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Family and Relationships
Last Call
I was lucky. I didn’t have a physical dependency on alcohol. I just drank to be like everyone else at the party. Faced with a choice between dying young in a tangle of smashed things or pulling it together to have a regular life, I chose the regular life. I traded living on the edge for just living.
October 2014
Shelter
Wilbur hadn’t ended up at the shelter because he’d drunk himself there, or squandered his money, or been caught cheating on a disability claim. No, Wilbur had ended up at Bartlett House because he’d never married or had children, and kin was how a man like Wilbur made it through the final years of his life.
October 2014
How To Hit Your Dad
It never occurred to me when I was little that there was a world in which dads did not come home from the bar and beat up their oldest sons. It was totally normal, you know what I mean?
October 2014
Step Nine
I knew early on that Max was special. She was a taut-bodied pit-bull mix but without the meanness, even in appearance, that her breed is known for. She must have been the kind of dog who rolls over as soon as she sees you so you can pet her belly, like in the photograph on your flier.
October 2014
The Empty Dress
March sky the color of smoke; / Carla’s red hair blazed, a torch song of hopeless hope / as she powered her wheelchair through the Vintage Fair / to help me find a wedding dress.
September 2014The Life She’s Been Missing
She does not yet know the thirty-six-year-old Addie who will become managing editor of Nylon magazine, the forty-four-year-old first-time novelist, the sixty-two-year-old breast-cancer survivor.
September 2014
Tornado Season
I’m scared now because so little of the Darren I’ve always known seems to remain in his weakened body. I can’t remember ever having been more frightened by a change in someone. I understand that we should expect “personality inconsistencies,” as the emergency-room doctor said, but it’s as if an entirely new brother came home with us from the Wabash County Hospital.
September 2014
The Winter Garden
The winter garden is a good place to incubate the idea of a child. It is all potential, like an empty house waiting to be furnished. Just as I imagined the chickens laying, the now-dormant bulbs blossoming, and the grapes ripening in the sun, so too I dreamed of buying maternity clothes and onesies, feeling euphoric after giving birth, and feeding an infant from my own body. Even the prospect of sleepless nights with a crying baby seemed enticing.
September 2014
The Refrigerator
A mustard-colored declaration of love, holy pink boxes of leftover delicacies, long-necked brown beer bottles
September 2014
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