He’s gone early till suppertime, always meat and potatoes and a vegetable done to death, the Southern man’s stock supper: pot roast, Swiss steak, pork chops, fried Spam with ketchup—just the menu for a chubby boy. Every day at four my mother says, Well, I guess I should start supper, halfhearted, going through the motions. Not much talk about his day, but there’s some sense that the job’s competitive, the work difficult, or the circumstances less than pleasant? Is he worried about money, since our move from the armadillo’d flats up to this fancier suburban place on a hill, where our retired neighbors even have a luminous blue swimming pool? When a hurricane comes, the benches from our picnic table float in the rippling aqua, along with a tree branch and a squadron of frogs.

Or is it my mother he’s worried about, her moody and petulant reactions, her unshakable displeasure in this new world? Given all the moves, her history of adaptability, why is this time any harder? It used to be a simple thing, packing up the stuff of home, those familiar objects: the round, frameless mirror with the flamingos etched into the rim, the “rock maple” bureau with crocheted scarf, the chocolate-colored print, from my mother’s childhood house, of two pointers in a field rigid with attention to something we won’t ever see. Unpack the cartons, register at a new school, and there, we’re home. But not anymore; it’s as if she turned some corner, back in the desert, and ceased to be willing to start again.

I try to stand now in her place, looking toward her horizon, although my view is tentative, wavery. She’s made it out of a relentless poverty; her mother, after all, lives in an unpainted, three-room shack that slopes like a funhouse at the fair. No paint or wallpaper inside, just bare boards to which my granny tacks collages she makes from pretty pictures cut from magazines. Outhouse down the hill, rows of sliced apples hung on string and drying from the roof, a big stick propped next to Granny’s undulant featherbed in case snakes come in the house in the night. My mother’s come from a place you don’t get out of. And she’d been ill there, too, a year of rheumatic fever, so that when my father came to offer a bridge out of the old world she must still have been a little frail, and eager to step out of that circumscription.