Perhaps the question was also tormenting our mother, because an entire week passed before she spoke to us again. We were sitting in the living room. Dewy was reading volume two of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I was striking and then blowing out matches, trying to get the house to smell like a campfire. Mom was cross-legged on the floor, writing a letter—to whom, we’ll never know. She didn’t often write letters, but it was something she took up on occasion, like baking bread or rearranging the furniture. There’d been times like this before, days when she retreated into the privacy of her mind and we’d have to say her name four or five times in a row—Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom—in order to get a response. But this time was different. This time, she’d gone somewhere deeper, somewhere we couldn’t reach. She put down her pen and ran a finger across the coffin table, where Dewy and I had sketched our names. She looked up at us, as if struck by an idea.

“Have I been a good mother?” she asked.

Dewy and I stopped what we were doing. I could see that Dewy was preparing an analysis of exactly how, according to Western science and history and philosophy, she had failed us, and so I said, “Yes. You’ve been the best.” I knew it was not completely true—she had, after all, brought the Weenie into our lives, and for this, Dewy would never forgive her, which meant that I too could never forgive her. At least not fully. But who was I to kick her when she was already down? Who was I to be greedy with my love? I’d learned at least this much.

Bald Bear

It was understood that Maxine and I were waiting for men. It was the dead center of July and the Kansas sun was poised like the face of a hammer ready to strike. In the lake, diapers surfaced jellyfish style, and children war painted with sunscreen pressed bottle caps to their ears, listening for an ocean they’d likely never seen. Maxine and I started rubbing sunscreen onto each other; there was nothing sorority girl about it. For the type of girls we were—both from hearty, Irish stock, our bodies like two peeled potatoes—the application of sunscreen was more of a medical procedure than anything else.

Maxine was working on my shoulders when a pair of men appeared before us, one holding a fishing pole, the other a hotdog. We were familiar with their kind: late-twenty-somethings who wore cutoffs and toted red Playmate coolers filled with Hamm’s. They came to the lake to drink and fish and sneak glances at girls in bikinis. The fisherman’s fly was down, and he was severely sunburned on his cheeks and nose, as if someone had taken a frying pan to his face. The hotdog eater was better: tall and tanned with a lumberjack beard. He was attractive—genuinely attractive—and seemed completely unaware of it.

“How we doing, ladies?” the fisherman asked, speaking through a cheek of chew. Either something blew into the hotdog eater’s eye, or he winked at me.