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  “Oh. What’s up?”

  “I thought I’d better call ’cause there was a bit of an incident today.”

  She described how at Colts Neck Elementary one of the long ceiling tiles was being replaced in the primary boys’ washroom, leaving a black rectangular gap that showed the air ducts. At recess Ray had kicked his shoe up into the gap so that it landed on the next tile over, eight feet above the floor, and one of the boys had a brother in fifth grade, tallest kid in the school, so with this tall kid standing on a chair and Ray on this tall kid’s shoulders, they’d tried to retrieve the shoe—I could picture it up in the dark and cobwebs, a little white Adidas I’d bought at the Target in Kearney. Ray had wrapped his hand around it then slipped and brought that tile down too—his fall thankfully cushioned by his rubbernecking friends. Colts Neck had it in the budget to pay for a second tile, of course, but they’d decided that to make up for it Ray would help the custodian at recess for all of next week.

  “But more importantly, how’s Ray?” she asked. “He didn’t limp or anything when I looked at him, but you know how once they’re at home they let their guard down the littlest bit?”

  “I haven’t noticed anything,” I said. “Maybe that’s my fault about the shoe. We’d been talking about parabolas.”

  Miss Federici hung up to go walk her dog, and I breathed slowly and deeply up my nose. What would my own father, the great Bill Giller, have done in my situation? A headlock, for starters, then a knee in the small of my back. I went onto the back step and called Ray inside—they’d found an old birdhouse under the porch and both kids were up the ladder, trying to balance it on a branch. I steered him into the living room.

  “Your teacher just called. You know what for, right?”

  “You know what they call roly-polies here?” He tucked a lock of brittle blond hair behind his ear. “Pill bugs. In Wahoo they’re roly-polies, remember?”

  “The right name is wood louse.”

  He opened his eyes wide but I can’t say he raised his eyebrows because he was too fair to have any. There wasn’t any blondness on my side or Lydia’s so she and I always joked that he was really Owen Wilson’s—the sarcastic actor with the broken nose—though Ray’s usual expression was too solemn for him to be Owen Wilson’s. And he’d told the preschool class in Wahoo, with all the gravity of a burning bush, that his dad’s name was Pete, exactly like Pete Townsend in The Who.

  “Oh!” he said now. “Did she say I’m going into the split one-two ’cause I’m such a better reader than anybody?”

  “Listen, no, buddy, she…”

  I studied his oblivious face and felt pressure build in my chest—someone had lit a burner to fill it like a hot-air balloon, and ever since I was a kid that’d meant angry, but sitting there on the coffee table with Ray perched on our big green chair, I couldn’t have said who I was mad at—Miss Federici, the Dockside guys, they’d all done their jobs, and God knew Ray had been through enough to justify launching a shoe into a bathroom ceiling. Jeez, why’d his hair look so flimsy? I’d have to look up how to get more vitamin E into his diet, or maybe he just needed to move back to Wahoo and hug his mom. Ray’s eyes went to my left ear seconds before my fingers settled on it.

  “Soup’s on, sweethearts!” called Deb.

  She ceded a point to our radical lifestyle and served storebought veggie pizza for supper. It steamed there on the cutting board and I fantasized about the thousand diverse ground meats that might gladly call a pizza home, all that salt, oh, and the grease—

  “There was a funny accident on the field trip today,” I said as I flapped Ray’s napkin across his lap. “We all got splashed with some kind of plastic.”

  I threw slices onto everybody’s plates. I glanced over at Ray and saw his eyes stretched as big as quarters.

  “What’s up?” I managed to ask.

  “What was the accident?”

  “Oh, buddy, I’m fine. Please don’t worry about the accident. It was dumb.”

  He dipped a crinkle-cut french fry in his ketchup and somehow that reminded me of a severed finger.

  “Everyone’s really all right.” I said.

  I showed the table the reassuring smile I’d been practicing for so long—because we were making headway on this normal life without their mother, right?

  “Why’d you guys have the assembly this afternoon?” asked Deb. She tilted her head at me. “They were late coming out.”

  “Oh,” murmured Josie, “this solider guy came and—”

  Ray covered his mouth, clattering his fork against his plate. Sick?

  “It was so not funny!” Josie’s eyes sawed him in half. “You’re so retarded!”

  “Hey, keep cool,” I said. “What is so funny, Ray?”

  Both hands over his mouth now, he looked from me to Deb and back again with huge, joyous eyes. Deb put her fingertips together to form, perhaps, a temple of serenity.

  “He said,” Josie went on, “that people without arms or legs need more understanding. There was this girl who fought in the Congo and these kids at this mall in Omaha made fun of her.”

  “That was on the radio,” said Deb.

  “Sorry.” Ray let out a deep breath and picked up his fork.

  “Was the soldier at the assembly missing an arm or a leg?” I asked.

  “One of each.” Josie chewed thoughtfully. “It was freaky.”

  “Hey,” I said, “that doesn’t sound very unders—”

  “But he said if he had arms and legs he’d go fight again, until the whole war was over, because nobody who lives there can stop running away long enough to grow food or go to the doctor, so most kids our age are all dead, and you know what from?”

  “Jesus.” Should I have been impressed or horrified that she knew how fucked up the world was? “Malnutrition?”

  Ray’s eyes got big again, and he set his fork down.

  “Landmines?” Deb asked.

  “Nope,” Josie said, “it’s—”

  “Diarrhea!” shouted Ray.

  Sunday, October 23.

  Jacksonville’s sad attempt at an onside kick went out of bounds and that was the game, 27–6 for the good guys, so I staggered out of my stuffy bedroom with my veggie platter’s untouched celery—the sight of it turned my stomach, which was weird. And watching football didn’t usually leave my legs so stiff. It was nearly dark outside, and the kids were panting and sweaty from Unicorn Quest, a backyard invention of Josie’s, so while Deb took a bath I read them Roald Dahl on the plaid loveseat, and once Mr. Hoppy had successfully tampered with nature to win Mrs. Silver’s hand I put their heads in my armpits.

  “Gah,” said Ray.

  “Da-ad!” said Josie.

  “While I’ve got you where I want you,” I told them, “you should know that I love you donkeys an awful lot. I’m going to buy you each a trough to sleep in.”

  Josie brushed her hair off her face. “Dad, didn’t you even notice?”

  “Grandma bought all the lights!” shouted Ray.

  Sure enough, strings of red and white Christmas lights had been hung in a horseshoe between the living and dining rooms, casting an aura of holiday pinkness.

  “Do you like them?” Deb yelled from the tub. “Kmart had a huge sale and I thought what the heck!”

  “I told her,” Ray said quietly. “Mom only liked them on the tree.”

  “You’d think she’d remember,” said Josie.

  They both pressed their heads against my ribs.

  “I guess we could try something radically different,” I said.

  Deb was boiling a pot of water and warming up the frying pan, so I poured my after-Dahl glass of Lucky Bucket then wiped off the kitchen counter. From my bedroom the tv spouted power chords and overly chirpy voices of indeterminate gender, which meant Josie and Ray had found one of those crap Japanese cartoons t
hat serve only to promote collectible holographic cards. Another father would’ve switched it to something wholesome like Elmer Fudd blasting Daffy Duck in the face with a shotgun, spinning his bill around to the back of his head. Deb peeled carrots into my mom’s green Pyrex bowl that Lydia had coveted for so long—carrot strips dangled over the side.

  “What does hairy Mr. Vincent have you doing nowadays?” asked Deb.

  “Still science. Bits of everything, nine through twelve.”

  “How about Stephen Hawking?”

  “Theoretical physics might scare off the nines,” I said.

  “Oh, I know, but that movie of his life was just on, and God—so sad. A brain like that, and looking down at this body that’s just, I don’t know, useless. A dead fish.”

  I pictured half-crumpled Lydia in her last weeks, staggering across the ward to the toilet so she could at least crap like a human being. Deb might’ve been picturing the same thing because she was moving her tongue across her teeth and staring at the wall.

  “Careful,” I said.

  She looked in time to not peel her finger.

  “Maybe Hawking would want to be the other way around,” she said. “He’d have a super-terrific body and a brain that couldn’t tell one way or the other.”

  She slid cut-glass bowls of carrot sticks and dill-flecked dip into the middle of the island—in her production of snacks she defied the space-time continuum. Deb lifted the bag of perogies out of the freezer and dropped them on the counter with a crack. I took down the Aspirin.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “Beer’s doing something weird. But not a headache. Like an arm-ache.”

  “There’s bacon for the perogies, that ought to cheer you up.”

  I finished my glass of water. “Good joke.”

  “Oh, just look through there—aren’t they sweet like that?”

  She opened her camera bag, twisted out the legs on her tripod, and I tiptoed after her to my bedroom doorway. On the tv a lot of spiky-haired characters in puffy jackets sat astride a winged horse. In the big viewfinder Deb framed Josie and Ray, unblinking, fingertips to their lips, the bluish tv light flickering across their foreheads.

  “When I put it on the YouTube,” she whispered, “I’ll call it ‘My Little Zombies.’ ”

  Deb cooked half of her pound of bacon and primly set the steaming platter in front of her own place. The kids and I smirked at each other like this woman and her meat were bumbling exchange students from another hemisphere. The perogies and steamed broccoli made their rounds—as the red and white lights made the cutlery twinkle pinkly. Deb offered her granddaughter the bacon tongs.

  “No, thanks,” Josie scowled.

  “Ray? You want to try a piece?”

  He shook his head, a green floret drooping from his lip like a damp cigarette.

  “I just don’t think it’s good for people to be, well, cemented into any one thing,” Deb told us. “You can’t even have a bite?”

  “You know why we don’t,” I said.

  “So tell me what we’ll do after dinner.”

  “On Sunday we play Uno before pee and teeth,” said Ray.

  “Well, then, should we do something different this time?”

  “Uno’s fine,” said Josie, brows furrowed as she spooned out sour cream.

  Deb shook her head at me down the tablecloth. But her eyes twinkled.

  “I told your father,” she announced, “that he should go to Pawnee next weekend.”

  “Oh!” Ray slid a flap of brittle hair behind his ear. “Do we have to go?”

  “I’m not going either,” I said.

  “If you kids want to go, you should go too!” Deb said. “You have fun when you visit Grandma Jackie, right?”

  Josie looked at her sideways, sour cream now on her cheek.

  “Yes,” she said flatly.

  “And Evadare’s so nice!” said Deb.

  “She smells.” Ray worried a perogie with the side of his fork. “A little.”

  “No, Ray,” said his sister, “that’s Grandma Jackie.”

  “It’s just her tubes,” I said. “It’s not her fault. Pass that bacon down here, Jos. I want a good whiff for old time’s sake.”

  Josie set the plate in front of me then surreptitiously licked grease off her thumb. The strips were arranged in intricate angles like a game of pick-up sticks.

  “It looks like the little pig’s house,” Ray said with his mouth full. “Like, after.”

  “I just thought the exact same thing.”

  “It’d suck to be the pig,” Josie murmured. “No house.”

  “I want to ask you seriously,” said Deb, “how well do you remember Pappy Art?”

  “Before he died?” asked Ray.

  Josie rolled her eyes.

  “Black jujubes,” her brother said.

  “And the noisy trains, do you still have those?” Josie asked.

  “Are you all right?” Deb asked me. “You look like you’re going to throw up!”

  “I felt weird all day. I’m fine.”

  “Did you ever meet Dad’s dad?” Josie asked her.

  My head swam like I’d been smoking weed. I took two strips of bacon and laid them beside my broccoli. The only thought in my head was This’ll help.

  “Oh, Billy Giller was a man who liked his helpings.” Deb beamed at the kids. “Pork roast, marshmallow-rhubarb pie, always lots of helpings!”

  I speared my fork through the bacon, dragged it through the sour cream then crammed the masterpiece into my mouth.

  “Was he real fat?” asked Ray.

  “And I can tell you,” I said as I chewed, “what Grandma Jackie used to be like. She was tall as me, wouldn’t know that to see her, and her feet were two different shapes from where a horse stepped on her! Man.” I finally swallowed, wiped my mouth with the napkin. “And she’d sing John Denver for a hundred miles—cheesiest stuff!”

  “Dad,” murmured Josie.

  I smiled at the three of them with teeth that felt generous and expansive. Ah, something was saying inside me, thank you. They gazed at me in the wash of pink, like they’d been caught in the Dockside deluge too.

  “You ate bacon!” Josie said with a catch in her voice. “You just ate bacon!”

  “It’s not veggie, I told you that,” said Deb.

  “Well, my headache’s gone,” I said, “that’s the main thing.”

  “But you took the Aspirin, you said it was a bad arm!”

  “Anyway, I feel a hundred percent better. I’ve got to do my prep for tomorrow, excuse me from the table.” I stood up and cleared my plate. “It’s not going to murder me overnight, you guys, eat that up, then we’ll have Uno!”

  Josie dropped her head on her wrists, shoulders shaking—sobbing! Ray went around the table and patted her back, and Deb squeezed the kid’s hand and glared at me.

  “Hey,” I told her, “careful what you wish for.”

  Because hadn’t Deb been bending over backwards for me to eat bacon? But then as I carried my plate into the kitchen I saw Lydia in her wedding dress and remembered that Never eat charred meat was our family’s mantra.

  “Jos?” I called, my voice echoing in the empty room. I didn’t want to go back and have her look at me. “I’m sorry, baby!”

  “This fat off the bacon’s all congealed now,” Deb told me as I dried plates. She held up my greasy old mason jar. “Into the trash?”

  “Uh, no, no thanks. Josie’s collecting it for a science project,” I lied. “Just pop it in the fridge.”

  In those tearaway track pants, Deb’s narrow ass looked exactly like Lydia’s—yes, I consciously had that thought. I was sure having an evening.

  “Did you put the bacon away? I’ll make myself sandwiches tomorrow.”

  “Um, no,” I
said. “Haven’t seen it.”

  “You still smell like sawdust, why is that? Go shower.”

  Monday, October 24.

  I woke up woozy, the baby pictures on the dresser crawling in and out of focus, so in my pyjamas and untied housecoat I tugged the second half-pound of bacon out from its hiding place under the romaine lettuce. I fried it up crispy as potato chips, and after generous taste-testing my nausea evaporated.

  Deb stood beside the fridge with the pint of cream in her hand, diaphanous muumuu in its glory. Lydia, in her wedding dress, peered over her mother’s shoulder.

  “I guess I should be happy we’re eating the same things now, but I read that only when bacon is really overcooked do its nitrite levels become dangerously high.”

  Nitrites, that sounded delicious—maybe I was craving more than just fat and salt? I put the bacon on the table beside two bowls of Cream of Wheat and yelled to Josie and Ray, then the doorbell rang. Early in the day, even for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Before I could slump toward the front door I crammed two more strips in my mouth.

  Amber and Grace, from the field trip, stood hunched on my porch. I knew it was a school day, sure, but hadn’t really pondered what state any of my elevens would be in when they shuffled into my classroom. The girls wore ball caps and their skull hoodies, old eyeliner clotted at the corners of their eyes, and Amber seemed to be having a problem with one arm—a sleeve dangled loose.

  “Mr. Giller?” said Grace. “Hey, it seemed like something was going on with you too, so we—”

  “You hurt your arm?” I asked Amber.

  “Not too bad,” she mumbled.

  Her baby-blue car sat with one wheel up on the curb.

  “Hey,” I started to ask, “have you guys been eating—”

  “Show him,” said Grace.

  Amber glared, then with her one hand tugged up the hem of her hoodie until her shoulder appeared, in the middle of her belly where no shoulder was meant to be. I saw the knob of bone. It wasn’t attached to her. My new-found aversion to celery became inconsequential.