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that he didn’t deserve to be in Grandmother’s bad graces just because his father had an Irish last name.
    “Well then.”
    Well then. Well then, I’d just have to bide my time until Greg’s extension ran out. And Joe left. Then I might get my office back.
    I left Grandmother in the kitchen and let myself out the back door. I lit the hibachi out on the porch and then came inside to take the pork chops out of the refrigerator and make our salad. A can of black beans, a can of corn, a few snips of cilantro, and a couple heaping tablespoons of salsa. I took the pork chops outside with me and shook off the excess chipotle-lime marinade.
    While the pork chops cooked, I went inside and opened all the windows. Like the vast majority of older houses in the Springs area, Grandmother’s didn’t have air-conditioning. There wasn’t much of a breeze, but at least the open windows would exchange the stuffy inside air for stuffy outside air. I turned on the pedestal fans in our bedrooms, positioning them in front of our windows to coax the air inside.
    While I was upstairs, I pulled off my shoes and socks and left them in my room. Then I went back outside, flipped the pork chops, and walked off the porch to make a quick tour of the yard. I loved feeling the heat of the flagstones against my bare feet. The yard is a xeriscape. I’d done the work when I’d returned from Boston ten years before, when I’d come back home.
    Home, and my life, had always been odd. By the time I was born, Grandmother was done cutting sandwiches into triangles, baking cookies, and training roses to climb her trellis. She’d dealt with her share of household pets. And she had long before resigned from the PTA.
    She was happy to make grilled cheese sandwiches or heat up store-bought lasagna, but I’d learned if I wanted anything fancy to eat, I’d have to make it myself. Same went for the yard. For many years, we were the only house on the block with artificial turf substituting for grass. And plastic tulips in the flower boxes.
    Now that I’d moved back, we were the only house on the block with xeriscape. But then we were also the only house on the block with an affordable water bill.
    Xeriscape used to mean lots of rocks and little tiny plants. Or cactus. But a little research goes a long way. We do have pebble and flagstone paths, but we also have ground-hugging sprays of magenta poppy mallow drooping down over the garage. Spiky fans of chives and dusk-shadowed purple sage. Rounded drifts of lavender, clumps of fuzzy lamb’s ear, and square patches of spongy lemon thyme. I broke off a few leaves of lemon thyme and rubbed them between my fingers. Took a big whiff. Then walked back to the porch, took the pork chops off the grill, and went inside.
    Grandmother was sitting at the table with a glass of ice water pressed against her forehead. “Let’s eat outside.”
    We filled our plates and then took them out to the front porch and sat on the steps. Eating outside during summer heat waves had become a tradition, but we had never gotten around to buying furniture to sit on.
    As we ate, we listened to the evening noises of Manitou Springs. Cars swishing past. Birds calling. Children shouting. The occasional parent yelling.
    We were halfway through dinner when she said, “Your mother is fifty today.”
    Happy birthday, Mom .
    I used to tell anyone who asked that my mother was dead. She might as well have been.
    My mother had just finished her first year at Colorado College when she met my father. It was an interesting match: Vietnam War protester and Air Force Academy instructor. No worse than Romeo and Juliet. And it didn’t turn out much better.
    They had one summer of love and then he got sent to Vietnam. He died before my mother told him she was pregnant. His F-4 was shot down. She was inconsolable. Practically catatonic. I was born seven months after his death. When I was less than a day old, my mother walked out of the hospital and ran away to