When she was in high school, her father would disappear. Lock himself into the Chinese noodle factory for days and sometimes weeks, leaving her his checkbook and a small envelope of cash to pay the bills. Mary would order pizza every night and watch television, hating him, then fall asleep with a knife under her pillow because she was afraid of being alone. Eventually her father would emerge and drive her to the factory to show her what he’d done. He always asked the same question: What does it make you think of? And Mary would say whatever was in her head at that moment: an orange, a bluebird, a baseball. Sometimes she would still be angry and the images would be different: a rope, a gun, a killer standing in the doorway. He never questioned what she said. He’d make a note with his pencil, and then they would go to a diner and get bacon and eggs and waffles with whipped cream, anything she wanted.

Mary wakes Mercedes, slips her a check at the door.

“How is he?” She hates having to ask this.

“Fine, fine,” Mercedes says, but she will not look Mary in the face. She is busy folding the check into a zippered pocket in her bag. “Three shots. Two movements. I washed him. He’s clean.” Mercedes pulls down the sleeves of her sweater. She does this every day when she leaves. Mary watches her walk down the driveway. Before she gets into her car, she blesses herself.

“I’ve found the answer,” her father says.

“To what?” Mary asks.

“My body.”

“Oh, Pop. Not tonight.”

“I heard about it on the radio,” he says. “This fellow replaces body fluids with plastic—silicone rubber and resin. You last forever.”

He hands her the catalog. Inside are photographs of cadavers, partially dissected, posed in the style of great works of art. There is a Mona Lisa in a wig and wraps, her eyelids removed, the muscles of her lips exposed. There is Michelangelo’s David split down the middle: one side ligaments and tendons, and the other pure bone.

“How did you get this?”

“I called the artist. He sent it to me.”

Mary flips through, page after page. The bodies have been completely deconstructed. She looks at her father’s hands resting on the blanket, and thinks of them braiding her hair for school, filling her lunch box, touching her forehead when she had a fever, jumping rope with her, throwing stones for hop-scotch.

“I’m not going to go see you in some freaky gallery!”

“It’s too late,” says her father. “I’ve already signed the papers.”

With the North American mammals, Everett exercised a different set of brushstrokes. Mary notices this first with the mustangs. There is a certain kind of bristle to their coats. She touches the marks on their foreheads—splashes of the same white in the river they are drinking from.