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The Lake on Mars

Art insisted that our troubles came from the government’s persecution of us. “We won’t follow the rules,” he said. “We live by ou-r wits and they won’t take that kind of crap from anyone.” I figured they harassed us because we had been selling as much pot as we could grow to a man the Feds had busted on Christmas Eve. Art saw it differently. He said that we were fugitives because we were Individualists, as if that were a dissident political party like some 1920s communists. Instead of Bolshevik beards, our friends wore a uniform of black Hanes T-shirts and ragged blue jeans.

Any way we looked at it, the county pigs had found us at Paul Lane’s house and told us we had better get moving because they were tired of our type in their neck of the woods. We started to pull everything together and prepared to get on our way. We rented a cheap room. I worked overtime and Art tried to cover as many shifts at the Chevron as possible. As soon as we had enough money, we left.

I always thought I’d do anything to stay with Art. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a short manicured beard. When he wore his old turtleneck sweater I would go crazy and start cradling my chin in the crook of his neck and running my hands over his strong back. Together we started out on this crap and I figured I’d stick it out for as long as it lasted. I believed I wasn’t about to find anyone better. Art can be real sweet in a pinch. I liked to think of him as a poet stuck behind the wheel of a Chevy Supersport Impala.

The car had plenty of room for our oldest son, Milton, who had just returned from God knows where, to curl up against the black leatherette in the Pony Express blanket that he had slept in every night since he was five years old. For ten years, every night, Milton demanded that I give him this blanket to sleep in. Even when it was ice-cold in the boys’ bedroom, he only slept with this blanket. Under it, he wore his coat and jeans, looking like some bum who had momentarily settled in for the night. The only time I knew of that Milton had ever left his blanket behind was when he took off three months ago.

Art and I didn’t know how long Milton had been gone at first, because we were in Monroe storing all our stuff in our friend Paul Lane’s basement. We were momentarily delayed by some coke Paul had picked up and a new stereo system; all his records sounded startling on that stuff. When we returned home, Dillon, my youngest son, was still in the house but Milton had taken off. “Don’t worry,” Art had said. “He’s at an age where he needs to establish his own identity.” But I was worried. “Quit mothering him,” Art had said.

In my Redbook, I read an article about people’s pets, about the stuff animals do when people aren’t around. The article profiled a cat who visited the neighbor’s cat and how the two would go on trips together. They would wander to a nearby river and roll down the bank and sleep under a tree and go home, sort of like a mini-Incredible Journey. I started to think about how this applied to kids. I thought about the things kids did when adults weren’t around. I wondered how Dillon and Milton behaved that week Art and I hung out in Monroe. In a way, I figured, it was like the moment when you finally went to Open House at the elementary school and discovered that your kid had a whole other life that you knew nothing about. Your kid had friends who stood directly behind their parents so that you had to shake this adult stranger’s hand and say, “My son has said so much about your son, I feel like I know you.”

Milton came back different. His head brushed above mine now. With his darker peach fuzz he looked older until you noticed just how smooth his skin was. He didn’t say much when he came to the door of our room at the Mount Si Inn. Paul Lane had told him where we were, which was a good thing, as we had already started to pack that night and in the morning we would have been gone.

When Milton came through our motel room, I remembered his way of walking. He walked like he was ducking under a low door frame; with each step, he lowered his head. He crouched across the room and sat at the kitchen table. He didn’t say any of the usual things he would say to Dillon. He just sat at the table and asked if he could make himself some coffee. “Sure,” I said, looking up from my magazine. The only thing I asked Milton was if he had found a job. But he cleared his throat and told me he really hadn’t found anything and that was why he was back.

I figured it was a good thing that I had packed the blanket because Milton took it in his hands as soon as I handed it to him and he curled up on the floor between the twin beds and went to sleep.

He hadn’t uncurled from the backseat yet, even though we were well on the way in the Impala. He just sat in the back of the car and stared out the window. Sometimes he read from his Conan book. Dillon asked Milton if he would play Hangman but Milton just rolled his eyes and went back to reading.

We were on the way to grandmother’s house, except we didn’t sing any songs and we hadn’t seen Mom since she started to visit the hospital in Wenatchee once a week for chemotherapy. She didn’t look so good in the picture she had sent for Christmas and that was six months ago. I think she chose to send the worst picture she could find. She stood against the twisted dwarf cherry tree in her backyard. White snow heaped on the branches. Scabs of ice clung to the black bark. Everything looked like hell.

Dillon kept up a constant stream of syllables as he counted mile markers, and then, because they were not going by fast enough, he started counting oncoming cars. Milton started socking Dillon in the arm whenever a truck passed. I should’ve stopped him but it sort of broke Dillon’s stride, so I let Milton get away with it until Dillon screamed. I said, “You two should stop it.” But it was a little too late and I was a little too intimidated by Milton’s sudden oldness to make him stop. He kept it up and Dillon began to cry. “Make him stop,” Dillon said through a wet throat.

“Milton,” I said. “We will pull over and Art will knock some sense into you.”

“Yeah?” he asked. Milton didn’t say anything after that until we came to Snoqualmie Pass, and then he said, “What’re you going to do to put sense into me? You pair of old potheads.” He socked Dillon in the arm so hard that something snapped in his younger brother’s shoulder. Dillon lost it. He started beating the side of the car and hollering. Art snorted and pulled the car to the wide freeway shoulder. Gravel popped under the tires and the sun slipped under the trees. The car stopped and the traffic behind us laid on their horns as they zipped around us.

Art chewed on his lower lip and took off his glasses. He flapped his arm over his bucket seat. “Okay, punk, my father said this to me when I was fifteen: ‘If you live with us, and if it comes to a fight, you better knock me on my ass, because if you don’t, if you provoke me, I’ll break your jaw.’ Understand?”

Milton and Dillon, Art and I, didn’t say a lot after that.

When our cherry 1967 Supersport Impala, its chrome bumpers cleaned by some electronic process at a detailing shop where Art had spent thousands, shot over Snoqualmie Pass, the smell of prairie and pine trees dusted us. The smell was Mom. She constantly washed everything she owned, watered her lawn, or applied moisturizer to her skin from pink jugs she bought from the Sprouse Ritz in Ephrata. When Mom wanted to say something was old or worn out, she said it was dry, as if the word “dry” carried some extra meaning for her; dry skin looked like worn-out Naugahyde or ancient skin bunched around old eyes. When I first heard someone described as having a dry sense of humor, I thought it meant that they had an old-fashioned sense of humor. By applying water, Mom tried to restore everything, to make the grass in her yard as green as green could be, to make her skin smooth and young.

Six years ago Mom still had what remained of her former bombshell self. I imagine that most men would have still slept with her. I always thought Mom should have been a movie star. And from the way she talked about her past, I think she believed she was on her way to becoming something great when she met my father.

“Milton,” Art said in a low voice, “stop kicking the back of my seat. Sit up straight.” As I turned to look into the backseat, Art said, “Stop shifting, you’re throwing the car off balance.”

“Please,” I said, “I could stand up and belly dance and not throw this car off balance.”

When I turned to look at Milton, he said in a loud voice, “I’m not doing anything now.”

“I was just looking at you,” I said.

“Stop,” he said. His face turned colors as he looked at me; red splotches spread out from his ears. I smiled a stupid smile, the way I do when a dog leaps out of a driveway barking, teeth clicking, but Milton still stared at me.

I took a quick peek at Dillon, but he was drawing what looked like mountains—huge triangles with spiky growths spraying out of the sides—in a notebook I had been using to keep track of bills. “Nice notebook,” I said. Dillon didn’t stop scratching lines into the paper.

“We need to pull over,” Dillon said.

“We’ll be in Moses Lake in forty minutes,” Art said. “Hold your hose.”

I turned on the radio and plowed through the static until I came to Debbie Harry singing “Rapture.” As the song ended, Art laughed. “Let’s get some pure proletarian music pumping.” He fished under his seat and pulled out his plastic tape case, half filled with tapes, the other half filled with Zig-Zags and baggies of his ragweed. He snapped in Exile on Main Street. The tape was so worn that anyone who was normal couldn’t identify it because every letter had been rubbed off.

Dillon started to tap me on the shoulder. “I need to go,” he said.

“Could you pull over?” I asked Art. He smiled at me, his hair flapping around his glasses. He put one hand on the arc of my neck.

“I love you, but we aren’t stopping.” He said this like it was some sort of big deal. “We get to your Mom’s house. We say Hi. We say Bye, and then we are on our way. He can go there.”

Dillon rocked back and forth against the back of the seat.

“You are such a pussy,” Milton said.

“We should pull over,” I said to Art. He didn’t say anything. “Can you hold it, honey?”

“No.”

“Art, just pull over,” I said.

Art slammed on the brakes. We all jerked forward. Dillon leaned out of the driver’s-side door like someone had just knifed him in the side. He staggered behind the car and leaned on the trunk. A station wagon with a metal boat on the roof slid over the horizon and sped by. Dillon sat in the ditch.

“What’s taking you so long?” Art asked.

“There are cars going by,” Dillon said.

While Dillon turned into the ditch, Art let go of the brake and the car lurched forward and rolled down the road. Milton laughed, not like he thought anything was funny, but like someone who had just discovered a pickle in his underwear. An eighteen-wheeler lifted over the horizon with a line of cars behind it. They whistled past us and a few cars honked their horns at Dillon, who was zipping up his pants and running after us.

After the stop, Art started to speed. He jammed on the gas and the Impala crept up to a green hatchback. He swung our car across the double yellow and sped past the car. He raced up to the next car and started hugging its bumper.

He shot the Impala over the yellow divider to pass a Trans Am that must have been going sixty-five miles an hour. An oncoming windshield a few hundred yards ahead of us glittered just over the watery waves of heat, and Art stepped on the gas. The engine roared and the mass of the car lurched forward. I wasn’t in any hurry to reach Mom’s house, but I was in plenty of a hurry to get Art off the road. I’ve always felt awkward needing things from sick people, but I needed to see Mom before Art and I began our trip to who knows where, because I didn’t know when we would be back this way again. The car coming toward us sounded its horn, a brassy noise that made the tips of my fingernails ache from digging into the leatherette seat. Art crossed back over the yellow and the Trans Am behind us blew its horn.

“We are on our way,” Art said.

He turned up the volume on the Stones. I suppose that the ancient echo of Mick Jagger’s voice and Keith Richards’s guitar would have given me flashbacks if there had been a gap between then and now. Art seemed to think history started somewhere in May 1967 and faded to a stop on side two of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, sometime in 1973. Art used this music not to pass the time, but to tread water in the present. Unlike him, I needed new songs.

He lurched the car around a camper and almost ran through an oncoming Honda motorcycle. “This should be a three-lane road,” Art said as he jockeyed in front of the camper.

“What? Is there oncoming traffic?” I said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Art smiled at me, wrinkling his forehead the way he has always wrinkled his forehead. There was a time when I actually thought the faces he made were cute.

When Art and I watched the moon landing we had popcorn and beer and put the light out as if the landing were a football game. He kept slipping his arm around me and making a surprised noise when I didn’t throw his hand off my breast. It was an okay time because we were in our black-and-white world watching Neil Armstrong go out into space. Under the blanket on the couch I cupped Arthur between the legs and rubbed him while we watched the TV. Milton lay in his crib. He didn’t cry. Arthur and I were back in the world we had been in before Milton, before we started dating, when I had already watched enough men gingerly taking off their underwear to fill a football field, and my husband had stood at the foot of enough beds gingerly taking off his boxers to fill a Holiday Inn. While we lay in our apartment watching the man standing on the moon we felt for some reason that we could have been in Art’s parents’ apartment. We needed the blanket to cover up my touching him, as though the people on TV would suddenly focus on us.

Finally we came to a long line of campers, trucks with aluminum fishing boats strapped on top, and station wagons. Art gunned the car into the oncoming lane, into the yellow line winding around the edge of the hill and into the prairie.

Art pulled into Mom’s short driveway. Her yard grew in green bristling blades where the other yards twisted into tight patches and clumps of yellow grass. Mom stood on the porch squinting at us and watering her yard from a long, green garden hose. She wore a new wig, bright and red, like a colorized version of Lucille Ball. I checked Art, and he stared at her as though he had just discovered that Mom was a zebra and I was a zebra and he’d been putting his dick in a zebra all these years.

Dillon scrambled out of the backseat and rushed past Mom. She stood on the cement pad at the foot of her kitchen door, her hands on her hips, the globe of her red hair hanging in the air like a permanent firework. When Dillon ducked under her, he barked, “Hey, Grandma.” Milton walked after Dillon. As Mom tried to touch him he stood back. He shifted around her as though he had bumped into a wall. She looked at me as Milton did this. What was I supposed to do? I shrugged. They were my kids. I didn’t have any control.

“I thought you’d be later than this,” Mom finally said. She wore a light green party dress, short enough that it showed off her legs, which were still much better than mine. Years of waitressing had exploded my veins so that my thighs looked like tubular maps of the canals of Mars. The light green dress complemented Mom. She looked like a pastel Christmas tree. But I didn’t say anything.

As soon as we entered the kitchen, Mom said, “Please excuse the mess.” We sat at her kitchen table. Gene Vincent sang from a small black radio. A pink fuzzy creature made of two felt balls hung from the antenna. We took our places at the table, each of us, I think, planning how we would say what we had to say, and planning how we would fake out everyone else so they couldn’t say what they were going to say. Then Mom said, “I’m dying, you know.” She lit a cigarette and held it up to her lips, holding Art’s and my attention in the moment when we didn’t know what to say. Mom had painted her lips a red that somehow didn’t clash with her hair, but under the paint I could see the thick wrinkles of her lips. She had used her lips like a plumber used his hands; her lips had scooped all the shit that they could move for fifty-odd years and now she was sitting at the table and I don’t think she cared about much anymore, least of all telling us crap.

On the edge of the kitchen table, stacks of newspaper starting with the crisp black and white of this morning’s Tribune fell into yellow pulp. She must not have read her paper for six months.

I didn’t know what to say to her. On the one hand it was true, I think, that she was dying. But when she just said it, it made it seem like a lie. My father did not complain before his death. My father, when he was alive, filled the house with his smell—a sweet, alcoholic odor like cologne—and sat in the only wooden chair that would hold together, and watch Ed Sullivan and then turn in, leaving his smell to linger through the house like we had momentarily moved to the perfume counter at Woolworth’s. After my father died, nobody I knew watched Ed Sullivan. When we visited his plot at the cemetery, we could smell only grass and the pungent reek of milkweed growing in the reservoir. I know, though now it’s difficult to recall, that Mom once had brown hair that waved in tight swells down her back and curled into her waist. When she stood under the lamp doing dinner dishes, her like electric filaments. Now she was bald, and no matter what we’d done, what Art had done with her, we had to spend time with her. But I wondered how I would think of her after she was gone, and I could barely remember her as she had been.

“I’m leaving Art,” I said.

Art took off his glasses and lay them on the table. “How am I supposed to respond to this two-pronged attack?”

“Say you’re sorry,” Mom said.

“I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry that you’re sick,” he said to Mom, and then glanced at me. “I’m sorry that you’ve gone off the deep end. You two feel better now?”

“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m not hysterical. We’re done with you.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.

“Me and the kids.”

“I’m dying here,” Mom said.

Art laughed. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Okay, Mom, tell us. Tell us how you’re dying.”

“You’ve always been like this, you know? You have to be the one in charge. Listen to you telling me when I can speak. You never could let yourself just go along for the ride.”

“Who’s riding who?” I asked.

“How can you say that to a woman who’s about to die?”

“Please tell us,” I said. “Go ahead, Mom, and tell us.”

Art and I listened to her talk about going to the hospital. She didn’t know any of the doctors there, even though she had been going there for almost a year. They told her when she had the results back from her first test that she couldn’t count on six months. “They were trying to kill me. It would save my insurance company money—that’s what I think.” She coughed, and smoke sprayed from her lips. “I don’t count on anything anymore. A month, a year, it’s relative. What is two of this for one of that?” She smiled.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Keep it for yourself, honey,” Mom said. She fingered one of the long strands of her wig. It was a gigantic head of hair. If I only glanced at it, it looked sort of real, even with the explosion of unnatural color and length. It was as if the radiation had resulted in an abnormal tensile strength of hair, like the way our lawn used to grow in absurdly healthy patches after the service truck spilled oil by the tank.

I stood out of my chair, aware suddenly that Mom and Art were both looking at me. I wanted them to say something, but they had stopped. “I need some water,” I said.

“Eight glasses a day,” Mom said, “drink at least that much. It’s a lot of water, I know. We have juice, coffee, tea, club soda. Would Milton and Dillon like some soda?”

“I don’t know,” Art said. He picked up the morning paper.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked Art.

“Not this instant.” He rattled his paper as if to show me he was otherwise occupied. I opened a cupboard, removed a tin of coffee grounds and snapped the lid off.

Mom, at the entry to the living room, said, “Dolls? Would you like some soda?”

“Sure,” the dolls said.

“Are you actually giving them club soda?” asked Art as Mom opened the refrigerator door. The broken seal snapped in the warm room. I turned the coffee machine on and the percolator bubbled.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t they allowed soda?”

“Eloise, kids don’t like club soda.”

“They wanted some.”

“You asked them.”

Mom opened the freezer; thick ice floes hung on the aluminum and icicles draped to the top shelf. “They would like some; they said they would,” she said. I watched her walk into the living room, planting each step and then carefully taking the next one. Her hips swayed almost too far, nearly sending her to the ground. Then her other foot planted and she swayed too far the other way.

The coffee machine hissed, steam rose from the plastic roof, and the smell of beans, metallic and earthy, lifted from the machine.

Mom sat back at the table and flicked a battered tin case open, tapped a cigarette on the lid, making a dull rattle, and snapped a match.

I smiled.

“They took it,” she said.

“Club soda is only good with gin,” Art said.

I heard a thump in the living room and saw Dillon lying on the floor. Milton kicked Dillon in the side of his chest. He stooped over Dillon and leaned into the kick. “Stop, you stupid animal!” I said. I pulled Milton back. He threw my arms off and flashed around. I stared into his eyes, and in that second I saw the new person he had become, the new peach-fuzz-turned-mustache and the shaggy spikes of uncut hair. “You two come with me,” I said. “Let’s go swimming, let’s go out and calm down from the trip.”

In the kitchen, Art and Eloise stopped talking when I reached down to pick up my keys. Art looked at me and smiled. “Can I have some coffee?” he asked.

“Get it yourself. The kids and I are going swimming with Mom. Come on, Mom.”

“I just drove for two and a half hours to this?” Art asked.

“Stay here.”

“No. I’ll come along.”

“We’ll be back,” I said. “We aren’t leaving yet.”

“I can stay and keep Art company,” Mom said.

“Come on, Mom,” I said.

Art looked at me. He dropped a baggie filled with green bud and some papers on the kitchen table. “Have fun,” he said.

In Foundation, by Isaac Asimov, a group of future scientists use numbers so well that they can predict the future by careful analysis of the past. They are almost right, but they forget to take into account the rise of individuals who can change history and thus the future, like Elvis Presley.

Mom always believed that she had fallen from a great destiny. She thought she had made some mistake a long time ago—slept with my father, for instance—and gone down the wrong track. For a long time she said it was because she married Dad, and then she said it was because she allowed herself to drink vodka, and then it was because she had cancer. Each disaster in her life convinced her that if it hadn’t happened, something great would have happened.

I drove Art’s lumbering Supersport down a gravel road toward Soap Lake’s beach. The arid hills around the lake, with sagebrush balled into black shadows, looked like the rock-strewn plains of Mars. The late afternoon sun reflecting from the surface made it the metal sheet of a polished grill. A few seagulls—stark white against the reddish gravel—hobbled forward as we closed the car’s doors.

“The beach looks like poison,” Dillon said.

“Looks like Hell,” Milton said.

My mother leaned against the car, looking oddly beautiful in the light that fell across the lake and the wind that flapped the hem of her dress up. She looked like a star of a 1950s B movie, a bombshell right out of Forbidden Planet. She smiled at me and adjusted the explosion of her hair.

A levee built of pockmarked Eastern Washington rock broke the waves far into the lake. A lifeguard tower, its metal corroded into boils and scabs, held a sign that read, “Beach closed until July 1st. No lifeguard on duty.” It was the twentieth of June, but my kids didn’t notice the “closed” sign. They stood on the shore with the waves pouring around their toes, their feet sinking slowly into the murky region where the beach dissolved into the water. The beach showers, four thin pipes, rose on a long wooden frame, the heads twisted toward the ground like the antenna of spacecraft in War of the Worlds.

“I won’t spray myself under those,” Dillon said, sounding almost as though he were speaking right into my ear.

Mom and I sat on a cement bench while we watched the kids play in the lake. Milton blew up a green raft while Dillon waded into the shallows. He splashed water into the air and it sprayed over the rolling silver swells, leaving black rings. “Don’t go too far,” I yelled. The words sounded like the million yells Mom had yelled at me—the million yells I had never listened to.

“They’ll go too far,” Mom said.

“Yeah,” I said, “how far is that?”

Mom smiled at me. “Out beyond the last buoy would be too far.” She took off her wig and laid it in her lap like an overstuffed animal. Her head looked small, with wisps of hair plastered to her scalp.

“Mom, you can get better. Cancer is not necessarily a death sentence.”

“Sweetheart,” Mom said in the voice of a movie seductress, “life is a death sentence.”

“You’re just a little guidebook to life today, aren’t you?”

“This is it,” Mom said. “I’ve got it all done. A moment like this with you and my grandchildren on a nice day at the beach—that is news. This is an event.”

“Good, Mom, just put your hair back on.”

I took my shoes off and walked down to the beach into the cool waves. I squatted down to the surface and scooped up a handful of water. In that cup of dark blue water I saw hundreds of almost-microscopic red brine shrimp twirling around, bumping into each other. I dropped the water back into the lake and my skin felt filmy, like it was coated with soap. In the millions of gallons filling the basin I felt the crowds of shrimp, the trillions of them.

“I’m glad you came,” Mom said. She stood next to me. Her hair was back on her head.

“We aren’t staying the night,” I told her. “We’ll not stay the night, that is, the kids and I won’t stay. I’m leaving Art with you.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Mom said. She looked out to where the boys were swimming. Standing there, I saw that my mother’s wig was completely fake. I could see both the face she had with the wig and the one without it, and the two separate impressions were Mom’s face, now. Like a moment of déjà vu, I could remember what Mom’s face had looked like six years ago when Art and I had come to visit her. It had been fuller then, and the skin was smooth and glowed with her manic health. I remembered her holding me years before and telling me that it was all right, and I was in her arms and they felt like the entire world. I took my mother in my arms now. She was a bag of lawn clippings, springy and thin. I heard her sobbing then. “Mom, I understand what happened,” I said, although I didn’t.

“You don’t have to go,” she said. But I couldn’t say anything back.

I looked out into Soap Lake and I thought I saw Milton pushing Dillon under the water. I saw him doing it. I saw him because Milton’s shoulders rose above the surface of the lake and I could see him rising up on Dillon’s back and Dillon’s arms thrash in the water, his face turned down into the brine shrimp, where I imagined him looking through the blue depths at the shrimp swimming down and down into darkness.

I didn’t move for a second. Then I was running out to the levee and along the gravel road at the top, yelling, “Stop it, stop it!” I felt my toenails straining against the impact of the stones in the levee. My breath hissed in and out and I felt like I could barely move. I still ran. I ran until I found myself in Soap Lake and I was pushing myself over the choppy waves.

Finally I had Dillon on the shore. I pushed down on his stomach and squeezed his cool skin until I felt his skeleton in my hands; I was afraid I would have to break his bones to wring the water out of him. When I finished, when Dillon coughed and coughed, I looked at Milton. Milton stood behind me, not looking at us, but staring out into the light above the water.

“Is he all right?” Milton asked. And I could see then, or I hoped that I could see, that Milton wanted Dillon to be all right. I wondered what he was thinking when he pushed his thrashing brother’s head under the water toward the darkness. I wondered how an action like this could happen, and I didn’t know. I didn’t know how I had pulled Dillon out of the water and made him breathe again. I didn’t know how Dillon had come from me. I had felt the process of him growing inside me, and then I felt the absence of him inside me and he was breathing in the world in front of me as alien as anything I could imagine.

“Is everything okay?” Mom asked. “Can’t he swim?”

“He’s not a strong swimmer,” I said. I helped Dillon to his feet. He hacked up water and the four of us stood on the beach as the light faded. We would sleep in a motel later and I would call Arthur sometime, but I wanted then to remake my kids, rename them, take away whatever had happened to them, take over their private lives, let them start again, step back and let them be whole.

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This is part three of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.

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