Of course, Nathan would have told everyone in his lab about his latest bout of martyrdom at the hands of his unstable daughter. He’d stopped teaching eight years ago, but he still kept his lab, still dabbled in experiments, still had a couple of graduate students, faithful unto death, as Shirley put it. They work with the lab mice but they don’t understand they’re lab rats themselves, clinging to your father like a piece of decaying driftwood far out to sea.

Shirley had studied English and drama when she’d been an earnest undergraduate, and even after decades of vodka she could still quote reams of poetry. Most often Amy Lowell, ending with “Christ! What are patterns for?” so many times that Sonia and her older brothers used to chant it as a chorus to any complaint.

Like the night that Larry took the car without permission and drove to Kansas City with his buddies to watch the Smashing Pumpkins at the Starlight Theatre. Larry drove off the road on their way home. He’d been picked up by the sheriff for drunk driving, and the car had to be towed out of the drainage ditch. Somehow a branch had lanced the radiator.

Nathan was predictably furious, so Shirley took refuge in mordant laughter. When Nathan finished with his tirade, Larry and Sonia and Stu shouted, “Christ! What are patterns for?” which of course made Nathan and Shirley even more furious. It seemed strange that Nathan had lived to be eighty without popping a blood vessel.

And then there was the night that Sonia— That saga had ended not with Amy Lowell but CheeseNuts. Whose name was on the bottles she’d picked up from sweaty Dan Bors. Twenty years later and she was back where she’d started.

*  *  *

Sonia October 2016

I don’t know what is real, / I can’t touch what I feel, / And I hide behind the shield of my illusion

She’d been reading old copies of the Douglas County Herald on the group home’s computer when she saw the report of the air force sale of the land east of the silo. It wasn’t reported like that, not as a story: United States Air Force sells sacred ground to greedy grubbing corporation. It was a report in the legal notices: sale of 15 acres, lat: 38.946021, long: −95.120369, from a line extending from one-sixteenth mile north of North 1420 Road and so on.

Sonia knew those numbers, knew every inch of that land, every way of describing it. In his sympathetic moments, Randy tried to get her to admit how exhausting such knowledge must be: It weighs you down, Sonia, keeps you from moving on.

She didn’t want to move on. She’d seen Nathan, she was sure she’d seen him, heard him yelling at Matt: You subhuman specimen, how could you do this to me? Do you hate me that much?