I'm the sister who stands in front of houses

He's the brother sitting across from meat the pancake place, who takes my photograph. In case I forget,he says. But I want them to give me that new drug.Then I'll know what's delusion and what's true. He tears the lidoff a jam packet. The bad things that have happened to meare because of the bad things I've done. Like Kennedy—I feel responsible.I know who was in Dallas that day, hidingunder the manhole cover. I was in the Air Force, the Secret Service.I say, No. You were in the Army, in Vietnam. Before that,we were at college together. Your apartment on 18th Street.I gave you a yellow rug. He reaches for the syrup. My life has beena long forgetting. Sometimes I think our great-grandmotheris dying. Mother is smothering her with a pillow. Do you thinkour mother would do that? I say, That sounds like a bad dream,or one of those fairy tales she used to read to us.He says, The correct word, the word you want, is confabulation.I pay our bill, drive across town to the old neighborhoodwhere we both knew from the beginning we were going.We park by our grade school and start walking.Halfway across the playground, he stops. It was the time of the Tet,the new moon, that's when you think they're out there, sneaking upon you through the fields, in camouflage. I was all alone,on guard duty. I called for Spooky then, or Puff, the Magic Dragon,we called it. Said, "Looks like we've got a situation here."Spooky laid blankets of bullets the size of football fields.He takes my picture by the closed craft center. Summers, we paintedplaster of paris animals and braided plastic string into key chains. I don't know if they were there, or I just imagined them.We walk down familiar streets as if heading home.I applied for ptsd. They told me I don't have it.So I asked them, "How could you send a crazy man to Vietnam?"He points to a tired building. A drunks' bar. Used to stop hereSunday mornings, after my paper route. They'd dump out the bottlesfrom Saturday night. I'd drink whatever was left from each one.Paydays, our father bought rounds for the house.I tell him, I don't remember any of this. He says, You wouldn't.You were little. But I was in the kitchen, watching. We walk,and he says, The shrink mentioned the new drug has side effects.We keep walking. He says, I thought I saw our father on the bus.And I think it was a double in the car that day in Dallas.Kennedy's somewhere else right now, lying in the sun.I say, That might be a, what do you call it? Confabulation. He laughs.The old house looks small and unprotected.Someone has chopped down all the trees we used to climb,even the bushes we hid behind playing hide and seek.They put a prefab box in what used to be the vegetable garden.He takes my picture in front of the old house,in front of the house down the street that's still a church—silent today.It seemed the choir was always singing then. I pose by the housethat was a restaurant, where I got a job makingpickle plates and salads. And I smile once more,before the corner grocery, where the owners lived upstairs.When we walked in, a bell would ring, and someone would appear.We'd pay the quarter our mother had given us for a loaf of bread,then spend our own nickels on candy. He says, I want to writemy autobiography, but I'm not sure anything I rememberreally happened. We turn. There never used to be a sidewalk here.The weeds grew into the street. When that new housewith all the windows was a one...