Shot had been smiling, but now he looked concerned, said my name, came out to help me up. And I let him, because it was my father, not Shot. He had just grown into, or shrunk into, Shot with age. Couldn’t figure out which. My father wore one of those same wool plaid shirts Shot favored. His beard grown long and wispy-white like Shot’s. As if my father had made a kind of disguise out of his own father.

But the eyes were different. The hard glint, the cold, black reflection, wasn’t there.

Imagine you expect the House of Usher.

Imagine you’ve steeled yourself for rot and decay and dysfunction.

Imagine you brace your will against that door opening. And when it’s all different. When it’s different, it’s like the weight you were fighting against dissolves into mist and you fall because there’s nothing left to lean against. And you wonder about all the other things that prop you up.

Silvina, is that part of what you wanted me to know?

[90]

Inside, they sat me down at the kitchen table. I could feel every one of my injuries screaming at me. I’d put too much strain on my body. Thought my strength made me invincible. Now I would pay, and keep paying.

The kitchen table was different. A remodeled kitchen. “Bright and cheery,” like one of my husband’s real estate listings. “With a chipper blue backsplash and stainless steel stovetop, along with light rosewood cabinets.” The smell of lemons too antiseptic to be real.

I preferred to look at the kitchen than at the bird-like woman who brought me coffee and a day-old chocolate donut “from the co-op.” “Bird-like” meant “alarmingly tall and stork-like.” Not an unfriendly bird, but wary. How could I blame her, even as I blamed her fiercely. A giant lump of black sheep daughter, sodden, had come unbidden through the door. A burgeoning arsenal hidden in her car, trailing a wake of carnage. On a quest that could not be explained with ease or confidence.

She was my father’s wife. “Lorraine,” let’s call her, after a pinch-lipped Lutheran I once knew. I guessed the Bible quote was hers. Lorraine and Lawrence, as if meant to be. Or some other consonance. Did I begrudge my father a new wife? Or was it more that I begrudged him some form of success, as it had clearly come to him after so much failure.

How could this place coexist with a burning houseboat? With a gunfight in a car lot? With a warehouse full of death? But the trick of the world was to contain all things.

Lorraine had picked up my cane and restored it to me. Lorraine had brought in Shovel Pig and my little bag full of fresh clothes. The guns were all in a locked box. While I just sat there, on a different trajectory, like an injured space alien crashed to Earth.