My sister’s doing her homework all this time but keeps coming up with other stuff about the eighties and fires it at me as she’s working as though her mind is able to split right down the middle and do two things at once. She’s totally brilliant, I think. “There was some volcano out west in Washington that erupted,” she says. “It erupted and kept right on erupting off and on for the rest of the year. That was in the eighties, wasn’t it, Dad?” I don’t know why she’s asking him. How would he know?

“I don’t know,” my dad says as he wipes black ants off the counter with a wet sponge. He doesn’t try to step on them, he just wipes them onto the floor and lets them crawl away.

“Why don’t you kill them,” I ask my dad.

“I like ants,” he says. “They remind me of summer and hot places. We always had ants when I was growing up.” He says this as though he were talking about puppies or guinea pigs.

“And they discovered AIDS!” my sister blurts out. “That’s when they first discovered the AIDS virus, was the eighties.” She’s on a roll now. I don’t know how her mind works. It’s a mystery to me; like she can scroll stuff up like she’s looking at it on a green screen or something. AIDS? Where does she come up with that off the top of her head? “And Marvin Gaye got shot by his father, didn’t he?” she says. Suddenly my dad stops cold in the middle of the kitchen like he’s been hit in the back of the head by a board or something.

“That’s right,” my dad says. “I remember that.”

“You do?” I say, and I’m looking straight at him, standing there with the sponge hanging down from his hand dripping on the floor and he’s staring out across the kitchen without seeing me or my sister or anything but as though he’s trying to nail down this picture of Marvin Gaye in his mind all shot in the head and bloody from some picture in the news back then that he hates.