Standing by the open casket, in the funeral home in Tucson, I find myself suddenly lashing out at my family, at my father and my sister. “You didn’t understand her like I did,” I practically shout at them. “Nobody understood her like I did; you don’t understand, she was mine.”

They look at me bewildered; I’m addled by loss, senseless, I can’t explain. We follow the hearse from the church—someplace in the foothills I’ve never been—out to a vast expanse of desert which has been bulldozed and irrigated into a thankless stretch of grass. No markers are allowed to rise above the ground, so that the grim turf may be easily mowed; each grave gets a little plastic-covered metal plaque, the name on paper beneath it. Will my father replace this with a flat stone bearing her name? I don’t know. I have never been there again.

My sister married the man she met in the bar by the air base, had a child, and before long they moved from Tucson, off to Reno, where he found a job in gambling, working as the “pit boss” on one floor of a large casino, where he supervised racks and racks of jingling slot machines, and the sly green blackjack tables and rattling roulette wheels. She’s worked in casinos, too, hostessing in their big, heavily air-conditioned restaurants. She’s with him still, to this day. We talk on the phone, holidays, but we don’t talk about our parents all that much; it makes us both too nervous. Sally’s youngest daughter’s in college now. The children she lost at the end of that first juvenile marriage have come to live in the desert near her. They have children of their own, who splash every weekend in their grandmother’s swimming pool, from which they can hear the steady roar of the new freeway that’s barreled through their neighborhood, just a few streets away.

My father’s pistol reverberated longer because it wasn’t fired, ringing into my future, and into his.

But my other token of the past had a future, too.

The Firebird, in fact, is used to the gun, and doesn’t care about the difficulty of circumstance; if anything, it burns brighter in a gloomy wood. Go ahead, the blazing thing says, do what you will, I’ll find the music in it.

Show me what I can’t use.

I believe that art saved my life. How is it that making sustains?