Mom arrived in the city for our birthday in a black car. She stepped out of the car wearing a floral dress and kitten heels. She smiled. She looked horrible.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Happy birthday,” mom said. “You look horrible. What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“That doesn’t look like a shaving cut.”

“Aren’t you cold in that dress?”

“Nonsense,” she said. “It’s mild.”

Mom always wants to hit an old haunt when she visits the city, in this case her old wing bar. Out of every empty table they seated us at the one long prepared for our reservation. Mom gazed at the baseball game over her wings which hovered one after the other in front of her mouth. Behind the wings, she rampaged against dad’s treatment of the new dog Coby. She worked herself up over her woman friends, and it hit me after a while that this wasn’t her speaking but Debbie, who died in a chiropracting accident in the 80s, whose personality mom now used for flare-ups. She always talked about Debbie. Of course I never met the woman in the flesh.

The flesh of twelve wings went past her teeth, even some of the bones with them. I turned down the remaining two she offered me, having had twelve of my own.

“But they shouldn’t go to waste,” she said, and ate one more. She fingered the last wing and then threw it down. “I shouldn’t.”

“Mom,” I said. “Do you mind if I change the subject? There’s a couple things it’s time I told you.”

“Oh no.” She started fingering the last wing again.

“It’s not all bad news. Actually one good thing is that I’ve met someone.”

“You’re kidding. That’s great news!”

“Thanks. Her name is J. She’s an illustrator.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-one. And the other thing is I was molested.”

“Aren’t you a bit old for that?”

“This was actually a long time ago,” I said, and I told her all about the old woman in the rainforest when I was twelve. “It messed up my sex-life for a long time. I was actually a virgin until twenty-five.”

Mom was shaving the skin off the last wing and getting buffalo sauce everywhere. “Twenty-one years old?”

“No, twenty-five,” I said.

“Oh, I thought you said twenty-one. Did she go to college?”

“Who?”

“The girl. It is a girl, right?”

“Do you mean J?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Oh. No she is twenty-one. And she’s not in school. She did a semester but took off. She’s sort of figuring herself out.”

Mom looked exasperated. “I thought you were gunning for a marriage like your sister’s. Look at your sister’s marriage.”

And she offered me her eyes like like they were goggles. Mom had the small eyes of a dumb fox, they narrowed in and crossed her eyes and pinched her nose, which I think is why she has breathing issues and has to sleep with a machine strapped to her face.

“Did you listen to anything I said about what happened in the Amazon?” I said.

Mom looked disappointed I hadn’t arrived where she had tried to lead me. There was also the baseball game, she could’ve been disappointed at that.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to have a think on it and get back to you. I have to talk to your dad because it sounds a little confused, and frankly racist.”

“Racist?”

“I’m not calling you a racist, because it could’ve been on accident. But I have to talk to daddy. I’m done with this.” She threw the wing on her plate finally, not really eaten just sort of chewed up. “Do you want dessert? Cake?”

We got the dessert menu and it had ice cream and some sort of mousse but nothing quite cake.

I met J at a party my mom’s designer friend was throwing for a famous chair, a week before me and mom’s birthday. She wore a sparkly green skirt and a thin black tank. She was thin and bubbly like the champagne flute she held at shoulder-height, and sat the whole time on the arm of a chair as the seat of it. She was busy entertaining old men for a while before I got to her.

“Hey, I’ve never met you, but I just had a dream of you,” I said.

“What was the dream?” she said. She had sparkly green mobile eyes.

“You were blocking a hallway like this and I had to get past you to my friend on the other side. So I moved you to the side like this.” I put my hand on the soft part of her under the ribs and pushed a bit. She swayed gamely and righted herself giggling. “But in the dream you were completely naked.”

After we’d had sex one time, I said: “You’re the first person I’ve had sex with in two years.”

“Why?”

“It’s not really a choice,” I said. “I would say I have sex whenever I can.”

“I had sex two nights ago.” “With who?”

“You wouldn’t know him.”

When she got sleepy I left for mine on foot. But on the walk I second-guessed myself. I got home cold-sweating and fevering and my head throbbed. I called mom and heard first about her root canal, then it was on to cocktails and grandpa’s perfect Manhattans.

“I miss them, what can I say. He made them best.” Then it was onto grandpa in general, she’d only just forgiven him for what she called her uneventful childhood and for ruining her fifties with his slow death. “Had to take the L on that one,”she’d come to say and said again just now. “I’ll never get my fifties back. When I die, it’ll be a quick one.”

“Are we still on for birthday?” I said. “City-style?”

She didn’t answer for some cheering on the television, baseball from the sound of it. “I gotta go,” she said. I didn’t get to ask her about my symptoms as I’d intended, but anyway our talk had smoothed all that out.

J and I met by a playground for our second date. I was in a goofy mood. It happens to me sometimes, only I’m not funny, so I need someone funny to make use of it. But J’d stepped into a darker light this time. She said she’d been a little sick although she didn’t show it, and then she chose this moment to tell of her mother’s fanaticism for energy-saving lightbulbs which she supposed traumatized her early on. They made teenage sex unsexy and playdates uncomfortable. She said something about her younger siblings, and then it was onto other things that bothered her, until the goofy light in me was out. I tried to keep my eyes on the children up-downing on the seesaws, some of them too big for them, but anyway. When J got it all out I could think of nothing I wanted to say to her. There was this pretty teenage girl at the swing-set entertaining her friends with a speech against a teacher they all hated, which it seemed she’d prepared in advance. We listened until it was done. It was the loudest thing around.

“Well, I guess I’ll just go home then,” I said. We hadn’t touched this whole time, not even a hug. “This was a mistake.”

“What? No, I’m sorry. I want to keep hanging out with you.”

She took my hand and her green eyes seemed to blow up.

It was my apartment this time, or rather mom and dad’s which they let me use. She started on a blow job right away, but her sickness came in and coughing broke it up. Her posture was bad, I could see her whole spine curled around my cock, which came out in sharper relief when she coughed. The cough got so bad she had to stop and let me finish myself on her face, but it got in her eye. She tried to play it cool but I could tell it hurt. I went to take a bath and shave and there I remembered she’d talked about younger siblings but said before she was an only child.

“For a long time I was an ass man,” I shouted from my bathtub. “But in recent years I’ve returned to titties. A perfect pair is truly a rare thing. Yours aren’t perfect but they’re really good.”

When I got out of the bathtub I found J crying on the couch. I was still wet and nude and bubbly.

“I’m sorry. Was it what I said about your tits? I was wrong. They are perfect.” I started to cup them but she pushed my hand away. “Talk to me. What is it? Is your eye still hurting?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just been a hard day in general. Today is my rape anniversary.”

And she told me all about the guy in a puffy green jacket outside her old job who forced sex on her a year ago. All this time she was looking out the window at the sparkling city and only once she finished the telling did she look at me. One of her eyes was far redder and puffy than the other. She looked frightened.

“What happened to your face?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re all covered in blood.”

I touched my face. “Shit, you’re right. I must have cut myself shaving.”

“It looks worse than that,” she said.

“I must have cut myself a lot.”

I let J treat me on the couch with first aid supplies. Now I thought it was time to tell about my molestation.

“I was twelve years old at the time,” I began. J was dabbing my face. “My parents had us in the rainforest that summer for anthropological research. I was wrestling with two of the local boys and their granny or their nanny came and yanked me by my shirt and dragged me into a hut. Then she pulled her skirt up, opened her legs, and pointed at her cunt and said something in her native tongue. Then she like pulled down my pants and grabbed my penis. Then I screamed and ran away.”

J was still mopping up the blood. “This is so weird,” she said.

“I think it totally messed me up. I was a virgin with girls until I was twenty-five. And before that I had a lot of fantasies, about my younger sister mostly.”

“Do your parents know?”

“I don’t see how they would.”

“You should tell them.”

“I don’t want to make them feel guilty. I actually think the rainforest was mostly good for me. It expanded my perspective.”

After me and mom’s birthday, dad came down for a city-hop. I met him at the train station. Dad retired from researching five years ago already and on top of that he’d just sold his shares in the company.

“Thanks for inviting me,” he said. “And happy belated birthday. Here.” He held out a fistful of chocolate coins and dropped them in my hands. “I’m sorry I didn’t join you guys the other week but you know I’d have just killed the vibe. She bores me to death honestly. It’s not her fault. It’s especially bad in the city cause I like to live it up here, and you know your mom. She just can’t tango.”

He marched us to the deli for lotto tickets. For fifteen minutes he read out numbers to the cashier, sometimes with the words “all day” or “all night” orelse to that effect tacked on, to the tune of the cashier's dutiful key-crunching and cha-chinging. The tally was up to $147.57 on the display when dad handed over a stack of receipts which started the crunching and cha-chinging up again. What was on them added up to $210.

“So you owe me $62.42 now.”

The cashier popped the register.

“Hold it,” dad said. “I’m not done.” And then another spate of numbers, until the first tally came up to $212.57. Dad handed him a five-dollar bill and said keep the change and walked away with a stack of fresh lotto tickets.

We hit two more like this in a two-block radius.

“Well I’m beat,” dad said. It’d been almost an hour now and it was dark out. “I should try and hop on the next train or I’ll never hear the end of it from mommy.”

“Okay,” I said. “Hey, can I talk to you about something before you go?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. He thumped me in the chest. “Atta boy. Don’t listen to what mom says, I’ve met twenty-one year olds more mature than your mother, more intelligent. Is she good looking, too?”

“It wasn’t about that. But thanks. Did she mention anything about something I told her? About the rainforest?”

“Oof. I was hoping you wouldn’t bring that up. Yes, she mentioned it. I think you’re a little turned around there, son. It would be a little racist to label that sexual abuse. You received a spontaneous education in sexual mores. It could happen to anyone. We figured you getting rough with those local boys got the woman worried you were exhibiting homosexual behavior, so she wanted to set you straight. That might not be how we do things here, but you have to keep in mind culture is relative. As scholars we embrace diversity and study it with objectivity. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You weren’t molested. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. To be honest I was pretty ticked off that you’d throw that on us as the reason for your general dysfunction. But the way you’re taking it now, I understand it was just an information problem.”

I got the frog look from dad now since we just stared at each other for a while. His big eyes pop out and almost point in different directions. I think that’s why dad really struggled to put things together in his head.

“Is there something else?” he said.

“No.”

“A beer? In the station?”

“Sure.”

“I’d have a second with you,” he said. So we had a second.

“I’d join for the third, but I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep on the train and miss my stop.”

So I drank up the third while he watched. I drank it quickly from nerves at him not having one as well. He paid and asked for an itemized receipt.

“Let’s see.” He donned his glasses. “My beers were $14 plus tax that’s $14.28, plus tip let’s say $16.85. Subtract that… so you owe me $25.27.”

“Looks like I only have a twenty,” I said.

“That’ll do.” He plucked the twenty from my wallet. “Five and twenty-seven on your credit line then. We’ll take it out of our next beer.” He winked at me. I walked him to the waiting terminal. He squinted up at the schedule for a while and then counted out four of his lotto tix. I guessed that he might die soon and I was pretty much right.

“Try it,” he said, giving me the lottery tickets. “Anyway you can go now. Leave me. I’d kiss your cheek but it looks all fucked up. What happened? Did you walk through a glass door or something?”

Sometimes you walk away from someone and wish they would follow you, and then somebody else does instead. I had to make four turns and slip into a diner to shake this guy in a bright red coat who convinced himself I was lost and kept shouting directions at me from behind. Left! Right! It took a hell of will not to obey him.

The old diner waiter with latex-looking skin dropped a plate of French toast in front of me. A bald mom fed her child a proportionately smaller turkey sandwich to her own. Then a black migrant kid sat on a stool next to me waiting for something to happen until the cook finally threw him out.

“Money is coming,” he said.

“You can wait for money outside.”

When I left I found the kid and gave him dad’s lotto tickets.

“Here,” I said. “I don’t know what to do with them but maybe you do.”

I circled round the area because I liked it here between the smell of park and sewer fumes and all the tall buildings, too. Coming back to the station I found a spot to watch dad from. For some reason he was still sitting there. He was asleep actually, but then he rose suddenly and came over to me.

“God I’m sunk,” he said. “The beer. And the air in here brings my face down.” He stretched his cheeks out with his jaw. “And they stopped using clocks in public! Or else the clocks stopped telling time… I think I mean they’re unintelligible to me now. At least I don’t know what I’m saying.”

The station clock was hard to make out but the time on it was right.

“You got a cigarette?” he said. “I said do you have a smoke?”

Then his phone alarm went off and he took himself with his bags to the platform where the train pulled in. He froze with one foot in the air before he finally stepped in and steamed away.

Winter blew in then, the moment dad stepped on that train. It ripped into my undershirt and I had to run home with my arms inside of it. It blew in for weeks and weeks, and with it came holidays, a visit from my little sis, and a green puffer jacket that was popular with the twenty-six to forty-something demographic, even pushing fifties, the green was just so fucking good. Dad got one and he got me one too as a preliminary present for the last and biggest holiday. I got J’s cough, which lasted about a week, but the coughing kept on a few weeks more, especially with laughter, but thankfully I don’t laugh much. I told J the good news about my molestation but she didn’t take it the way I’d hoped. She seemed almost mad or jealous about it and something was different with us after that. I don’t think I ever really had a dream about her. But I didn’t feel the need to tell her.

Winter blew my sister up from Nashville but only for a day. She stayed in a hotel on my street that as far as I knew never existed before she stayed in it. I don’t know how she found it. The moment she stepped into mom and dad’s she started cleaning it, didn’t even bother to remove her business heels or her trench coat. I just watched her squatting over my bathroom floor, hair in a tight bun, stilettos stabbing the tiles, coat swishing in the shower puddles, her butt almost poking out from her skirt while she scrubbed the tub. We used to be close.

“Isn’t that painful?” I said.

“Is what painful?”

“I guess I was talking about the bun but really all of it. Should I help?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How’s your marriage?” I was shouting from the couch now that she had the water on.

“He’s good! We had a scare but it’s okay. He’s fully back on his exercises.”

“So it turns out I was never molested.”

“What?”

“I said I was never molested!”

She turned the shower off.

“What do you mean ‘it turns out’?”

“I mean the results are in, it wasn’t a molestation. It was more like a sexual education. Like a cultural thing.”

“Who told you that?”

“Dad and mom.”

“Oh. I guess they’re the experts.” She started scrubbing the tub again.

“Yeah. You know sometimes I forget I have a sister. I’ve gone weeks thinking I’m an only child and even told people that on accident. Then it dawns on me.”

I was in a sort of reverie as I said this that her business heels clacked me out of. She was standing over me now.

“What exactly are you accusing me of?”

“Oh I wasn’t thinking in terms of accusations. It was more like an observation, value neutral.”

“I don’t think of it as value neutral at all.”

“No?”

“No. I think that’s terrible.”

She sat down next to me on the small couch. Across us on the wall the huge holographic buddha poster was blazing at us in an orange and yellow so bright you could almost hear it.

“I think about you all the time,” she said upward. “You’re my brother. I could never forget you. I love you. I worry about you.”

The way she said all this was more to herself than me but I still appreciated it. She seemed proud of worrying and I think she deserved to be. She’s really noble. She didn’t put her hand on my shoulder or anything but I know she might’ve, on a different sofa, in a different time.

Now she looked at me though. “Come up for Christmas,” she said.

“I would but dad doesn’t want me to. He wants to do a visit here again.”

“What happened to your face?”

“Oh. I cut myself shaving a while back.”

“That doesn’t look like a shaving cut. Let me see. It looks like, I don’t know, like you got mauled by something. It looks really bad.” She raised her fingers toward my face with her sharp purple nails and I pushed them away.

“Don’t touch it. It’s just scabs. I couldn’t stop fussing with them and then they got infected and now I think it healed funny.”

“You can probably get it fixed up you know.”

“How?” I said.

“I don’t know. There’s people. They find a way somehow.”

Dad came down for Christmas weekend. I went with J to the station but told her to wait around the corner. Dad came out to the terminal area and when we saw each other we both burst out laughing.

“I was this close to fucking texting you to wear it!” he said.

We hugged, he kissed me on the cheek, and we walked down the street arm in arm for a little while before detaching. I thought we looked fly, dad and I, in our matching puffers.

“Your sister’s up at the house with Tom.”

“I know.”

“What a body that guy has. Did your mom tell you how she walked in on him doing calisthenics in Nashville?”

“No.”

“Totally nude.”

“Oh.”

“That fucking dog bit your aunt Natalie in the ass yesterday for no reason at all. It’s like having one of those crazy hobos living in your house.”

We walked by one of those crazy hobos just then, running up the stairs and sliding down the pole, laughing.

“Okay here she is,” I said. “Dad this is J.”

“It was a cruel joke you played on me,” J would say to me later, “wearing those green puffers when you knew my rapist wore the same thing.”

And I would tell her I’d forgotten that detail about her rape, which was true.

“K says she’ll meet us at the restaurant,” dad said.

“Who’s K?” I said.

At the restaurant I felt a little sad for dad. J was much prettier than this K, even though they were about the same age, K proba- bly even younger. No one could be more aware of this, I thought, than K herself. They even looked alike a little. But dad didn’t notice at all, since he doted on her voluptuously. He seemed so proud of the whole situation. He got so proud he started drawing out his pointless stories again. Take for instance the one about the elevator technician. Where was the punchline there? Was it the guy’s appearance? Was it the size of the apartment? How long they’d owned it? Or how much they sold it for? And what about the girl, what was her significance?

“Oh,” dad said. “It comes to me. Her name was Louise. We had a lot of great times me and Louise.”

He kept switching up his fork hand in the telling without ever taking the bite he’d prepared, just lipping after it and then drop- ping it again when something else occurred to him. I noticed K had spent the past long minutes head in her wine glass and cheeks turning red. This was a dead-on mom-look. She makes it when she remembers childhood. She always looks down and smiles and blushes like the blood of memories is coloring her cheeks. And it’s like everything around her goes dark and she glows. It makes me sad to feel so distant from her in these moments, but also happy for her. She clearly had a happy childhood.

“I saw the elevator technician much later,” dad continued, “long after we sold the apartment. Just before we had you. He was working at the post office. So he was jumping from one dy- ing trade to another. I thought I’d find him in a video store next. But he probably died before video stores went out. He must have been quite old, I think. But then again you never know with blacks. The post office was a surprising downgrade from the apartment. Our building was a very exclusive building, heavily vetted. I would think if you work there you’re set for life. We sold that place to—what was it—a couple of gay dog food executives.”

Dad fixed his attention on me suddenly.
“You could never get into a building like that. Not even if you won the lottery. It’s got nothing to do with money, it’s all the little things they look for. You would have to never have bitten your nails, never walked on the insides of your feet, never slouched for all those years at the dinner table, not do that weird thing with your fingers, and goodness, not done to your face whatever you’ve done to it. I suppose that’s permanent?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It might be.”