On the serving bowl, porcelain roses were painted delicately. Everything in our house was secondhand, except for the pretty dishes. Everly’s mother gave them to my parents as a wedding gift.

Legend has it that after the wedding my mother tried to smash all her heirlooms. Newly wed, they got high on acid in the honeymoon suite. My father tried to stop her, but she was tripping. Thought the cups were birds trying to fly.

She hurled china against the red-heart walls.

The broken pieces were beautiful, she said. The white shards looked like swans.

I’ve never met my grandmother; never seen a picture of her. Maybe she’s arthritic and bald, senile in her Michigan mansion. My grandfather invented some kind of telescopic device, and when he died, he left his fortune to his wife and his only daughter, Everly. Everly was so generous. She gave all her money to the Pleasure Family.

If I became a model, would my grandmother recognize my face in a magazine? My dad said that lately I looked more and more like Everly; he said the resemblance scared him sometimes. She was sixteen when they fell in love.

First love is the hardest, my dad would say. Tears in his eyes. First love is the most…Oh God, I couldn’t take it when he got so weak. That’s why I stopped asking about my mother. Just the look in his eyes, so lost at the mere memory, made me glad I’d never fallen in love and wasn’t about to when I was surrounded by fools like Dean Black.

How was your day? my dad always asked me after school. But this time he didn’t. Which was probably for the best. What would I say?

Dad, today I skipped school and met a man who told me I could make money as a model. His shrimpy friend begged me to come to his studio so he could shoot me. Test shots, that’s what it’s called, like you’re the dummy on a firing range. These two men said they could help me move to New York and show up in the pages of Seventeen. My dad would be so disappointed if I told him I was tempted, even momentarily. He wanted me to believe that beauty was a bad thing. Vanity led your mother down so many dark roads. He cringed every time he caught me reading fashion magazines.

Why don’t you read a book? he always said. Go for a walk on the beach? Darling, those magazines will kill your soul.

Dad, today I met a cool girl named China. She drank perfume and poured the pink water down between her bare breasts. She wanted me to go party at the King’s Hotel. Hey, Dad, have you ever been to a party at the King’s Hotel?

Hey, Dad, I said, real cheerful and nonchalant. How’s business?