But I never found his room.

I never found the room because the room number he’d given me didn’t exist.

In the moment, you tell yourself he got it wrong because he was drunker than he looked, or he’d gotten confused and come from a different, adjacent hotel. You don’t want to think that he blew you off, but that’s what comes next.

Relief, disappointment. How you wander back down to window-shop the closed avenue of tacky stores on the street level.

How you look at the stiff mannequins in a clothing store and will them to move, to become something other than what they are.

How you’re drawn back into your own shit no matter what the distraction.

[32]

What went on between my parents when I was at school or out, I don’t know. Can’t imagine. I want to think there was an affection there, an intimacy, they could not display when I was around. I want to believe that both could be more present.

My father went around with a perpetual frown, as if he thought the world was making fun of him. As if, in living, he’d stolen something from God, and every breath was a kind of trickery. He could be known to smile at the right joke or something absurd that had happened on the farm, but that was it. That was when I liked him best, if I liked him at all.

In those days, growing up, the farm might be tolerable and even “something special,” as he called it. But the frown became over time a kind of cynical wince. The look of a man who thinks he understands the world and how much it wants to fuck with him. A sourness that creeps in when you have no more hope of being successful. My dad had degrees in animal husbandry and agriculture; knowledge, smarts, were not his problem.

Toward the end, as we hurtled toward bankruptcy, that’s when Grandfather became an anchor. The “indispensable weight,” as Dad’s neighbor, another struggling farmer, called him. To us, he was just the agony of bursts of temper and bursts of static. I hate that one of my enduring memories is Grandpa, before he lost his mind, taking us to a Sears lingerie show and leering at the models. I was twelve, my brother three years older.

The cutaway of that, two years later. Cut away to: seeing my brother’s lifeless face framed by mud. Framed by the riverbank.

My father’s failure with the farm is one thing. My mother was another: easy to diagnose, hard to talk about. It had started with a forgetfulness I might understand. Because you saw it in others. A slack gaze, a misunderstanding of relatives. A need to be taken care of. These might be things that came premature, but fell into familiar categories.

But as if familiar wasn’t her forte, the tiny, spiteful woman who had come from a strict religious upbringing into the evils of my father’s agnosticism found ways to express whatever was going on in her mind that ventured into strange places.