For the next couple of hours I rode around the island, down back roads with narrow shoulders, alongside ditches and swampy lots marked for development. I rode back and forth across a darkened square of repaired parking lot next to the First National Bank, where the previous summer a water main had broken and washed away the underlying dirt and a man’s car had fallen through the asphalt crust, nose-diving halfway into a soupy muck of earth. By the time I got back to our house, it was after five and my mother was home from work. I pushed my bike into the backyard and came in through the sliding glass door off the dining room, and it was obvious there was a major fight in the works. Karen was sitting forward on the recliner and her face was red from crying. My mother was at the dining room table, her own face buried in the boxed well of her arms. A suitcase was standing by the front door.

For an instant I thought I understood. They’d been fighting about Karen’s quitting school, and Karen had blown her top and threatened to run away again. But they looked so flipped out that I started wondering if the suitcase belonged to someone else. My mother might have packed it. Or even Frankie—though he was leaning against the wall where the living room funneled into the hallway, observing the two of them like a scientist taking mental notes.

“I think my arm is broken,” I announced.

Karen cut her eyes toward me. Slowly, my mother lifted her head from the table. She said, “What?”

“My arm.” I wasn’t holding it. I was just standing there feeling it throb and wanting to be acknowledged, though I didn’t want to tell them anything about what had actually happened.

“What’s that on your head?” my mother asked.

“I cut it.”

She looked straight up at the ceiling. She stared at a particular spot in the plaster as if the word of God were written there. Dropping her eyes again, she said, “I don’t believe this.”

“My arm—”

“Your arm looks fine! I don’t want to hear that it’s broken, all right? There’s entirely too much going on right now!”

I glanced over at Karen, who made the slightest squinting gesture with her already pinched, damp eyes, declaring herself the winner of the moment. Then I walked through the living room, past Frankie, and down the short hall to my bedroom, where I closed the door behind me.