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with his pot-bellied pig Mickey, who had been starved by her previous owners to make her small. It had worked, to a
point. Now she was about the size of our Aunt Jennifer’s fat beagle, and she came if Mr. Crisander called her, but Mickey was a lot heavier than a dog and had stumpy legs. She couldn’t catch a Frisbee to save her life. She also had a bad skin disease. Her raw, scaly hide showed through her black and white bristles. Sometimes she scratched against the stone pillar near the bottom of our driveway and her back oozed. Still, none of our friends could say they knew a pet pig, and she seemed to like us. Nate and I felt like we had to pet Mickey if we saw her.
    â€œI found Mick through the SPCA,” Mr. Crisander said as Mickey plowed her snout into our limp fingers. “People buy them and think they’ll stay piglets forever.” Mickey seemed like a good enough pig, but it made us uneasy that she rubbed against our legs, shimmying and squealing. She also had a bad habit of rooting in my mother’s garden. “Leave that thing for long enough,” my mother had said, throwing out what was left of her tulips, “and it’ll dig up the dead.” It didn’t help Mickey’s case that our mother told us to wash our hands after we touched her. It made us think certain things about Mickey, and about Mr. Crisander. Nate had recently mentioned he didn’t want to go to Scouts anymore, and my mother said she had been thinking the same thing. “I mean, a father-son baseball game? What are we, Republicans?” Nate went to Science Club now, and he was collecting cans to save money for his own microscope.
    My mother didn’t mind that Nate kept a picture of Genevieve taped to the ceiling above his pillow. Genevieve had a big pink flower behind one ear and her nose was sunburned. He didn’t really miss her, he said, because how could you miss someone you didn’t have space for? I felt like I knew what he meant. This was why we didn’t have questions about
Genevieve, why her death sounded like a grocery list of events and why we never played the game with her. It was our father who was the hole in our lives.
    â€œDid he die in the morning or at night?”
    â€œMorning.”
    â€œHow did you know he was dead?”
    â€œHe stopped breathing.”
    â€œDid his heart stop beating, too?”
    â€œAfter a minute, yes.”
    â€œWhat happened then?”
    My mother’s face was sliding out from under her skin. She whacked at the blades with the spoon.
    â€œFucking blender,” she said.
    She flung the spoon across the counter and it smashed into Nate’s shake. We jumped as the glass hit the tiles and the spoon clattered under the dining room table. Gobs of kale splattered onto Nate’s suit pants as the glass broke apart with a barely audible click. The three of us looked at the mess on the floor. I started to cry.
    My mother quickly picked up the biggest pieces of glass, the clink of them in her hand like a stunted wind chime. “He was dead, Nate. Nothing happened then.” She wrapped the shards in a sheet of newspaper and threw the package in the garbage. “Don’t cry about the glass, Elaine. If we were Buddhists, we’d already think of it as broken. Now go put your shoes on and wait for me in the car. And don’t pet Mickey if she’s in the driveway.”
    The drive was quiet, just the sound of Stevie Wonder from the tape deck. When we got close, our mother sang along softly. Nate and I didn’t look at each other. Instead we watched the people on the sidewalk and tried to guess their names. Nate said the woman with the puppy in her
bike basket was a Shirley, but I thought she was a Tory. We agreed that the man with the bundle buggy full of wine bottles was a George. We couldn’t quite decide on the woman with the fabric shopping bags and bunches of sunflowers. A Rebecca, we thought, or maybe a