Hernan, Krystal’s brother, worked part time as a cashier on the weekends. During the week he worked construction and would occasionally come in after his shift was over, smelling like asphalt and sweating like a god. He was older than me, and sometimes, when we closed the market together, he walked me home as the days grew shorter. I lived for those times. The weather was always cold or getting cold on those nights, and he was taller than me but not by much, and thin, and his eyes were so brown they almost seemed red, and his voice was deep and resonant, a butter-in-a-barrel kind of voice. Unlike with the old men who hung around the store, I was quiet around Hernan, stricken with a crush that rendered me hot and wordless. I wanted to be his lover, his sister, his buddy, whatever would get me closest to him. Krystal would talk about him like he was a pesky little brother, though he was two years older than her, and I think it had something to do with the fact that he’d been adopted when he was five or six, when Krystal was three. Krystal always felt older than him, or that she had one up on him, I guess, having known her parents for three extra years. Even as adults she was always complaining about him. Hernan keeps doing this, she’d say, or Hernan won’t leave me alone about this, and I’d be sick with jealousy, longing to be someone Hernan would not leave alone.

Midway through the second year I worked there, my mother died after a long, liver-related illness, and Geannie invited me to stay at their house for a few weeks after the funeral. Krystal had recently moved out, eager to get away, and her bed was free. “Just come over so you won’t be alone,” is how Geannie put it, and, curious, I took her up on it. In this way I was welcomed into her and Jim’s lives in earnest. She felt so sorry for me, I could tell, though my mother’s tight-lipped, distant parenting style wasn’t something I exactly missed. In fact, it was quickly overshadowed by how Geannie and Jim treated me, which involved a lot of talking and affection, and making me feel like I was an individual human with opinions and feelings and an observable personality. Throughout my years of childhood friendship with Krystal I had always savored whatever crumbs of attention they had paid me between their hectic work schedules and hurried hellos and goodbyes, but only as an orphaned adult was I fully immersed in their love. The image of my mother hardly had time to fade before Geannie stepped in, and the handoff from mother to mother figure was so seamless that sometimes, in the years that followed, I had to remind myself that Geannie was not actually my mother.

On several occasions after I sold my mother’s house and got my own place, usually around Christmas, the Scheeles invited me to come stay overnight for a few days. I would lie in the dark in Krystal’s old bed, awaiting Christmas morning like a child, and as I listened to the lazy holiday music Jim had put on the downstairs stereo while they finished their glass of wine before bed—a habit that seemed impossibly fancy—I tried to brainwash myself into believing that I had grown up in that house, with both of them as my parents, and that I was very young, maybe eight or nine, and that the rest of my life was still a happy mystery.