3 ROBERT BOSWELL DESTROY THIS T he girls’ mother paused in their backyard to talk to them about the outlandish luminosity of memory, how it colored everything on this day, making even the grass take on the softened, golden hues of wheat fields. “That’s ’cause Dad quit watering it,” Dot said. She was twelve years old and the normal one. “Mom’s trying to say it looks different when you’re leaving it behind,” Baby explained. She was eleven and the other one. Noon Alessio, their mother, did not hear her daughters’ comments . She continued through the gate and into the driveway, where the hired man Boris was lashing yet another suitcase to the pyramid of belongings on top of the family van. He was a convict, another of her husband’s projects, a burly man whose body seemed made of fleshy chunks piled together inexpertly. He looked appealingly unfinished, which was probably what had given her husband hope for his rehabilitation. Her husband, Theodore “Tadpole” Alessio, was a lawyer, a former state senator, recently counsel to the mayor’s office, and now what he called “an energy broker”—whatever that meant— as well as a partner in the firm of Alessio, Meyer, Itschtikov, and Alessio. There were often convicts hanging around the house, but there were also congressmen, community leaders, businessmen , and now and again the governor, dropping by for drinks or dinner. The day Noon returned from the hospital with Baby, not quite twelve years earlier, the vice president of the United States had been in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open, making himself a ham sandwich. Noon had been so startled that she’d dropped Baby, and she halfway believed it was the tumble that had made her daughter such an oddball. According to her husband, that meant the government was to blame. Their city had grown up along an old highway that wound through the desert like an indecisive river, while the thoroughly tamed river dribbled directly through the valley like a swath of colorado review 4 interstate. High mountains to the east and a ridge of hills to the west defined the valley, a patchwork of cotton fields and pecan groves surrounding the few tall buildings and the ever-spreading flow of houses. In a more civilized part of the country, the city would have been inconsequential. Here, it was the state capitol. There was no seat for Dot or Baby in the Caravan. When Boris slung the sliding door shut, the suitcases tied to the top trembled and the girls jumped back. “You’re too big to ride on your sister’s lap,” their mother said. Her own lap, they understood, was out of the question. Noon could not have held either of the girls with their sticky hands and moist mouths as far as the end of the driveway. The girls had entered a stage she loathed, that preadolescent bog that swamped their hearts and forced ugly excretions from their bodies. She did not want them at the new house until she made a few decisions, including, most obviously, bedroom allocation. The pair had always shared a bedroom, but they would likely have their own rooms now. The girls’ sister, Sal, older and faster on her feet, was belted into the only free seat in the back, the others covered with boxes . Even so, she had to double-buckle with their grandfather, Froggy Alessio, who was sleeping upright, his mouth open, the sound of his ancient lungs like a violin bow playing a saw. Boris took his position behind the wheel. The cardboard box that filled the back window had cow markings and the word gateway in bold letters. “One reason we’re leaving this neighborhood is because it’s full of thie-eves.” Noon Alessio had always thought her voice plaintive, and she had learned to exaggerate the quality, letting it crack like a hillbilly singer’s. With her back against the van’s passenger door, she pivoted her head to survey the driveway as if felons might be lurking even now. Actually, in all the years they had lived in the old part of town, they never had a...
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Nov 14, 2022
M H Yaghmaee + 2
Open Access