Jett sat back, nodding as her hand began to run lovingly up and down his thigh. He noticed the lack of interest in his pants. Instead, a stinging sensation was building behind his eyes and a knot tied and retied itself in his throat. Roni’s hand kept on, sliding up and down his leg, occasionally squeezing his knee. He closed his eyes and let himself imagine that it was not Roni’s hand but his mother’s. He pictured her long fingers, the nails painted with a clear, bitter-tasting polish meant to keep her from biting them. He would open his eyes and there she would be, at last, smiling at him—the familiar mole above her left eyebrow, the smell of her perfume wafting from her orange cardigan. She would laugh about what had happened with Roni. “Don’t worry,” she would tell him. “It’ll make a great story one day. Just wait and see.” And then she would get up, smooth her cotton skirt, and kiss him on the top of his head, her gold Star of David necklace bumping against his nose. She would go check on his father, that old lump. He never could be trusted in the kitchen. Remember the time he put salt in everyone’s cocoa? Or when he stuck a whole corncob down the disposal? Undoubtedly, he was causing a scene at the stove. Probably burning the hotdogs, like always.

Queen of England

Dewy and I were not good sons. At home, we sliced the drapes to make togas and blasted birds with pellet guns we weren’t supposed to have. To make our mother nervous, we pressed our skulls to the microwave door and licked the sticky bottoms of our sneakers. At the grocery store, we fondled bananas and played catch with bags of rice that always, to her horror, broke open in a grand display of her poor parenting. Sometimes, if we were especially bored, we slipped notes into strangers’ palms that read: “HELP US, WE’VE BEEN KIDNAPPED!” Everywhere we went, people looked at our mother as if she were trapped in a cage with a pair of rabid hyenas. In return, she treated us like princes. She had nobody else to love.

She was a small woman, topping out at five feet on a good day, and often complained that she did not have more hands than children. Our father fled when I was just a bun in the oven—to do what, we were never told. I guessed piracy, but Dewy told me it probably involved another woman or vodka or maybe both. I preferred my version, picturing him with a peg leg and an eye patch. My greatest hope was that he’d return to Wichita with a colossal black beard and a treasure chest full of gold and put us up in one of the mansions out by the racquet club. We’d crank the heat in the winter and the AC in the summer, name-brand turkey would appear in our lunchboxes. Dewy said I might as well sit around and wait for Jesus.