bug carcasses ten minutes from now?

Wynne pulled a beer from the cooler. “Y’all are just jealous I can still get it up. Fuckin’ old timers.”

The game lasted well into the night, and I went up to bed before it was over, though the rise of voices filled the house and made it difficult to sleep. I knew some of the men would still be downstairs in the morning, passed out on the couch and curled into easy chairs, grumbling their way into the kitchen when I started frying bacon and brewing coffee the way my mother always did. Even though she complained about my father’s friends—how she’d find cigarette butts tucked into the planters on our front stoop and empty cans strewn around the house, rings of sweat stamped into the wood of our furniture—she always treated them like family. She had been the first wife to join them, leaving home at seventeen to elope with my dad and ride cross-country on the back of his motorcycle, her whole life packed into an old army duffel. I’d seen pictures of her from back then, so small she looked like a child, sunglasses dwarfing her narrow face, her white-blond hair woven into two thick braids. My father looked huge and avuncular beside her, his arm thrown over her narrow shoulders as they posed before canyons and mountain ranges, the backdrop for their makeshift honeymoon. The version of my mother in those pictures seemed foreign and impossible to me, an elaborate fiction I couldn’t reconcile with the person I knew. Charlie liked to tell the story of how she’d once dug a deer tick out of his shoulder with the post of her earring and then lit the tick on fire, its blood-bloated body popping between her fingers. Our little savage, he’d say with reverence, as if this were the highest of compliments, but I couldn’t picture my careful mother tromping through the woods in the first place. For some reason I found it completely acceptable that my father had lived a series of lives without me, that there were entire parts of him that would be forever unknowable. But it seemed to me that my mother should have always, and only, been my mother.

*

My best friend Lia spent a lot of time at my house during the weeks when it was just my dad and me living there. We had just begun high school and the freedom of having a house to ourselves in the afternoons felt like being on the brink of real life. We’d grab beers from the fridge before my dad got home and drink them on the narrow slant of roof outside my bedroom window, our backs pressed against the house and our legs dangling over the edge.

“Are you sure he doesn’t count them?” Lia asked one afternoon when we were sitting out there after school, our jeans rolled up around our thighs and our legs slathered in baby oil to soak up the last of the summer sun. Her parents were Italian—kind and effusive but very strict, monitoring the snacks we ate and the shows we watched, forcing us outside whenever we tried to hole up in her bedroom for too long.

I shook my head. “Never. He has a stack of cases out back. And he wouldn’t care anyway.”

Lia took a sip and then tucked the can between her browned knees. My legs looked knobby and bluish white beside hers, translucent as paper under the bright sun. Lia was compact and exotic-looking, with thick black curls and eyes the color of celery. She received attention everywhere we went, and I was both jealous of her and proud to be her friend, as if our closeness lent me some adjacent importance. She was modest about her looks, always pulling her hair back and dressing in drab, shapeless clothes, like beauty was something that needed to be tamped down; I was the opposite, knotting T-shirts above my belly button to reveal a pale triangle of skin, spending hours at my mother’s vanity table spinning her curlers into my hair, begging to be noticed.

“I hope your mom never comes back,” Lia said. “This is so cool.” She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and tilted her face toward the sky, heaving a satisfied sigh as if we were vacationers sunbathing on a hotel balcony. She glanced over at me. “I mean, no offense. Your mom’s nice and all.”

I laughed. “My mom’s nice like Elsbeth’s a virgin.” Elsbeth was a girl we were casually friends with at school, though we devoted a great deal of time to making fun of her when she wasn’t around. “It’s too good to be true though. She’ll be back.”

My mother had stopped by with groceries the day before, a sure sign she was softening and would probably return soon. She’d tsked at our empty cabinets as she filled them with food and then set to scrubbing the pile of dishes in the kitchen sink. “Living like bachelors, I see,” she’d said, pushing my stringy, overgrown bangs out of my face. The imposition of her fingers in my hair had felt both agitating and comforting, like the reliable creak of a floorboard in an old house.

“Well, let’s enjoy it while it lasts,” Lia said, wiping a bead of sweat from her upper lip. She’d once confided in me that her mother had to wax the skin above her lip and between her eyebrows every other week, and this had been oddly gratifying to me, as if it leveled the playing field. I was blond as I could be, the whisper of down on my arms and legs like the soft fuzz of a peach and my eyebrows so light I sometimes drew them on. Once in a while I’d notice the shadow of a mustache beginning to appear above Lia’s lip and revel in the embarrassing humanness of it.

We took turns going downstairs to the fridge for more beer, giddy and out of breath when we returned even though there was no one there to catch us, and by the time the sun had set behind the trees we’d had four apiece. I lay sideways along the roof with my head in Lia’s lap, staring up at the purple sky while she recited curse words in Italian.

“Scfaccim,” she said, weaving her fingers through my hair, pulling gently when she came to a tangle. “I think that one means ‘your sister’s ass’. You need a haircut, Joni.”

“I’m feral now,” I said. “I don’t get haircuts.” She laughed. “My mom could cut it for you.”

I clawed at my bangs, pulling them down over my eyes. “I’m growing it out.”

“You look like a crazy person.” And then, after a pause: “You can always come to my house, you know. If you need some, like, ordinary life.”

My limbs felt heavy with booze, and I rolled onto my side, the grit from the shingles digging hard into my thighs.

“Careful,” Lia said, darting her arm out in front of me the way my dad did when we took a sharp curve in his truck. “Try not to die, please.”

“I think I’d make it,” I said, peering over the side of the roof. Below us was a slab of patio my dad had laid years before, red bricks turned the color of rust and edged with crabgrass that snaked between the cracks like veins. “The drunker you are the less likely you are to die,” I said, vaguely recalling something my dad had once said. “Your body’s like a rubber band.”

“Very comforting,” Lia said, standing up and pushing open my bedroom window. “I need to go home.” She ducked down to climb inside and slammed her head against the corner of the window frame. “Fuck,” she said. “I’m wasted.”

I stayed on the roof and watched as she wheeled her bike around the side of the house and climbed on unsteadily. “Try not to die,” I called as she pedaled down the driveway, her ponytail like a puff of black smoke behind her.

I sat back and looked up at the sky, lit from below by the flood of neighborhood lights and starless as a city skyline. It seemed funny to think of all the families tucked into their houses, eating dinner in front of TVs or gathered around tables, scooping mashed potatoes onto plates and indulging the inane details of one another’s days. I felt dizzy and infinite, separate from the quiet tedium of regular life, and even though my head was buzzing, I wanted to feed the feeling. I had begun to understand my father’s attraction to booze, why the promise of a drink fueled him throughout the day, and why its open arms greeted him at home each night; the relief of it ushered me in, simultaneously explaining the world to me and assuring me I didn’t need to care too much about any of it.

That was the first night I tried hard liquor: a splash of my mother’s scotch in a glass and then another and another, swirled with soda and tossed back like aspirin. I replenished the bottle with tap water and slid it back into its place behind the pots and pans, hazily aware that I had crossed some unspoken threshold. I spent the next hour curled over the toilet puking my guts out, but the syrupy warmth of the liquor stuck with me, eclipsing the price I paid for it. By the time my mother moved back in the following week, I’d begun squirreling away shots in empty Coke cans on the floor of my closet, drinking in the dark of my room after my parents had gone to bed, the calm of it washing over me like the relief of a deep, dreamless sleep.