She picked up his brownies. “I’ll put these in the kitchen,” she said. “With all the desserts we already have.”

We peeled the foil off our dishes and tested them with our fingers. We put them in the microwave. The bread swamp bubbled. The marshmallows puffed into sweet golf balls and then sank into popped balloons of dark sugar. We walked around the table with our plates, every man for himself, and settled into eating without anyone waiting for anyone. I went to the bathroom, crouched down, came back, joined the others. Abe tucked his napkin into his collared shirt. We talked about what it might have been like to discover the New World—the strange berries, the testosterone, the typhoid. Stan asked Abe what he remembered best about our summers in Nevada and he said, Heat, mainly, and everybody laughed. Abe looked at me with a question in his eyes, to make sure it was alright that they were laughing. I went to the bathroom and ate quickly when I got back to cover the smell on my breath. The stuffing tasted like a big mushroom sponge and the charred marshmallows ached against my cavities and chewing the turkey made my jaw sore because I really had cooked it too long and it really was too dry. Everyone was wet. They were drinking April’s wine, then our wine, then April’s wine again. Stan drank his own beer. He offered me a bottle. I said no.

We left battlefields on our plates: corpses of drumsticks, collapsed potato dams where the gravy made rivers. I stood up and clapped my hands and said: “Dishes by the sink. Nobody touches the soap but me.”

Nobody touches the soap was Lucy’s phrase. I’d been waiting for a chance to say it all my life, could still remember Dora mocking, I’ll touch whatever I like, during one of her moods, though she’d always been happy to let our mother clean up everything.

I liked the warm water against my arms and the sound of voices from the next room. It was easy to fall into a kind of trance. The wine smell on my breath made a woozy bandage around my face. I rubbed my hands to make bubbles under the steady water.

I tucked another bottle under the bathroom sink—I’d finished the first one—and then I joined the others. I had to focus on both sides of the kitchen doorway to make sure I didn’t bump my shoulders. I drifted left when I was drunk. It had to do with balance, maybe handedness.