First memories. Let’s see…she could remember walking when she was maybe four. Just a little, you know. Ugly prosthetic shoes. Then the wheelchair. Oh Lord, your bony ass could get sore in one of those, day after day, even on a pile of lambskin. So how could a mother not love her only kid? Well, it wasn’t that Lou Ann didn’t love her, it was just that with Lou Ann being a perfectionist and all—there was a certain ambiguity, and when you have to wait on somebody hand and foot—a certain amount of resentment and you start feeling like a slave. You start feelin’ that way because it’s true. Corliss rose to the occasion and Lou Ann did, too, after he passed on. Finally! Lou Ann finally accepted the situation and tried to make the best of it. On top of everything else there was all the stress and strain of an adult daughter living with a mother, but what are you going to do? Then Lou Ann ups and dies. Her face looked like a fried prune in the coffin. A face like dried goat shit. A final accusation…like, “See what you did to me!”

Her dad had been a concentrated good guy, had a different temperament, but Lou Ann really never could take it. Corliss was dead now fourteen years—Lou Ann, three, leaving her to get by with daykeepers. Quite unlike her temporal home—her scrawny, dilapidated body—the house was still in good condition. You take a normal human body, you could abuse it with drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and junk food and still it would last longer than practically anything. It would last longer than a Westinghouse can opener, a pair of Levi’s, or a Panama parrot. The average human body lasted longer than just about everything you laid eyes on except a house. A house could last…this house. But not the puny body that was hers. The house was still going strong. Sell it and she’d have two years in a nursing home and then indigent—a ward of the state. What happened then? You probably went down pretty fast. Some night, hooked up on a heart monitor, you know, one of those Jamaican nurse aides—Fuck dis shit, I’m going out for a cig’rette. A Parliament cig’rette. Yeah, I want to have me a Parliament cig’rette. You could let dis here bitch die in the meantime. So what. World gonna miss her? I doesn’t think so, daddy. Seriously doubts it.

Mabel? Have you been out smoking again?

No, sir, I sure hasn’t been smokin’, I been right here, honey, like I s’posed to be. Turn my back an’ she stroked out, thass all I know.