We’d all laughed, even my mother. Mr. Walker did look a bit like Elmer Fudd, with bright plaid pressed shirts and khakis pulled up too far. Marie performed Stepford Wives imitations of Minnie Walker. She’d put her hair in curlers like an old-fashioned set, stuff her bosom with soccer balls so that she nearly fell over, wear a full-length apron and apply bright-red lipstick all over her mouth, smearing outside the lines. She’d carry an imaginary tray across our living room with a glass of lemonade: “I’m so busy with my Christianity and charity, dearest Harry Walker, I nearly forgot your refreshment. You must be so tired, sitting on your ass cutting these grass blades. And it must be so exhausting for you, poor Harry, to look across at that disgraceful house and those disgraceful people.” She made us all laugh with abandonment. Thomas laughed so hard that no sound came out of his mouth. I knew the grass bothered him the most, that he felt it should be him cutting it. But we didn’t have a lawn mower and we’d never gotten my father’s machines back from his cousin in the Bronx. We’d never asked, and he never offered. We didn’t get anything of my father’s back except his truck, which my mother sold, and his body. I wondered what had happened to all the cards and gifts we’d sent him. All the things we’d made him at school. I knew he kept them. I felt sick, imagining his cousin just throwing out his stuff.

I watched Marie rolling up the garage door in the headlights of the car. Now, with her head shaved on one side, she couldn’t do Minnie Walker’s curlers anymore. Marie stepped to the side of the garage, and my mother drove in, pulled up the handbrake, switched off the engine, grabbed her pocketbook from the floor of the front seat, and went straight into the house and up to her bedroom.