This has been her private curse. She is unable to substitute history with memory, her mind cannot conjure, knows no sleight of hand. She has no versions of the truth with which to stack the deck. Her parents remain in her mind stuck at the various stages of their own development. Tired at the fringes of their youth from factory work, weary and gray at middle age. Locked into the cells of their own habits, their whole lives spent dancing around each other. When they found out she was pregnant they never once broke character. There were no fights, no tearful reconciliations. Nothing like that. They stepped around it and were equally unruffled when she gave the baby to Betty.

Vera’s memory is fearfully exact. There is no way she saw Lester leaning against the corner of the train shed to disappear like a startled brush bird. She had seen him dead.

She had seen his skull smashed in, his smooth face cracked and angled, the shell underneath ruined forever. She remembers clearly how his legs jerked, how he smelled when his muscles relaxed, the delicate rattle of beer cans as his legs flailed them over. She remembers with shame how her first thought was that if he spilled the beer, then Betty would know they had had a party.

It wasn’t a real party, not one with a haze of smoke, strangers clogging the kitchen or sorting through the slippery stack of forty-fives, anxious to put on the next groove, anxious to keep the tempo of mindlessness cranked up. It was just the three of them. The steel work on the IDS was almost finished. Since only a few of the workers were invited for the topping out ceremony, and the only salute the IDS corporation saw fit to give the workers was to spin the spotlight on Labor Day, Simon decided to have a ceremony of his own.

He bought the whiskey and the beer and arranged it on the coffee table. He was wild that night, as he uncapped the bottle, drank and passed it to Lester. Vera remembers how loud his voice was, how tight his posture. Lester tried to keep up, but the amount of liquor and the secret he intended to share with Simon were too heavy and he couldn’t pace Simon.

Simon was in it alone. “Come on kids! It’s on the house!”

She cannot forget this. Every time she sees a movie and a character makes the same oath—It’s on the house!—she has to turn away. She cannot watch because as soon as she hears on the house! instead of seeing friends and barflies crowding the bartender, she sees Simon with a bottle in each hand, towering over her and Lester as they sit on the couch.