When my parents split, my father, apron-wearing cooker of French toast, snowshoer and whiskey drinker and Red Wings fan, pick-you-up-and-spin-you hugger, beloved by my best friend Haesung, reviled by eldest and only son James, worshipped by me, was not the assistant manager of Foodtown, as he claimed. He’d gotten laid off four months before, give or take a week. And so, when he left the house early in the morning, Monday through Friday, work was not where he was going. From what I’d overheard, his days instead consisted mostly of sex acts with Becky, the twentysomething barista he was still seeing. The divorce was not fine, exactly, but it wasn’t a surprise.
Mom had lived near Silver Lake for a couple of years as a kid, and she called that time—all pebbly beaches, pines top-hatted with snow, boat masts piercing melodramatic sunsets—the happiest of her life. “I need a change,” she’d said, the summer of the divorce, which she spent mostly on the computer, messaging her friends from high school and flirting vindictively with men from all over the state. “Everyone here knows every last thing about us.” Jimmy told me once that for a while she was forwarding him five, ten listings a day, with subject lines like LOOK! HOW CHEAP. On this, my brother and I agreed: Mom was in the market for something only she could leave, and what better than a place of her own? Jimmy and I had this look we gave each other whenever Mom spun out on a tangent of hypotheticals—thinking about it makes me miss him. Mom bought the Silver Lake house without ever seeing more than a handful of photographs. I’m not sure even she was prepared for this nothingness, the gray snow, the trash-strewn yards, this dense tangle of trees that felt, as I moved through them, almost hungry, as if they would swallow you up if you weren’t careful. It was a twenty-minute drive to a grocery store that stocked any vegetables; nearly thirty minutes to the high school I’d be attending come January, which was in another township entirely. It might be pretty, and I could appreciate that, these woods with their old feeling, the clean, clear air, but this was a lonesome place.
I wrapped my scarf around my head, pulling it low over my brow, so that only the tiniest circle of my face was exposed, just enough for me to breathe and smoke. My throat was swollen from all the smoking—every time I swallowed, a lump moved from my tonsils to my chest. I had traveled maybe a quarter mile past the jungle gym when I noticed a set of snowmobile treads crisscrossing the path, drawing eights around the trees. Then music, tinny and faraway. I followed the sound until I could make out the melody, and then the voice of a radio DJ, clear as if I’d picked up the phone. The trees began to thin. Up ahead, they gave way to a clearing, where there was some kind of structure—long and low and dark as a bruise. A couple of snowmobiles were parked with their noses right up against the woods-facing, longer side. I followed the tree line, trying to stay out of sight. It looked almost like a train, or a piece of one, its windows painted black, except for one that was busted out and plugged with a propeller or a fan or something, the blades slowly rotating. A boxcar, like in that children’s series. A door in the wall slid open, and a man jumped out, shutting it behind him. He looked right at me. “Hey,” he shouted, taking a couple of steps forward. “Who’s that?”
I backed away. “I’m just taking a walk,” I said. I had to yell a little.
“Come back here a second,” he said.
I turned around, feeling him watching, and got the hell out of there. I didn’t slow down until I reached the jungle gym. Sweating under my coat, I slumped down in an area of relative snowlessness underneath the slide. I waited for my heart to quiet and then lit another cigarette. I finished it, calmer, and pulled the brown paper bag from my backpack. When I took a bite of the sandwich, I realized it was just lettuce and mayo and mealy tomato, because Mom had forgotten the meat.
*
Not long after I got home, minutes after I’d changed into a fresh T-shirt and scoured my hands until I could smell smoke only when I held my fingertips to my nose, our doorbell rang. I opened the door, kicking the word Dad out of my mind.
“Been meaning to introduce myself,” the man told me, standing uncomfortably close to the threshold. “Though now we already met. I live right there. Got a daughter about your age.” He had a very slight, unplaceable accent, his vowels loose. Up close, he was near as skinny as my mom, something starving but not unkind about his eyes. Aside from his size, the sores ringing his hairline, an especially raw one picked to bleeding on the right side of his nose, he could have been any old dad. He didn’t scare me, even if he had caught me snooping around in the woods.
“Hi,” I said. “I guess I met her. And Sal, too.”
“Sal? He’s a funny little shit,” he said, like we were old friends. “There’s nothing to see out back there, girl.”
“Okay.”
“Just trees, and private property.” His gaze roamed around. “Did you know, your gutter’s fallin’ off?” I stepped outside, onto the wooden platform barely big enough for both of us, and he pointed up where a row of icicles was tugging the gutter away from the eaves of the roof. “See?”
“I’ll get my mom.” I left him standing there in his sweatshirt, his too-large jeans, a boy with a very old face, as I intentionally shut the door.
Mom was in bed, buried under her blanket, wearing the glasses that made her eyes look like they were at the bottom of a well. “Who’s it,” she said, turning the page of the nine-hundred-pound paperback she was reading, one of those time traveler books about sex in Scotland. I’d read them all.
“Neighbor. Says our gutter’s falling off.”
“That weaselly guy from the barn next door?” Mom asked, swinging her legs out of bed.
Outside, Marlena’s dad walked us around the house, swiping at the icicles with a snow shovel so that they careened into the ground. “You gotta do this every couple weeks this time a year, especially when you live in one of these prefab thingies,” he said, “where they stick the gutters on with Silly Putty.”
“Thank you.” While he was faced away from her, slamming at the gutters, Mom nudged me and rolled her eyes. This guy, she mouthed. Thinks he knows everything. A dozen icicles came crashing down, and he looked at her for approval, leaning against the shovel, awkwardly out of breath. “I had no idea,” she said.
“Another day and they would’ve busted for good.”
“I see that.”
“I can do it, if you want, when I do mine. It’s no trouble.”
“That’s okay,” Mom said. I’d been silent the whole time, standing guard I guess, or maybe just curious. “Would you believe it, I have a grown son? I think this is probably a good job for him.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Marlena’s dad, his face entirely, inexplicably red. “You’re no more’n twenty-five, I’d say.”
The effect Mom had on men infuriated me as a teenager, especially then, before I’d ever had sex. I resented her for failing in that way, too, by not giving me that quality, her charm, her way of making even prescription goggles look sort of geekily elegant. This is your daughter? people always said when she introduced me, like I’d stolen her, forced her to claim me as her own. This? I left them there.