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wasn’t that kind. He always looked and dressed and acted like a guy with an ace up his sleeve and a joker to play. He had a wicked sense of humor.
    I remember once he returned from a fishing trip on the Anacostia River lugging a snapping turtle by its tail. He chased Maury and me around the backyard until the turtle crooked its long neck over its shell and bit at Dad’s hand. That did it. He slapped it down and chopped its head off with an ax. Blood splashed everyplace and the headless snapper stumbled blindly in the grass.
    Maury, who loved animals, dropped to the ground next to it, and rocked and moaned. I felt sick and upchucked on my Mary Jane sandals.
    “When I think about it—” Mom breaks my train of thought. “Maury, when he was born, seemed like any other baby. Slept a lot, didn’t cry much. You need to nurse them, read their minds. The little devil’s got no words. But I quit breast-feeding him because he was a biter.”
    This is my cue to say, “Don’t blame yourself, Mom.”
    “Soon as he could walk,” she continues, “he did nothing but fall on his noggin. Not a week passed that we didn’t have to rush him to the emergency room for stitches. That’s the difference between Maury and Quinn. Quinn could fall in shit and hop out smelling like a rose. But poor Maury, his life is one long stumble of fits and starts and stutters and farts. The last straw, the final blow, was you coming down with polio.”
    “How did my polio hurt Maury?”
    “He loved you!” Mom exclaims, shedding a long ash from her Kent. “You were his favorite. Those months you were in the hospital, he never stopped moaning.”
    Having polio was a pretty poor time in my life too, but I’ve grown accustomed to being a bit-part player in the family melodrama. The main plot has always been about Mom or Maury or finally and forever about Quinn.
    Shoving up off the sofa, Mom announces, “I have to pee,” and walks briskly across the living room. Perhaps this spryness is meant to prove she doesn’t need to be in an old folks’ home. But at the bottom of the staircase she hesitates and like a tightrope walker slides a foot forward, then teeters and grabs the banister. She climbs a step at a time, planting her left foot and pulling the right one up after it, planting the left foot, pulling up the right.
    There’s a sympathetic twinge in my leg, and I want to run and help her. And at the same time, I want to run away.

Maury
    My room in Nicky’s house is at the top of the stairs, under the slanted roof. First time she showed it to me, she said, “Painted green, it’s like you’re in a tent.” It reminded me of Mom’s attic back in Maryland. After my parole from Patuxent, I spent months up there building my boat. Not a model. A big one, fourteen feet long. I stretched out in the bottom of it and stared at the nails in the rafters like I do at the stars over Slab City. Once I finished the boat, I planned to float across the Chesapeake Bay and into the ocean. Instead, I caught a bus to California.
    In the desert summer, eight months long, the window unit in my room shakes and jangles and shoots lukewarm air across the bed. It’s strong enough to blow the hairs on my bare arms and legs, but never cold enough to stop me from sweating. This time of year, I like it with the AC off so I can hear the wind against the roof. It sounds like snow, but it’s sand. Hissing through my teeth, I can make the same sound.
    We don’t get snow in the desert. Only up in the mountains. Some days, in the bright sun, the dunes look like snowdrifts, but when you press your hand to the ground, it’s hot even in winter.
    Long as it’s been since I touched snow, I still dream about it. Nicky claims it’s natural to dream about blizzards in a place that’s hot. “Just like up north where it’s freezing, you dream about a warm beach,” she says.
    I don’t really dream about any kind of weather except snow, and it’s more I’m remembering being a