I think if she felt any shred of tenderness toward him these tasks would be lightened, but her old histories with him seem bitterly fixed despite the straitened circumstances of his age. As for me, I don’t feel much for him because I can’t form any sense of a character beneath the cranky surface at all. I don’t seem to exist for him, and I am far too much of an aesthete, at fourteen, my sensibilities too delicate to go investigating who he is. I’ve seen him, through the half-open louvers, changing the undergarments, seen him, in fact, masturbating, an ancient man bent over himself, intent, on his pale back the skin cancers blooming in black profusion—melanomas, like my father’s? His body’s a disaster, but somehow he seems indomitably tough, resistant, fierce. He’s a murderer, after all, who lived for years on squirrel.

My mother comes into my room, reeling, upset, possessed by some information she can’t contain. I put down my book (Oscar Wilde’s Salome with the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations? Auntie Mame or Little Me? I’ve become a veritable expert at scouting out anything in the library with a whiff of the lavender about it, a detective fueled by need. I’ve found an amazing book of beefcake photos of bodybuilders called Here’s Power for You, pornography disguised as exercise, but that’s for secret perusal. The overdue fees accrue.) She says, You don’t know what’s happened, I can’t say it, it’s terrible. I say, What? She says, It’s too awful to talk about it. I say, What? And she steadies herself as if she were nauseous, as if even to utter the words made something actual to her, something she doesn’t want to be real. But she can’t keep it in, either. She says, Your sister—intake of breath, eyes turning to the wall—has had an abortion.

And then she turns right around to face the little bathroom adjacent to my bedroom and vomits into the sink, her response that visceral, as if the idea of losing a baby were enough to send some tremor through her flesh that she couldn’t control, wrenched as she is in body and soul.