I don’t get it. I’m a little excited by the thought of my sister doing something so transgressive, but I don’t really understand why it’s so horrifying, why does my mother find this so unthinkable? It seems to me she doesn’t even like children, not really; oh, she sentimentalizes the babies we’ve seen along the highway south of Nogales, the beautiful Mexican kids for whom she brings along tins of cookies when we take a trip below the border, and she likes to send gifts home with Alicia, who comes every week to vacuum and scrub, little presents for the muchachos with their darkly gleaming eyes. But something about it makes me nervous—because these children are in fact remote from her, romanced in some fantasy of a simple life? Exotic, their physical beauty enhances her idea of their virtue, their unsophisticated goodness, their unquestioning and admirable faith. Or maybe I judge her too harshly. Do they stand for the grandchildren who seem to be lost to her? Perhaps it’s simply that Mexico isn’t so far from the East Tennessee of the 1920s: a rural, deeply connected family life she remembers and can’t have again, though she’s chosen to flee it, though she hated it, too. Don’t we always want it back, a little, the old life we’ve run away from?

Though our latest encounter with that old life has proved entirely disastrous; some irreparable contretemps between my mother and Orlin has happened while I am at school. By evening she is refusing to go on, refusing to. My father and Orlin have words, the old man waves his cane threateningly, and before the night is over my father’s called Uncle Clarence, and after dire and absolute refusals Clarence has agreed to take Orlin in, at least until the old man can be placed in a nursing home. Miserable tension, the next few days, my mother tight-mouthed and quiet. She brings the old man trays of grits or tapioca, which he refuses to even look at. The ancient bags are packed again, bound tight with their leather straps. Orlin puts on his traveling clothes, including a tie which must have seen World War I if it’s seen a day, and my parents drive him to the bus station. Returning home, my mother opens the spare room, thinking after a few days of airing she’ll reclaim it as her studio, and then she finds what he’s left for her, coiled in the green vinyl seat of the rocking chair: an extraordinarily large pile of shit, even more fragrant than his signature musk of urine and tobacco juice. Before it’s cleaned up, she makes sure that my father and I have both seen it; she wants witnesses.