“You don’t do anything stupid either,” he says.

He crosses the room, gets close to me, stares into my eyes.

“Promise me,” he says. “Say it. Tell me you’ll call me if you get any stupid ideas in your head.”

A true love swells up in my throat, our bond glimmering and silver between us. I want to sob.

“I promise,” I say. “Now you promise, you promise too.”

“I promise,” he says.

Then we go back to it, back to the slow removal of our family from a place.

THE AIR OF MY FATHER’S OFFICE IS ABANdoned and stale. No one has been here in some weeks. Dust clings to my fingers when I run my hand over his desk. I sit down in his chair, feel the worn areas his body sunk into.

His drawers are filled with small bits of his life and ours.

I find in succession:

An old tube of Vaseline

A small velvet pouch with a golden compass inside

A small photograph of a topless woman I do not recognize

A scrap of paper with his handwriting that says: “Remember, they’re all assholes and that’s got nothing to do with you.”

I laugh at the last bit until suddenly I am sobbing.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOONS, I SLIDE INTO my mother’s room. My mother sleeps heavily, the sleep of grief. She curls around her knot, only waking to weep and then sleep again.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOONS, I SNEAK THE white pills from my mother’s bottle. I am saving again.

GRIEF DESCENDS AND THEN STAYS, A thick black fog around me. The sadness radiates off of me, whispers death, death, death.

MY MOTHER’S DRAWERS WERE FILLED with lockets of our baby hair, our small old teeth, small scraps of paper with her lilted handwriting. I could only make out fragments.

in my dripping (pain)
the color of dead grass
someone will remember us
someone in some future time
will think of us
I have lived with a curse

VISION

Six years old in my mother’s bed. I wear my favorite pink pajamas. The television rattles off stories before us. Occasionally, my mother curls around me in a brief hug. I can feel our knots touch when she does.

Then she pulls a bag of orange Circus Peanuts from the drawer of her nightstand. This is rare: A sugar, a candy, a treat. The bag seems to glow in the light of the white house.

“Now, now,” she says. “We’re only going to do this once.”

She feeds us both the small sugar sponges, alternating fairly. In my mouth, the sugar dissolves with a joy, melts into my bloodstream and courses through my body. Again, and again, she slides the candy into my mouth, until the bag is empty, until my body is a liquid pile against the bed.

“There, there, isn’t that nice? A sweet treat for us today.”