The Witch House

It was across the street, at the bottom of the hill our own house crowned, so she got all our rain whenever it rained. All the neighborhood’s rain, it seemed. It ran down the eaves, down the driveways, down the old pebble road in dozens of little gray rivers, along the cracks and plow scars, as rain in New England does, tracing the paths of neglect. And the water didn’t come alone. It brought sediments: trash mostly, plastic bags and food wrappers and one time a giant used condom that outraged everyone until Mr. Mason finally collected it with a pair of twigs, but also petals and fertilizers and pollen rafts and seeds, all dragged from the thoroughbred gardens and manicured lawns to pool stagnantly at the foundation of her dumpy red ranch. Everything bloomed there. Wildflowers, treelings, vines, vegetables. Even Mrs. Jessup’s prizewinning heirloom roses found their way there one summer from the top of the cul-de-sac. They all bloomed together, one vulgar tangle that lifted our garbage up high for all the street to see. It was an eyesore. Evidence of disregard. These were the Bush years. She was thoroughly hated.

“Why don’t we go there for trick-or-treating?” I asked my brother Chris once, as subtly as possible for an eight-year-old; I already had the vague understanding that I would need to enter the witch house one day, and I would have preferred to do it in a group if possible.

“Cuz she’s a freak,” Chris replied, dangling a caterpillar over a teeming anthill, as he often did in summertime. And I watched, as I would often do; every time an ant pawed at the caterpillar, it would writhe crazily in Chris’s fingers, like lightning had passed through it.

“But isn’t that the best kind of place to go for trick-or-treating? The freaky place?”

“Wrong kind of freaky,” he said, lifting the caterpillar away from the sand mound. An ant had crawled onto the caterpillar, and it was biting at its pudgy flesh, although its jaws were too weak to puncture the hide. Chris held their mass to his eye, watching. “She’s a predator.”

“Like, she goes hunting?”

“No, that’d be awesome. Like she diddles kids, stupid.”

I didn’t know what diddling meant, but I guessed it wasn’t a good thing by Chris’s tone, even though it sounded kind of fun. “How do you know that?”

“Why do you need everything explained to you all the time?”

“Just tell me.”

“Well, she wears a Minnie Mouse bow in her hair even though she’s, like, fifty. Also, she tells Robby whenever he walks by that he can use her sprinkler. And he told me she winks when she says it. Shit . . .” The caterpillar had successfully bucked the ant off, so Chris was lowering it again, biting his lower lip as he dragged its fleshy body through the mob of soldiers. They latched mindlessly at its curves.

“That just sounds nice, though,” I said.

Chris gave me the Older Brother Look. “Yeah, so does candy in a van, gaylord.”

“Mom said not to call me that.”

“Whatever, watch this.”

He dropped the caterpillar on the anthill now, and the teased ants immediately swarmed it. The caterpillar writhed and writhed, but the ants held firm with their jaws, like so many dogs, even though they couldn’t draw blood. I watched in horror as they lifted the caterpillar as one and dragged it, wriggling, down their hole, which had seemed too small for it just a moment before. I watched until it slipped out of sight, and then I watched the darkness, imagining. How they planned to eat something whose skin they couldn’t break I didn’t know. But Chris fed the anthill a caterpillar every time he found one, and they never turned it down.

My first memory is of the witch house. I’m four or five, and I’m in my room, on the top floor and facing the street, which means I have the only window in the neighborhood that can see past the overgrowth into the front yard. My siblings are playing in the grass right below my window, but I can only hear them, not see them. Maybe I’m sick or hurt, but for whatever reason, I’m not with them. I’m alone. So I’m watching the house.

It’s bright July sun outside, and the forsythia encircling her yard is yellow and wiggling in the breeze like a giant fuzzy bug. It’s strange that the witch isn’t out, I’ll later think; if it’s summer and sunny, she is on a rusty beach chair in her underwear, sunning her oily skin like a fat red lizard. But all I see is the yard and the sagging red house behind it, warped by the heat rising off my sill. Shimmering dreamily, a kiss of lipstick on a mirror. There’s smoke coming up from the chimney. The windows are dark.

Then suddenly, the door opens, and a man comes out, and I’m amazed to see that it’s my father. He’s wearing the same clothes he wore to work that morning, but they look different now somehow—looser, almost like he’s shrunk inside them. He looks unhappy. He’s adjusting his necktie incessantly on the stoop, staring down into the rain puddle that’s still there even though it hasn’t rained for weeks. It’s shrunk as well, to about the size of a dinner plate, and it must hold my father’s reflection like a dull headshot. He’s staring at it. He stares at it a long time, adjusting. Then, he steps down, as if to smash it, and I remember him slipping straight through the puddle and vanishing, as if it were a hole out of the universe. The memory ends there, although I remember not trusting that my father was my father for a long time after he walked in for dinner that evening.

There was a game we’d play. When the witch wasn’t outside in her underwear, all the kids in the neighborhood had to take turns running down the driveway to touch her house. Just a poke was enough, although some of the braver kids (especially my brothers, Chris and Nick) liked to impress the hiding crowd by lingering with their fingertips pressed to the splintery wood. There was never any incident, except for the time Marissa Lowe stepped in an underground bees’ nest and had to be taken to the emergency room. So, to keep the game from getting boring, the stakes naturally kept rising. First you had to shove a bottle cap in the mailbox by the front door. Then you had to tear a flower growing through the house’s skirt. The commands intensified. Peel a strip of paint from the siding. Jump three times as hard as you can on the wobbly stoop. Once, we had to lob rocks into the tall, crooked chimney, and somebody’s sailed straight through one of the house’s thin-glassed windows. It left a small, neat hole in the pane, like a bug-chewed leaf. We scattered—breaking windows was a taboo we all recognized. But there was a delicious tension in the waiting afterward. Forcing our parents to punish us on the witch’s behalf would have felt like a cultural checkmate of sorts, like getting Billy Graham to defend Courtney Love’s honor. But the witch must have not made a fuss, because nobody’s parents ever said a word about it. The pane was never replaced.

We were unsatisfied. So my brother Chris proposed the most daring challenge yet: We were to stick our heads through the cat flap at the base of the front door. It was thrilling, but too dangerous. Nobody else bit, leaving my brother, the oldest boy in the neighborhood (now that Nick had aged out of playing), to complete it by himself. He sauntered over, as confidently as ever, but once he stood before the old, sun-pocked door, I could see a pinch developing between his shoulder blades. Somebody hissed a barb, though, and he shook himself and ducked down, level with the cat flap.

I remember the sight of him pressing his hair against the dirty rubber, his butt raised while the crowd watched in silence from the trashy overgrowth. It was a tight fit, and he had to twist and grind to force his skull through the narrow opening. When his head was fully inserted, and all we could see was his vulnerable body kneeling on the stoop, a collective wooziness fell over the onlookers. It looked wrong, him lying there without his head. He’d fallen still—so still, a little white butterfly landed on the exposed small of his back and stayed there, opening and closing its wings in the syrupy sun. We waited. We didn’t know what for—the challenge had been fulfilled. But Chris wasn’t coming back. He wasn’t moving, not at all. He was transfixed. Something, we realized, was happening in there.

All we could do was watch him watch. It was hot in the brush where we crouched. The air was thick and close. The vines clasped us, like veins in the tight skin. An overstuffed womb. Chris still hadn’t moved. Somebody farted. Nobody laughed. I felt a squelch and looked down; my knee was in a dead squirrel.

Then, finally, Chris emerged. He sat there for a moment, watching the cat flap wag in and out of the house’s darkness, as if to burn the image of what he had seen into his mind. There was a glimmer in his eyes, something peeled and raw that made us hesitant to prod him with questions. When we did ask what he had seen, he would not tell us.

“You’re all fucking cowards,” he said eventually. “You don’t get to know.” And he stormed off into the woods, kicking at the leaves with his hands balled in tight fists at his sides.

We weren’t as close after that. The games quickly stopped. And I’d never even managed to get past the lip of the driveway.

The witch had daughters. Two of them, and they looked nothing alike and had appeared as suddenly and scandalously as graffiti, although that happened before my time. There was no father for either, at least as far as Mrs. Jessup could gather, which meant that there was definitively no father. For this reason, we called them the antichrists. One was tall and spindly with straw hair, and the other was short and dumpy and coal-haired. They didn’t go out much. And when they did, they would not play with the neighborhood children—not even my sister Suze, who had a face like sunshine and would go on to spend her life rehabilitating turtles that had been struck by cars. In fact, the antichrists, who were only two years apart, didn’t even talk amongst themselves. They would emerge from the ranch separately, both in the same homemade clothes and with the same dazed look behind their eyes, and they would do nothing at all but walk. Silently, with hurried, measured steps. They walked in opposite, apparently preassigned directions, so that if one exited the house before the other returned, there would be no chance of them accidentally falling in step. If their paths did happen to cross, there was no exchange of words, or smiles, or even a sisterly glance as they continued tracing the neighborhood, one clockwise and one counterclockwise. They were like strangers in a crowd. It was alarmingly odd behavior, especially to our family, in which each sibling combination had its own secret handshake.

“God, they must hate each other,” my mother would say, frowning, every time she caught the spectacle from the kitchen window. “What that woman must do to them.”

The antichrists got older. By the time I was fourteen, they had both been out of the house for several years, though they were such non-presences in the neighborhood that I had honestly forgotten they’d even existed in the first place. Mrs. Jessup’s intelligence was that the older one had gone to a state college. The younger one had gone off to Hollywood to pursue acting and was apparently in the background of some major insurance commercials. I couldn’t quite believe either story—those fates seemed too ordinary for such alien pariahs. Purely uninteresting—to the point that the antichrists became interesting again, and we began to see them as escaped cultists who’d been normal people all along under the thumb of some satanic seducer. They had everyone’s pity. We wished them well and forgot them.

And then one day, the older girl—now the older woman—was out walking the street again. The same tight, urgent steps, circling the neighborhood like some flightless vulture. It was as if she’d never left. And then, a few months later, the younger daughter was out walking too, still silently, still in the opposite direction. I was shocked by how much they’d aged in so little time, out in the real world, away from their mother. Grayed hair, crow’s-feet, a limp. They hugged themselves while they walked now, as if they expected the ground to give out underneath them at any moment. Impossibly, it was almost like they’d caught up to their mother in years; the witch hadn’t aged a day since my earliest memories of her—still plump, still radiant, sunbathing behind her trash-capped overgrowth while her daughters circled whatever drain she seemed to be clogging.

Obviously, their return was much discussed.

“Doesn’t surprise me at all,” my brother Nick said, home for Christmas from teaching English in Japan. He was a year younger than the older antichrist, and he looked strong and lean from a diet of edamame and sashimi. His worm-veined arms were folded while he watched through the dining room window, fingers tapping at his ashy elbows. I was fourteen, and his body intimidated me now. He looked sculpted, like tiny insects were eating his soft spots from the inside.

“You thought they’d be back?” I asked.

He nodded gravely. “Knew it. People like that don’t survive on their own.”

I watched the antichrists trudging past one another in the snow, holding themselves so tightly, then I glanced up at Nick. I’d missed him, his surety. It wasn’t easy to reach someone in Japan. He was the middle child, the brightest and hardest working, and Mom had been worried about how he’d do without us—worried he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t clean, he’d get lonely—but it seemed like he’d slid into his new culture as easily as if he’d been born there. He knew all the etiquette, ate only with chopsticks, had a Japanese girlfriend who looked so small and crushable under his arm—“Mari-chan,” he called her casually (I felt like he was talking about a cat whenever he talked about her, which wasn’t often). It was all so natural for him, like a fish who’d been dumped into an ocean on the other side of the world and carried on like nothing had happened. Water is water. Salt is salt. Man is man.

“Speaking of surviving on their own,” our mother said, and we already knew she was talking about Chris. “Anyone know how my second youngest is getting on in . . . where is he now?”

“Borneo,” I replied. The night after he graduated high school—a couple years after the cat-flap incident—Chris snuck out of the house and never came back. It took months to track him down (he’d finally caved and accessed an ATM in Lima), and he refused to talk to any of us. Apparently, he was now trying to break into reality television as a primitivist blogger; he would travel to remote, wild locations, then use his smartphone to document himself surviving via only Stone Age and earlier methods. He had a decent, but not great, following. His most-watched clips were of him getting medevacked. It had been three years since he left, but everyone still acted as if he’d run off to the casinos for an illicit long weekend.

“Not eating bugs again, is he?” my father asked from the next room over. He was scrolling on his phone in his recliner, as he always ended up doing at gatherings. Down, down, down the feed with his flicking thumb.

“It’s good protein,” Nick said, watching the antichrists pass again, this time through the trail the other one had made in the snow. His jaw was set and his arms were still folded, the veins jumping against his skin with each beat of his heart.

“Honestly,” our mother sighed, “it’s like he can’t get far enough away from us.”

That same holiday season, right before New Year’s, I went for a walk late at night. Everyone else (except, of course, for Chris, who I had confirmed was indeed eating grubs on a live stream that evening) was sleeping off the night’s wine. I couldn’t sleep, though. The return of the antichrists had upset something in me. Everyone else seemed so satisfied by their failure at freedom, as if it had fulfilled some classic script. But for me, the things that had changed in the daughters (their faces, their aspects) coupled with the things that hadn’t (their silence, their solitariness) struck me as deeply, unprecedentedly tragic. I’d known, of course, that people could get worse with time, that not every life was a triumph, that not all efforts merited trophies—being the youngest in a large competitive family ensured I knew that much. But it had never occurred to me that a person could stay the same. That, on an essential level, we are who we are, and we’ll always slide back down to where the rain pooled when we were young. It disturbed me. Tadpoles staying tadpoles. Our endeavors were supposed to change us, either for better or worse. Stagnation was a destiny I hadn’t yet imagined.

So I went for a walk. It was a clear, starry night, the barren branches and my own hazy breaths the only things obstructing the winter constellations. Brilliant, ancient light. I tried to breathe as shallowly as possible. There was snow on the street, unplowed, so even though I was looking up while I strolled, I soon found myself walking in one of the sisters’ ruts. I wasn’t alone in this herding; in the packed snow, I saw many footprints of various sizes. Coyotes, deer, bobcats, and now me, my own feet joining a wild pack in space, if not time. Savage creatures. I had never seen any of these animals in my neighborhood, and it thrilled me to know they existed, to see my own footprints squashing out their own. The cold and the night tickled my lungs. I realized I had never felt even remotely alive before.

Somehow, I found myself standing before the witch house. I must have followed the sisters’ path unconsciously, right to their front door. I was scared now—far too scared to move. My eyes took in every detail before me, things I had seen countless times through the distant lens of my bedroom window but which seemed surreal now and loomed like human-size amoebas. The old bird nests clogging the gutters, the tilted metal 8 over the door, the rain-swelled side boards rejecting their nails, as skin rejects splinters. All illuminated yellowly by a single porchlight, which was a fake candle with a glass flame that never went out—not once in all my years of spying. Around me, the overgrowth rustled in the winter wind, dead and dry. The cat flap fluttered at the base of the door.

And then I was kneeling. I believe I had every intention of looking inside— the way Chris had when he was around my age. When he had changed. But right as my fingers touched the flap, I heard movement in the snow behind me. I looked, and I so expected to see a wolf or a bear or some other killer creature that it took me a moment to register that it was one of the antichrists. The younger one—the actress. She looked like a scarecrow, standing tall and gaunt in the overgrowth, her straw-like hair blowing sideways in the icy breeze. The starlight caught glinting streaks below her eyes. She was crying silently.

It quickly became clear that she wasn’t going to say anything. I had to come up with an explanation on the spot.

“I think my cat ran inside here.”

She did not respond at first. My eyes fell in embarrassment, and I noticed that she was clutching her stomach, which was protruding a bit grotesquely on her otherwise diminutive frame. She was pregnant.

“What does it look like.”

I had never heard her voice before; it was thin and distant, as if she were whispering from the bottom of a well. It hung delicately in the air, and I found myself hesitating to respond, reluctant to destroy her sound with my sound.

“Black and white. Small.” I didn’t know how I was lying so easily.

We stared at each other for a moment. This was the closest we had ever been, yet there was something achingly familiar in her eyes, I thought. Deep knowing. I felt like we had survived a great violence together, hundreds of years ago.

“Wait here,” she said then, and she shuffled past me and slipped through the door, which she opened wide enough only to squeeze her swelled waist through. A smell like crushed flowers drifted out. Sweet and glandular and overwhelming.

I waited for a long time. I don’t know why—there was no cat. I had successfully diverted her. All I had to do was run home, and nothing would happen, as with the broken window years before. But I stayed, practically prostrate, listening to the muffled movements within the belly of the house. The slush had melted through to my knees. My hands were red with cold.

Then, suddenly, the flap pushed toward me, and out came a cat, exactly as I had described. It was tiny, a kitten really, with three Rorschach black spots staining its otherwise white body. It was mewing, already shivering out in the cold. The antichrist did not come out again.

I took that cat, even though I was allergic, and cared for it for many years. Her name was Cow. We lived on Cow Lane.

When I reached high school, I learned that there was a certain drama linking the witch house and my own, but it took until spring to find out what it was. Half a year of sidelong looks and poorly hidden muttering had gotten me down, and I hadn’t made any friends, so at my father’s urging, I followed in my brothers’ footsteps and joined the baseball team. I wasn’t good, and I was tolerated only on account of my brothers’ legacy. But then one day while I was watching varsity practice, one of the captains (who had been a sophomore when Chris was a senior on the team) finally took pity on me. Sweaty and dusty, he sat next to me on the bench, and after a few moments of breathy silence, he started talking without looking at me. He got straight to the point: Apparently, it was town-wide knowledge that both my brothers had lost their virginity to the antichrists. When I asked what the basis for that rumor was, the senior looked down and said that Chris had admitted it himself. It was, apparently, a sexual rite of passage in our neighborhood—but he didn’t know anything about that, he quickly added. All he knew was what Chris had told him. He got up then, dusted his white pants off, and jogged back to the pitcher’s mound, where the other boys swarmed.

I was shocked. I had never once heard either of my brothers talk about the antichrists in sexual terms. The witch, from time to time, yes—and only because of her lingerie lounging and rumored pedophilia—but never the daughters. I felt nauseated. Violated. I couldn’t imagine perfect Nick, of all people, wasting his virginity on someone like that. It was more plausible that Chris had lied—it was like him to make up a story to gross out strangers, and it was also like him to implicate Nick to desecrate our older brother’s preening image. But how could I disprove this story? I was the youngest, the only one left in the neighborhood, and I felt it was my duty to clear my family’s name before I was gone too.

When I got home that evening, I watched the strolling antichrists through different eyes. I found myself trying to be aroused by them. It felt sick and creepy.

Both my sisters happened to be visiting home, and they were in the kitchen at that moment. Karla, who was the oldest of us, had just had a baby, so she was frequently home for the free childcare (and, I imagined, to take a break from her husband, whom she had been with since high school and none of us liked). She was resting now, eating a veggie spread at the island while my mother was with little Tommy at the store. Suze was cooking dinner.

“What do you guys think of the antichrists?” I asked suddenly.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw them trade a quick glance. “I don’t know,” Karla said then, after an awkward pause. “I guess it’s sad they’re both still home.”

“But you guys are home too.”

“He’s got us there,” Suze said, flipping sausage chunks in a pan. She was bone thin; I was pretty sure she ate real meals only when she didn’t have to pay for food. The turtle clinic paid poorly, and her last boyfriend had devastated her bank account.

“Oh, come on, you know it’s different,” Karla said. “We’re just visiting.”

“Well, what were they like in high school?” I asked.

Another awkward pause.

“I can hardly remember, honestly,” Karla said, prodding a dark bruise on her forearm. “Never had a class with them. They just disappeared in the crowd.”

“He should ask Nick.” Suze giggled, and I did not miss the sharp glance from Karla this time.

“Why?” I pressed.

“No reason, she’s being stupid.”

I stared out the window, watching the empty street. “Well, I’ve heard rumors . . .”

“What, you believe rumors now? You’re gonna have a real hard time in high school then, kiddo.”

I was quiet for a while. Suze’s clunky stirring was the only sound in the whole neighborhood. I watched the younger antichrist pass again. If she’d ended up having her baby, she hadn’t kept it. There were no children in the neighborhood anymore.

“Do you think we know their dad?” I asked, without meaning to.

The stirring stopped. Then it started again.

“I sure hope not,” Karla muttered.

It was the baseball team, oddly enough, that finally gave me my excuse to enter the witch house. We were to sell cheesecakes in order to fund the varsity team’s trip to Maine for the New England championship, which I thought was a cruel labor to ask of shy nth-stringers like myself, who were probably better off focusing their efforts on geometry homework. But I had a freezer full of cheesecakes at home now, and while other kids’ parents had agreed to buy half their load to save them the trouble, my father insisted that I exercise my business acumen to get rid of them all, even though it was his fault I had this chore in the first place.

“It’ll teach you valuable life skills,” he said, adjusting his tie in the mirror before heading off to work. “Chris and Nick had to do it. Why shouldn’t you?”

So I made the rounds. I still didn’t have friends to pity-buy any. Other players had gotten to my teachers first. Karla bought one, and I didn’t even bother asking poor Suze. Nick and Chris were on the other side of the planet. All that was left was to circle the neighborhood, like one of the antichrists. This worked surprisingly well (Mrs. Jessup—God bless her—bought three cakes after insisting on feeling my nonexistent muscles first). I still had five cakes left to unload, though. And the only house remaining was the witch house.

She was in the yard. It was a sunny day out, the first after a week of heavy spring rain, so her beach chair was in the center of a large reflective pool. It held the sky and the flowers and the garbage and us within its frame, like a perfect, upside-down double of the neighborhood. I at the edge, and she at its nexus, lounging. Both its nadir and peak. She was in her underwear, reading a magazine, only now she was staring at me, her eyes blue candles set deep in her skull. Her bow flapped gently in the breeze, a giant red butterfly resting on her head.

“It’s you,” she said.

“Would you like to buy a cheesecake?”

I could barely hear my voice—it was like the underwater me had spoken. At some point, I had started walking forward. My footsteps disturbed the glass-like surface of the pool, which got deeper and deeper with each step in her direction. My socks were soaked through.

She looked at me, a playful curl developing at the edge of her mouth. I looked down, so it was as if I were talking to her rippling reflection instead of her. With one finger, she scratched at the waistband of her bottoms.

“You want to give me cake?”

I swallowed. The boxes felt heavy in my arms. “Yes.”

“I don’t have my wallet on me, you know.”

“Oh.”

She yawned, arching her back as she stretched in her chair. I could hear her slick skin peel away from the plastic. “But if you wanted to,” she said, through a groan, “you could grab it for me from the kitchen counter. The door’s always open, you know.”

“I, uh.”

“It’s a small home. You’ll find it.”

This closed the discussion, and she went back to her magazine.

I sloshed toward the house. My shoes were heavy with water. Water bugs fled before my ripples, some taking flight and some succumbing to the waves. I saw Mrs. Jessup’s roses shivering at the lip of the puddle, pink and plump in the thorny thicket, like lost ladies-in-waiting. But I was really watching the house. Strange noises came from within. A high electric whine and a cow-ish lowing. The door gave way at the slightest touch of my hand, onto a dark, fragrant pit. No light escaped it. I couldn’t see anything until I stepped inside.

It was a cramped space. Many lives overflowing onto one another. Books and laundry and dishes and ants, all stirred around by the ten or so cats lolling about in the errant pools of sun that forced their way in through holes chewed into the walls. The antichrists were here. One was mending a man’s shirt with a machine at a table, and the other was stirring broth in an ancient-looking pot, standing at an angle to accommodate the toddler slung on her hip. It was a girl. She was pudgy, her thighs bulging larva-like out of a tight green onesie, and she stared at me with glazed, unpleasant eyes. She seemed drugged.

There was a man too. Mr. Jessup. He was snoring on a sagging futon, in nothing but strained white briefs. He seemed too big for the room but also smaller than I remembered him, as if he had shrunk down to enter the home but was in the process of growing again. One of his hands was clamped around the older daughter’s thigh while she ran her fingers by the sewing machine’s undulating needle. Her skin cratered around his digging fingertips. He seemed to be in the middle of a very bad dream.

Neither sister acknowledged me, nearly in trances, ensconced in the safety of their tasks. As if they were afraid I’d notice them if they changed. Only the toddler reacted to my presence. The fog over her eyes seemed to lift, and then she started to cry. Big red-faced shrieks. No one did anything to stop her. The machine kept running. Mr. Jessup didn’t stir.

I found the wallet, fat and shiny on the kitchen counter like an old, legless toad, and I carried it back outside atop the boxes of cake, the toddler’s wails following me out. The light was dazzling, after the darkness. I stumbled once, in a deep pothole hidden under the shining water. My ankle was sprained, although I didn’t know it yet; my baseball season was over. A few people would sign my cast. One would become my first boyfriend.

“Did you find it?” she asked me, still reading her magazine. Just passing the time.

“Yes.”

“Wonderful. And how are your brothers doing—Nick and Chris? The little conquistadors,” she said fondly, now rooting through the many bills in the wallet.

“Fine.”

“And your father? I miss him.”

I didn’t respond to that.

“His girl misses him too.”

I didn’t respond to that either.

She looked up at me then. There was a big wind, and the butterfly bow on her head flapped hard and fast, like it would get away if it weren’t tied to her hair, and then the wind calmed and it was calm too. She was smiling underneath it, underneath all of it, very warmly and very kindly, and I knew her then, knew she would give anything asked of her, take anything given to her. Anything at all. I just had to ask. I stood silent. She held out a hundred-dollar bill.

“I’ll take five cakes, please,” she said. “One for each of us.”

Read more from Issue 22.2.