She was elegant and conservative, dressed in black pants and a black blouse that draped off her slender body. Her ankles were exposed, the legs of her pants rolled up. Her feet were bare and flawlessly manicured. I thought of the stinging smell of nail polish remover as, each night, for as long as I could remember, she stripped the red polish from her toes before reapplying a fresh coat.

With arms folded close to her chest, she slowly swayed back and forth, gently shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she often did. She wasn’t drinking. I had never seen her drink.

I walked past the painting of a nude woman, her arms bound behind her back, nipples jutting forward, tied to a flaming stake. Her face was soft, her eyes closed, a cigarette dangling between her lips as her head bowed, seemingly about to light her cigarette on the blaze. I crossed the crowded room, making my way between people, dipping and flattening myself to avoid a collision, approaching my mother and the stranger. He was tall, just over six feet, with dark curls piled on top of his head. He had sharp, high cheekbones that protruded just below his eye sockets. His lips were uneven, the bottom much fuller than the top.

“Where’s my father?” I whispered to my mother.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She flicked her wrist dismissively. “In the city with his new girlfriend, I’d imagine.” She turned to the stranger. “This is my daughter, Grace. The one I was telling you about.”

The young man reached for my hand and shook it, his emerald eyes lingering on my face. “I’m Jack.”

His front teeth were slightly crooked, hugging over one another, the outer edges lifted higher than his canines. His nose seemed ornamental—as if it weren’t meant for breathing or smelling at all—with tiny nostrils and meticulously carved cartilage that curved upward. He was wearing a cornflower blue cashmere sweater and holding the roach of a joint between his thumb and forefinger.

“I’ll let you two get acquainted,” my mother said, as she turned and disappeared through the back door to the patio.

He bent to drop the roach into a half-empty can on the coffee table. It sizzled before dying out. He pointed to the couch, “Join me for a drink?”

Surrounded by a group of unfamiliar people, I sat with Jack as he told me that he and his friend had been on the road for three weeks; they’d driven across the island, taken the ferry, then crossed the border, headed for California.

“Our engine caught fire as we were driving through Arizona.” He smirked, taking a long swig from his beer bottle. “We had to call the fire department to put it out.”

“No way.” I laughed, noticing I was clutching the edge of my sundress. I let go, smoothing it repeatedly. “What did they do?”

“The firemen doused it with some sort of foam,” he replied. “We had a pound of weed in the glovebox. Luckily the cops didn’t show up. We would have been fucked.”