I kept reading them until my mother died. And then I felt the lack, but still felt the hurt. Maybe that was my cue to live another life than the one I’d chosen. I don’t know. Except I had the example: you could be whoever you wanted to be.

When we moved from an apartment to the house, I didn’t give my dad the address. Made it clear we were done.

But I kept my mother’s letters.

[33]

I blew off the conference the next day. I luxuriated and wallowed in a huge room service breakfast of scrambled eggs, waffles, bacon, toast, hash browns. After a workout in a gym so small my ferocious intensity to wreck every machine drove out the one flabby, middle-aged man using the rower. The hunger and the fear in his eyes as he drank me in repulsed me and yet perversely made me push myself harder.

Then I went to find Carlton Fusk.

The way I’d always planned to.

Brooklyn was flooded from recent rain, but, oddly, not near the water. I had decided to check out a few other taxidermy stores before pouncing on Fusk. Maybe out of caution, but also to get a sense of what the average taxidermy store was like. Establish a kind of baseline to judge Fusk against, I guess.

But most of the stores had converted to selling other things. People didn’t buy dead animals as much anymore. At least, not in Brooklyn. One place had become a kind of sad “man store,” devoted to hair-care products and aggressive-looking outdoor gear for the faux tough who never went camping. They had a dead ostrich chick taxidermied, along with a lion cub. Every animal in there was a dead baby of some kind, even the owner behind the counter. The door near the back drenched in cologne. I crossed two other stores off after that, without visiting. Knew what they’d be and why.

“Roadkill is fine,” proclaimed one storefront. “Roadkill is just fine.” Another advertised “intricate detail,” including “smaller birds,” and I went in because a goldfinch or similar on a pedestal got my attention. But it meant nothing in the end. Why should it? Typical taxidermy store wasn’t a thing, I concluded. It was more like used-book stores: the spaces and what they contained gave insight into the owner’s mind more than some “industry standard.”

I could only take so much of this kind of exploration before I was ready for Fusk.

As soon as I walked into Fusk’s (let’s call it) “The Low-Budget Bordering on Shithole Taxidermy & Antiques Shoppe”—the low-grade stench of mold hit me. That and some kind of furniture varnish. But also, I realize now, the smell of death, which meant Fusk must perform his “art” on-premises. Maybe in a basement, so a hint of reek rose from the floorboards.

The clutter was of the hoarder level only respectable in an antiques store. Someone I assumed was Carlton Fusk coalesced as a smudge of shadow in the back, seen behind the far counter through stacks of boxes, overflowing shelves, and floating dust motes.