The dandelions were concentrated around some splintered wooden pallets and scattered through patches of grass and dock leaves. She pulled two more bags out of her pocket: one for the leaves, which she’d cook with the other greens, and one for the blossoms, which we’d use to make wine. It sounded like something out of an old-fashioned fairy tale, something a goblin would drink or that a woodsman would offer the miller’s daughter. We only picked the ones with fully opened flowers; she said it was impolite to bother the closed ones. She pinched the base of the stems with her long fingers, deftly, like someone playing a harp. It didn’t occur to me then that we must have looked like the strangest kind of bums, not even sifting through trash but gathering nature’s rejects on a worthless plot of land through a minor city’s smog. I ignored the clumps of half-pulped newspaper and cigarette butts and beer cans, and focused instead on the odd ladybug and the butterflies and the bees; I tried my best to stay in the story, a knee-high apprentice to the wise old master. Once we’d picked all we could within the bounds of fairyland propriety, my mother straightened up and walked us home with an air of confidence she could put on easily back then.

The little house we lived in only had one bedroom so I had to be sure not to get up at night in case my parents were having sex on the couch, but I liked that the kitchen opened onto a small backyard. We sat outside as the sun went down and separated the flowers from the stems, rinsed them, and let the water run off into the grass. She ground the mint down into a paste for the pesto while I boiled the rice. She sautéed the greens while I tossed the salad. And then my dad came in. He slammed the front door, and then the bedroom door. My mother stopped and listened. The bedroom door slammed again.

He charged into the kitchen, almost frantic with confusion. “Where are all the boxes?”

“Boxes?”

I knew what he meant, and I knew I had to answer him, but it was hard to think. “Outside,” I coughed finally.

“Where?” He glanced out the window to the backyard.

“No, I mean, you told me to take the trash out last night.”

“You threw them away?”

“I thought you told me to.”

“So I tell you to do something, and you can’t use any common sense? Do you think moving boxes are free, that I have nothing but time and money to get new boxes?”

“I didn’t think . . .”

“That’s right, you didn’t. You just don’t think, do you? Huh?”