We have a piñata and a pellet gun, some apple wine product, lime green in color, and this Victoria’s Secret catalogue we keep passing around, fighting over, glossing with expansive self-aggrandizing commentary. “Adriana Lima is so my girlfriend,” says Alan, for about the eightieth time. Bruce tries to say something, too, but between his speech impediment, low-grade retardation, and the drugs he’s been doing, it just sort of sounds like a foghorn. I’m too old for this shit, though I guess that’s part of the point. This is my birthday party, or so I have been repeatedly told: me, swilling Boones’ Farm from the bottle and blasting the eye off an orange and pink burro, discoursing between hiccups about the old days, Stephanie Seymour, models who looked, like, older and wiser than you, their audience, you, the masturbateur. I coin the word. Bruce expresses agreement, I think – a low moan. Alan begins licking page 16, again, his girlfriend in something that looks like a lace heart, red and black. My birthday was actually two months ago, but I was elsewhere at the time, deeply engaged in the affairs of the moment. The day passed without notice.

Bruce keeps pointing the gun at me, pretending to fire, faking a kick back. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Alan explains all about the recent sniper attacks on the Natchez Trace Parkway, has a whole theory about it, chickens coming home to roost, the cyclical nature of history, karma for what happened to the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee. Since graduating from high school, Alan has landed a job at a franchise fish sandwich stand and, in his free time, listens to history books, on tape. He bought a box set on the Trail of Tears. He tells me that the government has blood on its hands, that the government is a labyrinth of lies. He spills some apple wine product on his lap, wipes at it with a picture of his girlfriend in a teal push-up tankini.

Bruce, meanwhile, whose main accomplishments since high school are acquittals on both a sexual assault charge and a count of assault and battery, tries to tell me about his job at the box factory. Eventually he resorts to scrawling words on an empty twenty-four pack’s cardboard. “You want free boxes,” he writes, like it’s not a question.



My homecoming coincides with a series of funerals: my aunt and uncle and their three kids, my cousins, all dead from an avian pox, very rare, previously unrecorded in this area. The coffins sink down, get shoveled over with symbolic spadefuls of dirt. There’s some singing and some praying, then we all turn our backs and out the coffins come again, loaded onto University Medical Center vans by guys wearing face masks and laboratory goggles, elbow-length industrial rubber gloves.

Twice at the graveyard my mom asks if I’m happy to be back home. She’s asked me this consistently since my return. Sometimes holding me by the shoulders, staring at me until the tears run down her face, then kissing me hard on each cheek, wiping her tears away. Sometimes staring off, glazed, into the distance, squeezing my hand till I think I’ll be the one to start crying. She asks me as I mow the lawn, coming out with a glass of lemonade and a beer, a little tray with three kinds of cookies and some grapes. She asks me over breakfast: muffins and croissants, French toast and pancakes, scrambled eggs, four meats, three juices, two cheeses, various fresh fruits, jellies, preserves, and spreads. “Doesn’t it feel good, being back home?”

At dinner I sit alone at the table as my mother runs back and forth, in and out of the kitchen, bringing out more plates, more courses, all these obscure things that she claims are my favorites, have been my favorites: deviled eggs, olives, dill green beans, celery stuffed with peanut butter, spinach and artichoke casserole, pickled beets, rice casserole, egg noodles, corn muffins, venison goulash. “Comfort food,” she says, then “It’s good to be home, isn’t it?”

By dessert the line is bluntly declarative: “It’s so good to be home,” and “Nothing’s quite as good as being home.” There are three pies – lemon chess, vinegar chess, and gooseberry – a store-bought cake, a batch of cookies, fudge. And all the while she’s apologizing, sighing, wiping her forehead, worrying that there might not be enough of something or that something’s missing, that something’s not right. “I wish I didn’t have to use those frozen gooseberries, but this time of year, honey, it’s just impossible. Anyway, at least you’re home. Being home is all that matters.”



Alan admits that he’s addicted to C-Span. He watches it with this creepy edge-of-his-seat expectation, as if maybe any minute now John Wilkes Booth is going to leap down from the tourist balcony – if there still is a tourist balcony – or like maybe, with enough attention, he’ll catch some clue that the whole thing is fake, the way people watch the Zapruder film, over and over, or the moon landing, looking close, frame by frame, for identifiable Arizona rocks.

Bruce is in something like a coma, sitting in the corner, facing the wall, rocking back and forth, drooling. The apartment is covered in the shredded tissue paper fur of the piñata, now eviscerated, its head atop an empty whiskey bottle sitting on the coffee table. Alan and I are on the couch, snorting lines of Ritalin and vowing to stay up for the whole filibuster. Some junior senator is reading all the M’s from a phone book. Now all the N’s.

At some point, Alan puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me it’s good that I’m back, that things weren’t the same without me around. He tells me some people have said things, but I shouldn’t worry about that. It’s fine that I’m back, and nobody needs to ask how I got here. “Besides,” he says, “Your mom needs the help now that your dad’s gone.”

Another senator is on the floor. He reads the rules for filibuster as a filibuster technique. Alan and I take turns shooting plastic bb’s at Bruce’s back. He doesn’t notice until we get him in the neck.



The next day I go to the mall with my mother. One of the big department stores on the end is going out of business, and she wants to check out the sales, to get me some presents, “to celebrate your coming home.” On the ride, she gives me what sounds like a rehearsed speech about how she wants to “hold me close” but also give me my “personal healing space.” She dabs stringy, disintegrating tissue at her eyes, tells me she’s been talking to some professionals she met in a chat-room. She’s part of a support community, she says. She gets support newsletters in her email.

I wander around in a sort of daze, watching the pre-teens strutting their stuff, sexed up or ganged up or whatever. I chuck some change into the wishing fountain, sign up for the chance to win a new SUV. The place smells like popcorn and pubescent pheromones, except the candy store, which smells like jellybeans. I take refuge in some upscale, low-carb, pan-Asian place, which smells like lettuce wraps and boiled tofu skin. I sit at the bar and order kamikaze after kamikaze, collecting paper umbrellas as I go, getting good and nostalgic about everything.

My mom’s bought me a book called Change Equals Growth and this maxi-pad-looking thing, which she tells me is a neck massager, battery-powered. She’s been to the candy store, too, and picked up “mood music” CDs, one of which she plays on the drive home, the sound of waves lapping against a shoreline, then a gurgling brook, then a light misting of rain. It makes me need to piss.



She fills a few bowls with jellybeans, malted milk balls, chocolate-covered raisins and almonds, gummy hearts. There are bowls on every flat surface in the house, filled with candy kisses and plastic-wrapped caramels. There are jars and tins and an entire section of kitchen counter given over to unopened bags of various snack foods, mixed nuts, chips.

For dinner there is Chicken Marsala, but my mom feels bad because the sauce comes from a jar, so she makes me a steak, too, and fries some bacon for a salad with apple slices and bleu cheese. All the pickles and relishes and breads and cheese from before are put out, with maybe a few more. Excess accumulates. There’s more bric-a-brac than the last time I was here, the bookshelves in the den filled with trinkets and souvenirs, picture cubes and picture frames. She’s rearranged the photos hanging in the hallway, taking down all but one of Dad and putting up more of me, baby pictures and school pictures, a picture that she must not remember was taken on my honeymoon.



I fill my pockets with candy, trade it to Bruce for Vicodin. The massage machine I trade to Alan for five minutes in his bathroom alone with Adriana. She’s best on the back of the spring clearance issue, in this tight beige sweater and leather skirt, looking half like a schoolgirl and half like an inflatable doll. After ten years, I have returned to late adolescence. We do shots of Jagermeister and listen to the anthems of our youth warp and shred apart in the teeth of Alan’s old tape deck. Then we get more fucked up and approximate the lyrics as best we can, making up for our faulty memory with vigor and volume. We sing songs about freedom and highways and dreams, songs in which “girls” are a sugary, mysterious abstraction. Songs about striving and needing, the burn and the ache. Some of desire at once urgent and fatalistic – back seats, no tomorrow, do or die trying. On the pills, we can’t feel out throats go hoarse. We only stop when we have no voices left, though Bruce goes on making music by banging his head against the coffee table until his forehead is bloody.



In the morning, my mother greets me with sobs, begging forgiveness. “Honey, honey,” she says, her voice phlegmy and raw, “I can’t believe I forgot. Your favorite breakfast food, and I forgot.”

And so I eat toad-in-a-hole, yolky yellow leaking out from the mound in the fried toast. There is something called sausage casserole, as well, and sticky buns, waffles, three grapefruit halves, yogurt, ham. “My mind just goes blank these days,” my mother says, bringing out a platter of biscuits and gravy, a box of marshmallow cereal. “I’m so sorry,” she says, and “It’s so good you’re home.”