She came into my room to kiss me goodbye. I hadn’t actually thought about Mom really going away to my grandmother’s funeral until I smelled the sharp odor of Camel cigarettes and the faint vapor of green apple hard candy as she leaned down and kissed me on my upper cheek, right next to my earlobe. “Goodbye, honey,” Mom said. She kept Jolly Ranchers in a glass bowl on the kitchen counter because she was on a diet and didn’t really like them. On her day off she always lay on the sofa in her bathrobe until late in the afternoon, reading, painting her nails, and chewing on the candies. She meticulously rolled the wrappers into little balls and stuffed them into her pockets.

When I woke, Mom was completely gone. Looking into her bedroom, the sheets tossed on her bed, her limp and empty Ed’s #1 Diner uniform hanging in the corner, I became worried that she wouldn’t ever come back after she went to Grandma’s funeral. She might inherit so much money that she could do anything. I walked in tight circles around the kitchen floor. I brushed the counter with my hands and listened to the voices in the courtyard outside the window. I missed my mother’s presence in the kitchen as she looked up from her cup of coffee and magazine and smiled at me while I poured cereal into the specially carved wooden bowl my older brother Milton had made for me in Shop.

A note written with a purple permanent marker, smelling like glue and grapes, read, “Son, wash dishes and vacuum. I left some money for groceries. Love.” On the refrigerator door, under a flat Sesame Street Grover magnet, a creased five-dollar bill filled a white business envelope. I ate a piece of toast and drank a glass of milk while sitting on the couch. This morning, I had to get to work.

I worked as lawn help at Happy Kids Happy Place Day Care. I found the job a week before the last day of the eighth grade. I worked for the owner’s daughter, an older girl named Pam who had just graduated from high school. One time, when I had spent hours removing the grass turf along the sidewalk and breaking the clods into dirt and roots, Pam suddenly kissed me on the lips, bringing her face to mine at a right angle and firmly pressing her lips into mine. She kept her face close to mine, as if she would kiss me again. “You’re such a hard worker,” she said. Then she turned around, shook her hair, and ran inside. I stood in the yard and rubbed my lips. I wondered if I could count it as a first kiss because it had happened so quickly and I didn’t know for sure if she meant anything by it. People do stuff all the time that they don’t mean. When my brother Milton still lived with us, I cleaned up after him all the time and whenever he was in the same room my mother would tell me that I was a hard worker.

As I left and went down the dark stairs of the apartment building, a black figure blocked the narrow passageway. “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s in Spokane.”

In the partial light, I saw the wrinkled bump in Ms. Krantz the manager’s nose, and I smelled the air from her apartment, fried tortilla shells and damp, frayed Persian rugs. “She’s coming back?” she asked in a flat voice full of the static of loose phlegm.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Tell her to come see me before she even gets through the door.” Ms. Krantz drifted into the light. I hurried behind her, past the swimming pool in the middle of the central courtyard and out the front gate.

Even though the front door of the day care had a doorbell, I knocked because Pam didn’t want me waking the sleeping children. Pam cracked the door, letting out the hubbub of a laughing baby. Brushing a strand of hair out of her face, she smiled at me. “I’m sorry about your grandmother.” She closed the door behind her, letting it rest on its hinge. She wore a pair of tight shorts that I liked to see her wear. We walked along the row of rhododendrons, over the cropped grass of the back play-yard to the work shed. “Is your Mom going to inherit a lot of money? Will we have to find a new yard boy?”

“I’m not a yard boy,” I said. “I’m the yardman.”

“Don’t get me started,” Pam said. “Is your Mom out of town this weekend?”

“Why?”

“She is, isn’t she?” We stood in the shed. It smelled of motor oil, gasoline, and lawn clippings. Pam read the list of my jobs from a legal pad. When she finished reading, she said, “Everything understood?” I nodded and Pam rattled the pad onto its hook, next to the lawn rake. “You know my friend Molly?” Molly went to the high school where Pam had just graduated. Sometimes Molly sunbathed on the back lawn while she waited for Pam to finish her work. Molly never wore makeup. Her skin was pale and she had blotches around her mouth, but because she was older and once had a boyfriend, I thought she was sexy.

“She likes you,” Pam said.

“How? She does?”

“She thinks you have a cute butt.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“You like her?”

“I need to start work,” I said. I grabbed the lawn mower’s handle and shoved it toward the door.

“She’s coming over today.”

“I’ll be at home packing so when my Mom comes with my grandmother’s million dollars, I’ll be ready.”

“Today, in reality,” Pam said. “Molly said she’d like to come over to your house and visit you.”

“I don’t know.”

“I told her you’d love it, so think about it while you finish your work,” Pam said, and I thought about it. I thought about Molly and her skinny arms and her long fingers and the way her hair fell in rolling curls down her back. When she came over, she usually wore a one-piece swimsuit under a pair of old jeans. I wondered why she wanted to visit me. I had never really talked to Molly, although every time she came over she nodded her head at me and I smiled and turned away because I didn’t want her to know that I sometimes thought about the way she kept her purse close to her and would sometimes open it up to take out a small silver mirror and look into her own eyes.

After mowing, I spent the morning weeding the flower beds and tossing the weeds into a small bucket that I dumped in the compost heap in the back. After my four hours, I told Pam I was leaving. “So did you think about it?” she asked.

“She can come over if she wants.”

“She said she would be at your house around three.”

“Three?” I asked. Once I was on the road, I ran home, closed the screen door behind me, and climbed the steps to the apartment. The hard odor of fried eggs filled the passage. On the door to my apartment, the brass number six had fallen, leaving a raised ridge of paint running around the old outline. Under the six, the eye lens had popped out, and my mother had jammed a cigarette butt into the peephole. Both things had happened late one night when my father, Mom’s ex-husband, had tried to beat the door down and get into the apartment. I had looked for the eye lens. For a while I took out the cigarette butts, but Mom would just stuff in another one. She told me to leave it alone because people walking down the hallway would see the hole and then they would look in and God knows what they’d see. Eventually I didn’t see the filled hole; it blended with the door’s flaking paint and scuffs.

I looked from the kitchen window onto the apartment courtyard. Sometimes, women lay almost naked on the lawn chairs next to the pool. The wooden lounge chairs held their empty arms into the air. The apartment building was quiet. My mother normally sat on the sofa, watching TV, painting her toenails, getting ready for work, but now she was gone.

Sweating from the run home, covered with cinders of chewed grass, I vacuumed the living room, vacuumed my mother’s bedroom, and wiped the kitchen clean. I tried to imagine what Molly would do when she stepped into the apartment. But I didn’t know. She could step through the door and throw off her clothes right there. She might arrive wearing a dress that I would try to unzip, but the zipper would get stuck and she’d leave because I was so stupid. I wondered what she would wear. I hoped she didn’t wear a bra because guys in the movies always had a hard time taking them off.

I stopped in the middle of the living room, suddenly spazzing. My intestines fought for room with my stomach. My back itched in all of the places I couldn’t reach. I tore off my shoes so that I could scratch the soles of my feet, but sitting Indian-style on the carpet, I dug my nails into the hard skin until the soles of my feet were bright red and still I couldn’t get rid of the itching. So I took a shower turned as hot as I could turn the dial, until the round edges of my shoulders burned.

As I showered, I thought about my mother driving all the way back to Ephrata, way out in the desert on the other side of the mountains, and I started to calm down. I remembered what the road looked like from the front seat of the old car we used to have, a Supersport Impala convertible. When my older brother wasn’t hogging the front seat, I’d sit there and just look at the yellow line coming toward us. I’d try to spot the farthest one from the car and just watch it come down the road toward us. But almost every time, it’d zip toward the hood so fast I had no chance of seeing it. I never really knew my grandmother, but I don’t think she had a dime. I didn’t really think my mother would just disappear. Sometimes Mom did leave for a long time, but in the end, she always came back.

Dry, and wearing a pair of nylon jogging shorts and a yellow T-shirt, I ate Saltine crackers, American cheese, and an apple. While I ate, I looked at the TV Guide. I occasionally paused to look out the window of the apartment. I broke a slice of cheese into two rectangles and then again into four squares. I put each square on a single saltine and put it into my mouth. Outside, brackish water filled the pool basin and a woman now lay in one of the wooden lawn chairs on the patio. The lit panel of a Coke machine glittered in the shadows. The woman spread her towel over the chair, leaned over her black plastic radio, turned a knob, and lay back to rub oil over her arms and legs until the sun reflected from her skin. I could see she had already tanned an even brown.

From the change jar in my room, I found two quarters. I walked into the courtyard. The woman lay with her face pressed into the chair. I walked in the shadow of the overhang. Gently, I pushed on the glowing Coke panel; a can dropped from the machine. She looked at me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but her head tilted and rose along my body. As I walked close to her, by the pool of water that smelled like moldy bread, I saw that her arms were very thin and her legs were extremely skinny except at the place where they joined her body. The round heap of her soft butt and her fleshy back seemed oddly overstuffed. Her hair clumped in a knot bunched at the back of her head.

“Hi,” she said, without lifting her head from the chair.

“Hi,” I croaked, and I stepped into the shadows of the hallway.

From the kitchen window, I saw she had turned over, exposing a tan line along the top of her breasts. I dropped the Coke in the refrigerator. I pulled out my box with the Green Lantern and Justice League comic books. Among the giant-sized issues of the Green Lantern, I stored a Penthouse I had found while cleaning the Dumpster behind the day care. In one pictorial, a naked woman lay next to a swimming pool, pushing her body into the water and into the furniture around the pool. I pictured the woman outside as the woman inside the photographs. Instead of “Hi,” she said, “I can’t quite get this oil on a couple of spots on my back.” After I finished, I checked the room to see if it looked the same as it did before. I hid the magazine in its place.

Molly knocked on the door at two forty, and I ran to the door and swung it open. She stepped back and asked me, “Does Dillon live here?” Then she recognized me and smiled, “Oh, hi.” She wore a green sweatshirt, jeans, and a pair of earrings that twirled just above her shoulders. She wore fresh lipstick that made her look like she had put on wax lips. She and I looked at each other for a moment without saying anything. She glanced up and down the hall.

“Come on in,” I said.

“Nice place.” She threw her bag down on the sofa and walked through the kitchen. “Jolly Ranchers, my favorite. Can I have some?”

“Sure,” I said, “We have a thousand.”

She unwrapped a mandarin flavor and rolled the hard candy into her cheek. “What’s down there?” she asked. She pointed toward the bedrooms. I followed her. She put her hand on her pocket and leaned into Mom’s bedroom.

“You shouldn’t go in there,” I said. “My room’s right here…”

“Yeah,” she said. She flipped on the light to my mother’s bedroom. The bed was unmade and a suitcase with peeling leather buckles sat open on the crumpled sheets with a few folded blouses in it. Next to the bed sat a small glass end table with an old clock that had numbers that snapped into place every time the minutes changed. The clock made a buzzing noise.

“We shouldn’t go in here,” I said. But Molly opened the top drawer to the dresser.

“Hubba hubba,” Molly said. She pulled out a slinky slip and a lacy square of fabric. She pulled it open and I saw that it was some sort of bodysuit. “Someone around here has some taste,” she said.

“What do we have here?” she said. She held up a small carved box. She opened it and said, “Gold mine!”

“Don’t take anything,” I said. I grabbed the box out of Molly’s hands. The contents fell out. A baggie opened as it fell to the carpet and scattered leaves and seeds over the floor.

“Look what you did,” Molly said. “Get a broom.”

I came back and we swept up the marijuana as best as we could. As soon as we had it all back in the baggie, Molly said, “Let’s smoke some.”

“Is that why you came over?”

“Come on, just a little.”

“I don’t smoke it,” I said. “My Dad smoked it. My Mom says she doesn’t smoke it.”

“Then she won’t miss it, will she?”

“No,” I said.

Molly sat back and said, “I’ll make it worth your while.”

I looked at her. She held the bodysuit in her lap, stroking the fabric. “You have to promise that we won’t take very much,” I said.

“Promise,” she said. She measured a little out into the wrinkle of her palm. “Do you have a can?”

“I’ve got a Coke, but I haven’t drunk it yet.”

“Let’s go drink it,” Molly said.

Molly poured the Coke into a glass and then pushed the can down in the middle. She took a corn-cob holder and poked a bunch of holes in the hollow she had pushed into the can. With a lighter from her purse, she lit the leaves and seeds. Smoke rolled out of the lip of the can. I thought she was an expert. I had never seen anyone use a can before. My father used a pipe or rolled the weed up into papers.

“Suck it in,” Molly said, holding her breath. I held the can and drew the smoke in. The can made a wheezing noise and I tasted the Coca-Cola, and then I tasted a familiar hiss of smoke as it hit my throat. It felt dry and I sucked in more smoke. I grunted the way my father always did. The ashes in the hollow of the can turned red. Molly grabbed the can back and sucked in more smoke.

“That’s it,” she said.

I let out my breath. Smoke poured from my nose and my mouth. A pool of blue smoke drifted across the kitchen. Molly smiled at me. Finally she let out her smoke. “This is good shit,” she said. She shook her head.

I thought she was just pretending.

Molly took my hand and we stood up and went into the living room. We sat on the sofa and she didn’t look at me, but smiled straight ahead. She dug around in her purse and then unwrapped something that she put into her mouth.

She scooted close to me and I scooted close to her so we both sat in the middle of the couch, and then she placed her hands on my face. I leaned back. Then she pushed me back into the couch so that I was lying down. Her hair exploded over my face and I felt the slightly damp warmth of her tongue on my neck and smelled the cinnamon odor of a red bear. “Are you eating candy?” I asked. I wondered if this could be counted as my first kiss. Already it was gone, and I was more concerned with the unexpected taste in her mouth.

“Yeah. Jolly Rancher. Fire flavor. Want some?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I wish Jolly Rancher made a condom because then I’d have both of my favorite things in one package.” Molly sat back on the couch and told me that I should take off my clothes if I wanted a Jolly Rancher.

“You first,” I said.

Molly stripped off her shirt. She wore a loose white tank top without a bra. “That’s cheating,” I said. “You still have a top on.”

She took off her tank top.

I stared at her nipples. They didn’t look like anything that I had expected. They didn’t end like little buttons at the tips of her breasts but sort of spread out into her skin. I couldn’t tell where they started or ended. “You didn’t have to,” I started to say, but she turned to her bag and pulled out a handful of Jolly Ranchers. She gave me a red one and popped a green one in her mouth, and then she pressed me to the couch.

“You need to take off your clothes.” She breathed heavily into my ear. She started sucking on my mouth and the wedge of green apple candy popped out of her mouth and slid into my mouth.

“Hey,” I said. But then I found my shirt around my head and felt my pants loosen around my waist. “Hey, hey, hey,” I said.

“Hey, hey,” she said.

But nothing would happen for me. Molly labored until three thirty, when I gave up and said, “It was great, but I can’t go on.” I knew I shouldn’t have looked at my magazine today.

“But you didn’t come,” Molly said. Our clothes lay around the couch and two sticky Jolly Ranchers had fallen between the cushions.

“Shall I make you some lunch?” I asked.

“Sure. What’ve you got?”

“American cheese.”

“Creamy.”

“Saltine crackers?”

“No, that’s too dry.”

“Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

“Perfect,” Molly said. She put on her clothes and sat in the kitchen watching me make the sandwiches.

“You like your bread toasted?” I asked.

“So how was it, considering?”

“Good. Fine. Bread cut diagonally or horizontally?”

“No cutting,” Molly said. “Just good? First time’s usually the best.”

“Not according to my Mom,” I said. “She said the first time was the worst in the world. And then she said that it got better. She said you’ve got to practice.”

“You mean I wasn’t good?”

“I don’t know. It was my first time. Right now it was the best.”

“Yeah, I thought it was nice.”

“It was also the worst, being the first time, because I’ve got nothing else to compare it to.” I sat at the table with Molly and put her plate in front of her.

“I’m not hungry now.”

“I’m starving,” I said. “Don’t you want your sandwich?”

“You can have it,” she said. She opened the door with the brass number six. “Thanks for the bud,” she said. Then she slammed the door shut behind her. I left her sandwich on the table. I cleaned up the couch and looked for anything that would tip off my mother that a girl besides her had been in the house. I found the two sticky bits of candy behind the sofa. I felt an odd, light-headed feeling, like I had forgotten to eat.

At nine o’clock the next morning I woke to the sound of the garbage truck coming down the street, crashing Dumpsters. Cool air leaked from the window and the smell of the pool, harsh, rotting, and vegetable, jolted me awake. I showered and hurried down the steps to work.

At the day care, Pam opened the door.

“So how was it with Molly? Did you and her have a good time?”

“Sure.”

“Sure? You’re very gallant about it.”

“What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Not much.”

“My Mom’ll still be in Eastern Washington. Would you like to come over?”

“Would you fix me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” She laughed, but it was a sound that didn’t make me laugh with her. I wondered where that left my first kiss.

That evening, I saw my mother’s car pull slowly into her parking spot. Ms. Krantz followed her up into the apartment. I heard the landlady’s bray over my mother’s laugh. They sat on the sofa. “Hi, honey. Ms. Krantz is having an important conversation with me. Give me ten minutes.”

I sat on my bed in my room. Blankets lumped around my back and across my thighs. I heard the muffled voices of my mother and the landlady talking softly. I remembered my mother had called Ms. Krantz a bitch and a whore when Ms. Krantz had picked up the trash outside while Mom sat at the front window, reading the classified section of the Times. When she had seen Ms. Krantz’s waddling figure, Mom swallowed her coffee and spit out the words under her breath.

I listened to their voices in the other room. “Your mother must have left you something. Everyone has a little something when they die,” Ms. Krantz said. “I’ve held off giving you and your son notice because I expected you to return with rent.”

“I don’t have it.”

I heard Ms. Krantz cough. “Well, that is all I need to know at the moment. Remember about your visitor as well.”

She was talking about my father. She always called him that.

“If I see that man around here again, I’ll call the cops. That man who’s been selling you whatever it is you’re taking will be caught. I don’t want those kind of folks clogging up my hallways anymore. So if you got to have them people around here, you had better move.”

Mom’s hair fell back from her temples and rolled around her ears. In the daylight, Mom’s face, her jaw and her nose, broke into thousands of incongruous lines, scribbling along the arc of her cheekbone. I saw a terrain of stray hairs, peach fuzz, moles, and blackheads. I wanted to feel my mother’s presence then, as a source of immediate comfort and safety, a place where I could ask for money or go to feel the warmth of her arms and the bulk of her body wrap around me. I was a little taller than her now, and I don’t think she was used to it because she stumbled back as I stepped toward her.

“Sit down,” she said. I sat on the sofa and she sat next to me. She brushed her skirt and a Jolly Rancher wrapper flicked onto the carpet. Tossing back her hair, she tapped the end of a cigarette on the back of her right hand and then propped it into her mouth while she hugged me. “I missed you. Did you miss me?”

When I said yes, she smiled and put out her cigarette and lit another one, but I felt odd now wrapped in her arms. She blew smoke out the window and blew some at the pane of glass. I smelled her hair. A cache of familiar smoke held me strongly against her.

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This is part seven 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.