Strongwoman

A few weeks after my dad moved out, I played a trick on my mom. I asked to give her a hug, and after we held each other a minute, I stuck a sewing needle in the back of her neck. I had it taped between my fingers with invisible tape.

She’d been wailing at night. Maybe she thought I couldn’t hear her, but I could. I understood she was sad, but the sounds she made in the dark were so gigantic and horrible, I didn’t know where they came from. There were glow stars above my bed, moons and shooting stars with their tails peeling down, and I watched the yellow light they stored drain out. I hated myself for how I’d stuck them there. They were all clumped in one corner of the big, empty ceiling, too close together to make any constellations. I tried to restick one, but you can’t—they just fall. What helped a little was to pretend there was a black hole over the bed. That was what had sucked them together there.

I never said anything about the sounds. I did my homework well and made sure my teachers liked me. I was a good kid, basically, I think, for an eleven-year-old. I loved my mom, but sometimes I would pester her to tears. It was easy to make her sad, but she only wailed like that after she thought I was asleep. She would be up early, cooking breakfast recipes she’d clipped from the paper. “How’s my man doing?” she would say if she saw me staring off, and hug me. She was getting fat and I liked hugging it all. There was a good white pad of it behind her neck. She didn’t have a talk with me about the needle.

“Ow, crap!” she said. She looked surprised, then sad, but she didn’t make the sound.

A few days later, she told me I was going to spend the summer in Denver with my dad. Maybe it had been the plan all along.

I wanted to say I’d done it by accident. First I’d taped my middle finger and ring finger together, only because there was some tape. And then I’d seen the little needle hole between my fingers, so I put a needle through. And there. I’d figured out from one of their fights that I was an accident, which was ok. What it meant, though, was that maybe everything I did in the world was also an accident, that I was a way for more accidents to happen. I liked that. All the rocks I kicked down the sidewalk, which weren’t going to move on their own, all the cars that stopped for me to cross the street. The invisible tape was part of that, and the needle.

It was an hour drive to Denver from Fort Collins, and we hardly talked. She tried to dance a little to the radio, then quit; I watched the neat lanes of traffic, the millions of cars that were supposed to somehow never touch.

My dad had quit being a lawyer and was a property magnate now. He had two apartment buildings and a bowling alley he was fixing up. We spent most of the summer at the alley with his girlfriends and a Mexican handyman named Gus.

“Junior,” he said the first day, “start loving it.”

There was a claw machine I could play without paying, a spot-the-differences video game called Titty Match-up, and expired Sour Belts that tasted the same. My first job was to leave cigarettes burning in the ashtrays, to cover a smell.

He was so excited to see me that I realized I wasn’t going to see him a lot. He called Ling-Ling Palace from the lanes at ten in the morning. “General Tso’s breakfast. We got a special occasion here. What? Look, employ your expertise.” He plunged the phone’s antenna into his palm.

The fancy, sagging business shirts made him look like a sultan, and he...