In 2021, I moved back to North Carolina from New Mexico. I was starting an MFA, and my stepfather was dying. I had lived away from North Carolina for fifteen years and had consciously built my own life and career. I wanted independence and freedom but in the face of  my stepfather’s illness these things felt adolescent.

When I left New Mexico, I had one dog, Frankie, and a boyfriend. The boyfriend, D., and I decided to try long distance. I believed it would work more than he did. Or I was the one who said I believed. It was a fantasy, and someone had to believe. D. and I had been together since I was thirty. When I moved back, it had been three years. My twenties had been volatile. I was running away from home, searching for freedom, and on a constant cycle of building, destroying, leaving, and wondering. I told myself in my thirties I would stop leaving.

 D. and I were not perfect, we did not make sense in big ways and had found each other on the cusp of transitions—him out of an eight-year relationship, the first after his divorce, and me a week after moving back to New Mexico from Hawaii, and not planning on staying long.

When we met, I had just moved into a casita with no furniture. The lease was month-to-month because I couldn’t say how long I would stay. I was terrified to buy furniture because when I thought of building it, all I could think about was having to tear it down again. I didn’t want to begin because all I could see was the end. I forgot all about the space in between, the way a temporary space could feel like home, the way you never could really know what was forever and what would end. In that uncertainty, I did not want to surrender to possibility.

Three years later, the casita was filled with furniture built by D. Then unbuilt by him and put into a moving storage container. I saw my life packed inside the smallest storage container offered and I clung to D. 

The storage container arrived in North Carolina the week after I did. I paid a stranger from an app a hundred dollars to build the bed D. had built and unbuilt and we had slept in. My mother gave me her old living room furniture. It was too big for my one-bedroom apartment. I took it anyways and kept adding new things. I was in a perpetual state of longing. 

In those first weeks, D. and I talked on the phone or video chatted for hours. We talked until I was in bed and almost asleep. We would hang up, I would jolt awake, and call him back immediately, feeling like I still needed something. But what I needed was for him to be there physically.

We opened the relationship. I got on apps. Deleted apps. I didn’t want casual sex. I wanted someone who loved me to hold me. I deleted the apps and scrolled through the county’s animal shelter. Dogs had profiles too. Close-up shots of their faces, different angles showing off their bodies, and bios describing their personality, their likes and dislikes, and ideal match. In their profiles, they asked for what they needed outright: a forever home to love them unconditionally. Words I could not say to myself.

My desire for a second dog had been long standing. There was Tucker, the Australian Cattle Dog I fostered in New Mexico and wanted to adopt. He was sick, from southern New Mexico, and with him and Frankie curled on me I had felt complete. I had imagined a life together. A little house outside Albuquerque, just the three of us, something I could see perfectly.

The apartment caught me. Second dogs weren’t allowed. I thought of moving. There was a family who wanted Tucker—two kids and a big yard in Los Lunas. Once, I had looked at an ex-boyfriend’s post on Facebook from when we had broken up: In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. He had been quoting Buddha. It was cringe-worthy but when I lost Tucker, the words had soothed me.

The family adopted Tucker. After he was gone, Frankie sniffed the apartment incessantly. The family sent me pictures and Tucker looked happy, happier probably than he would have been with me. I ended up moving to Hawaii and couldn’t have taken him with me. Tucker had found his forever home while I was still searching.

            On my lease in North Carolina: PET POLICY: TWO PETS MAXIMUM. Before I started the search, I called the office to make sure this meant two dogs. Could I get that in writing? Heartbreak from the past had made me neurotic.

“It is in writing,” they said. “RE: PET POLICY: TWO PETS.”

I started searching.

I went to the animal shelter. Told myself I was “just looking.” I met Charlie, a one-year-old tan male with black markings. They labeled him a “Carolina Dog” which meant he was not domesticated.

Did he belong in a one-bedroom apartment? No, but he was so skinny, and I had romantic ideas of him recognizing something wild in me. I said I would make it work. I would do whatever needed to be done. I would move to a house in the country. And then, Charlie met Frankie. Charlie walked behind Frankie, silently and sulking. He was hunting Frankie. Wild comes with its own sensibilities.

There was Bertha, an eight-year-old overweight gray and white pit mix who licked Frankie and ignored me. Maybe she would warm up to me eventually. But when the shelter staff led her away, her pee was a long red stream. The staff looked at her worriedly and said they needed to do more tests. They would contact me when she was cleared. They never did.

I called a rescue and did an intake interview meant to match me with a dog who would be perfect for me. A man, Thomas, called me on a Friday evening. He said there were two dogs he could think of who might work but one was inconsistent with other dogs and the other had just had babies. My MFA was starting in a week, and I thought maybe, right now, things weren’t meant to be.

“Well,” Thomas said, his voice heavy as if revealing something he didn’t want to reveal. “There is one dog, Knox. He’s kind of a quiet dog. He’s been with us on and off for a while now.” Another pause. Then, Thomas cleared his throat. “You can meet him and see.”

I met him that Sunday.

I saw Knox before he saw me. Thomas was inside a carpeted, two-room office in a brick building off the Main Street of a town with boarded up buildings but a thriving gas station scene. Thomas ran the rescue with his wife. He was tall, lanky, bald, and had the weathered skin of someone I pictured smoking in lawn chairs on Myrtle Beach. He was soft-spoken and gentle and when I walked in Knox stayed between his legs, glancing at me, but always returning his gaze to Thomas.

“I gave him a bath before you came.” Thomas stroked the top of Knox’s head and looking into his face intently. He sounded like he was apologizing, but I couldn’t tell who it was to—Knox or me.

Knox has a heart-shaped face. He is not the kind of dog to look away. He holds eye contact and whether this is love, a threat, or anxiety is up for debate. He has black fur with white markings on his chest, his front right paw, and the tip of his tail, which curls upward. He has the smushed face of a boxer, the shoulders and back of a Pitbull, and the coat of a Labrador.

“An All-American Dog. I tell people, he can be whatever breed you want him to be,” Thomas told me.

Frankie and Knox greeted each other easily and then played. I felt as if we were in an attachment study. The dogs playing. Frankie returning to me. Knox returning to Thomas and never once looking at me.

“He’s been with us for a while,” Thomas said when Knox would not look at me.

“How long?” I asked.

Thomas scratched the short bristle of hair left on his head.

“Two years, I think.”

“How old is he?”

“Two or three. I guess closer to three,” he added unconvincingly.

Knox had ended up with them after he was hit by a car and left on the side of the road. A friend of Thomas’s had seen it happen. One of his back legs was broken. He still had a pin in it and was in recovery for eight weeks. Then, a family adopted him—a mother and her three sons. Three months later, the family gave him back.

“I just can’t imagine that” Thomas said, shaking his head. A dog is in my home for three months, it’s my dog. I can’t image giving him back.”

When Thomas dropped Knox off, I saw him idling in the parking lot in front of my apartment while Knox stared out the window longingly. Knox and Thomas had been together much longer than three months. I realized what the hesitation had been—loving something you know you can’t keep and trying your best to let it go gracefully.

Knox came around to me eventually. And once he did, I thought of his heart, his reluctance to me, and how sometimes avoidance is like a protective casing. He cuddled in a way I have never had a dog cuddle. Wrapped his front arms around my waist and laid his head on my stomach. He sat on top of the couch and wrapped his front paws around my neck as if hugging me and then pressed the side of his head to the side of my head. At night, I let him sleep in the bed, and he curled his body around mine. During the day, he sat in my lap, rolled onto his back, and stuck all four legs straight up to the sky. I rubbed his stomach and he seemed to smile at me. I wondered if he did this in his former home or with Thomas. Someone had loved Knox. They had not kept him forever, but they had loved him, and that love had planted something that could grow with me.

Sometimes, in these moments, my phone would be on a table just out of reach. I saw D.’s picture light up on the screen and let it ring—Knox had anchored me.

“You’ve replaced me,” D. said.

I laughed.

“No, really. You have.”

I left New Mexico, moved into an apartment in North Carolina, and started the MFA fully believing the life I was creating was temporary. I would easily be able to return to the past. I would not have changed; D. would not have changed. We loved each other so it had to be more than temporary. But there was something missing for me in New Mexico, and it made my life feel—no matter how busy I was or how much I filled the days with friends or activities—at its core, empty.

I had left North Carolina wanting freedom, independence, and anonymity. I had those things and yet, on the other side I was free floating. In the fifteen years since I had left North Carolina, I had moved across the country, then beyond it, then back across it again. I was searching for something. I was always leaving because I thought the problem with ties was how they bind you. The problem with no ties was there was no one to hold me.

At Christmas, I was off school for a month and D. flew out to North Carolina for three days. Our plan was to drive back to New Mexico where I would stay for the rest of the month. Why wouldn’t I fly, he kept asking.

D. had once told me that, because of his kids and family, he “had a lot of gravity.” The implication being that I had less gravity and would be the one doing the orbiting.

“I can’t leave the dogs,” I told him.

If I was coming to New Mexico, the dogs had to come with me. Flying felt too much like orbiting. 

D. was divorced with three kids. He had a vasectomy and made it clear more kids, another marriage, those weren’t things that were going to happen with him. When we got to together, I was so volatile I couldn’t think about those things. I couldn’t imagine a future more than a few weeks. Back then, when I said I didn’t know if I wanted those things anyways, D. had looked at me doubtfully.

“I know I’m not your forever home. I have to be okay with being temporary,” he told me

I hated when he said this. I said he was assuming I wanted those things. He was a decade older than me, and I only got angrier when he looked at me as if there was a future for me, he could see but wasn’t yet revealed to me. I was angry because I knew he loved me just as I knew we would be temporary.

When D. flew out at Christmas, we stayed at my grandmother’s house for one night. She was in a nursing home recovering from a stomach ulcer. Her house was filled with images from my childhood, but it was cold, and the TV wouldn’t turn on. My father had turned the electricity off, not knowing when, if ever, someone would again call her house a home. I stood in the hallway of her house, surrounded by family portraits of cousins and uncles, and felt a tide of memories—family, parties, and running freely between people who hugged me so tight it suffocated me. Standing in my grandmother’s cold and empty house, in the absence of this family, it was emptiness that suffocated me.

As of this writing, Knox has been my dog for twenty-one months. In that time, D. and I acted on our openness. We dated other people, people who made more sense for what we both needed. We tried to come back to each other, and realized what we had had was a home, but it was fleeting and temporary. I vacillated between feeling like the family who gave Knox away and feeling like Thomas who so gracefully released him to me.

In the twenty-one months since Knox and I have been together, I have moved out of the apartment and into a house with an extra bedroom. I have had to build my own furniture, uncertain when, or if, I will see it unbuilt. The house has a yard. I try and stuff away my fear of uncertainty. In the yard, Knox and Frankie can run freely while I sit on the back deck in second-hand furniture that is almost breaking. Frankie comes to sit at my feet and Knox stretches in front of me—legs skyward, belly exposed, smiling in total surrender to the moments in between.

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I spoke to my trauma

      It dug its grave into my chest

             It refuses to come back to life

                    no matter how many times I summon it

The first words you say to a cop when you are being arrested should never be “Fuck you.”

I'm in a bare room. Nobody here but Poe. Lights flicker on off on off on off. Poe laughs at me but he's strange now, wearing a badge and carrying a billy club in his belt. Oh, it's not Poe; it's the cop. Oh shit, I've been arrested.

The cop is laughing at me, shoving me. He puts his face right up next to me and moves his lips, but all I can hear is a bullwhip cracking.

Sideways. Everything. Oh, God, the cop has knocked me down. My head is right next to a gray circle. It's a drain in the middle of the floor. I can smell it. There's blood and sweat rising up out of its putrid depths and coming into my nose and mouth. My back! The cop is kneeling on me. He's got his knee on my back, forced into my kidney. My God it hurts, and "I can't breathe." "Good," he says, “This is what happens when you don’t listen." I'm sorry, I say, but it comes out like it did before: "Fuck you." But I am sorry, and I can't breathe. "Let me go, I can't breathe." But I have no air to speak, maybe I'm just thinking it. I'm about to pass out. Now there's another weight, another knee, another cop with his knee on the side of my head. My head can't hurt this much, and I can't breathe. My God, it hurts, and I can't breathe.

Later—was it only five minutes?—all I could hear was the cacophonous ringing of AC/DC's "Back in Black." I sat in that padded room for a century, or it seemed that way. Fear was gone. Anger had taken its place. I had to use the bathroom, but there wasn't one, so the stench of the drain became even more unbearable. Eventually, the same cops who had beaten on me handed me a chicken sandwich, which I could hardly tell was chicken because of what I had just done to the drain, but I ate it. They handed me clothing, an orange t-shirt, and brown pants with a drawstring at the waist, and I noticed I was naked, but I refused to get dressed. Sometime later, I fell asleep clutching the fabric.

Four or five days later, or so I was told, I was released from jail to a behavioral health unit. It was nighttime. I could tell because it was dark outside and the air was cool against my feverish skin. When we entered the facility, two orderlies in clean white jumpsuits greeted me. I didn't know what was happening but suddenly, faced with men who smiled, I felt full of hope. "Can I go home now?" I asked. And when there was no answer, "Can I? Can I go home?" 

Instead, I was given pills, little white ones. Then I was dressed in blue scrubs with “Property of Shady Village Hospital” printed on the back and was put in another padded cell.

Under the influence of the medicine, I realized that behind the brown steel door, the walls of my cell were not just beige; they were pearl-white. They glimmered and undulated and shot sparks. Heaven-esque lights shone down on me.

At that exact moment in time, I realized it. I was insane.

Right next to the door, there was something I didn't want to see: a splotch of blood. I got as far away from it as I could, but now I could hear someone screaming. Somebody in the room next to me was suffering. He sounded terribly wounded, like a specter you might hear on Halloween or the victim of an awful traffic accident. Each time he screamed, the blood got darker, more dangerous, and then the screams seemed to be coming from my own insides, from underneath my skin, as if somehow this blood knew what I was thinking, could see the guttural, primal heart within me. I stared at the splotch of blood, and fire came out of my eyes. The screams made the blood even thicker, brighter, a river of crimson on the floor. The river rolled over me, and suddenly I was gasping for air, drowning in blood. I couldn't breathe. And then I awoke.

I wasn't drowning. There was no river of blood. But it wasn't much better than the dream. The man was still screaming, and Poe, my phantom, was there to haunt me again. I shivered and closed my eyes. The lights flickered on off on off. Finally, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, the screaming next door had stopped. I realized I could think clearly for the first time in years. I sat up. My shirt was half off but thank God my pants were fully on. I put my ear up against the wall between me and the screamer but now heard only soft sobbing.

I had been given two medicines, Klonopin and Depakote. I would take them each day of the twenty-one days that I was in the behavioral unit. They did help a lot, but they didn't cure me. The world remained a cacophony burrowing itself into me, and I could not quiet the noise. Each night, I would see the magazines on the table 20 feet away from my brown steel door. They were neat and orderly. I was uneven, jagged, unhinged.

I did have one triumph in the hospital, my first day on the ward. Along with the ward's 12 other patients, I was enjoying a meal of Hamburger Helper and mashed potatoes, the pasta a bit underdone and crunchy, when a man named Bob walked up to me and punched me in the arm.

I could have gone crazy on him. I could have come up with my always ready, "Fuck you." But instead, for the first time I could remember, I exercised some restraint. I thought about his motives, his madness, and I figured we were all under high stress due to being overcrowded in a psychiatric ward. And I just let it go.

There is something grandiose about peace, pacifism, and also something totally logical and sane.

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By eleven o’clock, we’d been hiking for almost two hours, and the morning chill had transformed to a humidity that settled thickly on my skin. The canopy of trees blocked any chance of a breeze, and I was feeling more out of shape than usual. My daughter wouldn’t walk next to me, or even near me, but that was okay. After nineteen years, I was used to following her.

I could see the red flash of Delaney’s ponytail bobbing about fifty yards ahead of me on the trail. She’d started coloring the tips of her hair when she came home at the end of the semester, trying to make her new self easier for everyone else to see. She kept applying the temporary color until it was a permanent thing. The collars of her least favorite t-shirts stained to a milky pink even after a little bleach on the warm cycle. I washed them although she insisted she could do her own laundry. Every few minutes, that red ponytail would stop swinging as she paused. She was looking back, making sure I was still behind her.

The sun-faded map posted at the trailhead had warned in bold letters to keep the river on our left on the way out and on the right after we turned to hike back. Just like channel markers when we went out on the boat. Red right returning. I’d committed the directions to memory, nervous about the places with natural bridges where we’d have to cross side creeks and streams made from mountain runoffs. I always liked to know exactly where to go. 

But the river was really just a tame thing. It swept past rocks without churning white froth or making more than polite gurgles. The falls we’d been heading toward, though, were wild. Feral. Something to hear long before we could see them. They rumbled through the slices of light between trees like far-away thunder. It had been hoodie-cool when we set out, but now I had the sleeves tied around my waist, resenting even that much extra fabric touching any part of me. Drips of sweat coursed down my back, soaked my bra.

When Delaney first suggested this road trip to see the Georgia waterfalls, I rearranged the mail on the kitchen island and counted to five before answering. Her attention was a doe that appeared from nowhere and could vanish just as quickly. I had to be careful not to scare it away with big gestures or quick answers. “We could go the second week of July if you want,” I said finally. She nodded, our business concluded.

I’d always made a point to spend time with my daughter. I did the same for her older brothers, but they were easy, pleased with a stop for fries or ice cream or going to pick out a new shirt or pair of shoes. My husband and I split the duty of getting them to Taekwondo and lacrosse practice. When they leapt from the car without saying thank you, it never hurt.

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that she was the only girl as well as the youngest, Delaney’s company was harder to come by. She’d shrug off walking the dogs with me, riding to the grocery store even with a shameless bribe of candy, or, as she got older, an offer of a shopping trip or pedicure. She’d head upstairs and close a door between us while I held my keys at the bottom of the steps. My gestures grew grander: she said yes to seeing Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and even Wicked on Broadway. Her excitement and appreciation were always prompt and sincere, but so was my sense of having to earn my time with her.

Home from college for the summer, Delaney’s readiness to return, her desire to get back to the world she’d built for herself, was a constant vibration that coursed through the house. When she went to work and barely breezed a goodbye in my direction, when she started packing before she’d even gotten an email to make a move-in appointment, when she sat reading the textbook she’d already bought with that look of furious concentration she always had, I felt strangled silent. I hoped the trip would be a break in a dam, a flow of words and confidences and memories and feelings, but I knew—I really knew—I wouldn’t hear the words I most wanted from her. I’d exceeded an amateur level of managing my expectations, but hope was always a persistent thing.

After huffing up a little hill, I paused with my hands on my knees, looking up to spot the red ponytail like a flag in the distance. “It’s only hair,” I’d told my mother. “It’s not a battle worth having.” But Mom was always one to force things, to wrestle for control, to celebrate Pyrrhic parental victories.

She wasn’t the one who taught me to be generous with words. Mom said, “I love you,” when she wanted to, not when it was what I most needed. I had to teach myself how to find her love in the car when she drove me to meet friends at the skating rink on Friday nights, in the clean sheets that appeared on my bed every single Saturday, in the hours she worked to make sure I didn’t have to take out student loans, in the cool hands on my feverish forehead. But I resented having to search.

Much later I learned how hard it could be to know where and how to look at your children and how sometimes you were peering at them through the filters of marriage and work and the feelings of never doing the right thing at the right time. I learned that, really, words were just words. There were lessons Mom was teaching me all along, and there was so much love as well. Still, I wanted to be a different kind of mother, pouring love like liquid, soaking my children. I wanted them fully and completely and at all times hydrated. But Delaney didn’t say the words back, and I was the one left thirsting.

When we brought her home from Moscow, a skinny red-cheeked baby who twisted and stiffened in my arms, I’d whispered Ya lyublyu tebya over and over. No one in the orphanage would have cradled her in the blue-black hour before dawn, leaning close to her little seashell ear to murmur to her heart. But I wondered if the Russian words, thick and clumsy in my mouth, would strike some native chord in her, unlock something that the flat English, that my hands, my heart, couldn’t. Russians are not known for being demonstrative, so maybe there was some soil in her soul where that stoicism took root. Maybe it was passed through the umbilical cord from her biological mother, a bond that could never be ours.

My toes tucked under a root, and I stumbled down on a knee. A red drop welled up and poised on the sweaty surface, and I wiped it off with my thumb and paused with my other hand against a tree, oozing its own life blood. I balanced my way to the river and dunked my hand in the icy water. I rubbed and rubbed at the sap, but it was still sticky. I brought my palm to my face and inhaled the inside of the forest, a hidden interior world so rich that it could perfume everything.

“Mama?”

Her voice reached me, and I heard the concern, wrapped it around me for a moment. If I didn’t answer, how many times would she call for me? How long before she retraced her steps to find me? Would she run?

“Just catching my breath!”

“We’re almost there. I’ll meet you at the top.”

A chorus of crickets filled the silence, and a persistent breeze finally reached me through the trees as I climbed the bank to return to the trail. It was almost a six-mile hike to the falls, and I knew the way back would not be as difficult because it was downhill on now-familiar terrain. I knew the slippery spots, the places I could stumble. Returning home from a turning point is supposed to be easier.

            She was waiting for me at the end of the trail where a wooden fence barricaded the way forward. “It looks like we can get closer to the falls if we keep going,” she said, looking at the narrow path beyond the fence. I felt her wondering if I would keep following her if she ducked under that barrier. Despite always being sensible and pragmatic, she’d learned how to push past fears and take calculated risks to avoid regret. “I don’t want to wish I’d done it,” she’d said about jumping off the high-dive, parasailing, going to the dance alone. There was something so naked about her when she measured the risks against her desires. I could taste her fear now of falling, of bones hitting rocks, of lungs filling with water. I could feel her spine trying to stiffen.

I moved past her and ducked under the fence, leading the way, moving slowly, knowing not to hold my hand back for her to take even though the way was steep. She might have taken it because it was offered, to be polite, not because she wanted to and certainly not because she needed me to steady her steps. Other feet had made this path past where it was safer to stay, to look at the falls from a distance, and I followed that groove in the dirt and didn’t look back. She would call out if she needed me. She’d know I’d always turn back for her. She’d know I’d run.

We climbed up from the path onto an outcropping of rocks overlooking the midpoint of the falls. Vertigo tipped the world for a second as I looked up and then followed the water to where it crashed into the pool about a hundred feet below where we stood side by side. There was no guardrail, no rope cordoning off a safety zone. I kept my distance from the edge, sprayed wet and slick, and forced myself not to hold out my arm to keep Delaney from moving past me. She stood next to me without touching.

The water roared over anything we might have said, but there weren’t any words to raise up over the noise. We didn’t take out our phones for pictures; what was right in front of us was way too big to cram into a small space. I was wondering when she’d turn, ready to start the hike back to the car, but Delaney moved closer and leaned her head on my shoulder, her sweat mingling with mine. In our silence next to the water’s thunder, I could hear everything she’d never said.

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A few blocks from my sister’s apartment, I found the blue and red spinny wheel of a barbershop. I yanked the door and it only budged slightly. It was heavy, and locked. I stepped back and saw a man inside, on his way to unlock the door. I saw his tall figure with treelike limbs through the shop’s front windows; he was old, and so was his barbershop. The store took up the street level of a brown brick apartment building, one with more concrete than windows. Across the street were freshly built apartments and more on the way. In the window I could see the reflection of lit-up signs: the Lydia and the Lyric were high-rises with doormen and twenty-four-hour receptionists. Each had dimly tinted glass faces, through which I saw bright white lights and uncomfortable modern chairs. The door opened, and I stepped into the barbershop. I followed the man across discolored yellow tiles to a chair, where he sat me down and began cleaning his clippers in slow motion.

            We were the only ones there. The shop was quiet except for subtle blues music turned down enough so that it was unrecognizable, but you knew it was there. It was lunchtime on a Monday, drizzling outside under pillowy clouds. I watched my barber’s reflection in a mirror. He looked ancient, spoke slowly and in stanzas. He had wrinkled, caramel-colored skin that shone slightly. On his head were white, curly, puffy hairs, like the loose strands of cotton balls you can’t put back together. He turned his back to reach his tools, and I saw dark spots on the back of his head. A very subtle man, my barber reminded me of the grandfather I never got to meet. He seemed to be living at the end of a life, running the clippers up and down the side of my head with shaky hands. I saw his fingers through the corner of my eye, their skin so thin it could tear off at any time. He had a body that might’ve collapsed at any moment, but a voice that always spoke with something to say. He grinned with white teeth, small and light like a child’s but square and split like crooked gravestones.

Facing the back of the shop, I stared at a portrait of Barack Obama, who was smiling with his arms crossed, superimposed in front of the capitol dome. My barber took my head, then spun me to reach my left side. Now I faced the street and those brutal apartment buildings, the juiceries, banks, and build-your-own bowl restaurants that lined the sidewalks below. I asked my barber about them. He hadn’t heard of the word gentrification but “yes,” he told me, “people get priced out.” Above the barbershop windows hung plastic white roll-up blinds, under which I watched a sleepy street that glittered in the morning mist. I pressed him more.

“That’s the question,” he murmured, then paused. “Where do they go?”

I asked him what he liked about D.C., and without hesitation in his slow cadence, he replied, “This city’s got money.” That’s why he’d come here from a small town with no jobs. He was a man who liked to make money. The back door opened. A woman dressed crisply in post-carrier blues beamed at my barber, tossing mail on one of the barber chairs. They greeted each other as if carrying on yesterday’s conversation, laughing about a running joke. “Take care, Blade,” she chuckled, and Blade said he’d see her tomorrow.

Blade told me he’d been a barber since he was twelve. A caddy before that. A pool shooter ever since. He worked to make money. He did all things to make money.

“Money’s not everything, right?” I asked, attempting to sidestep his prophecy. I felt like he was trying to teach me something.

“No, money isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

I gave him a strained smile.

He drove the clippers over the side of my head again, then paused and shut them off. “Everything in the world costs money. Even dying.”

I said nothing, just listened. He said he didn’t do much that was “just sociable.” His fun came from making money, because “making money is fun.” He gambled. And he was damn good at it. He told me he was a “damn good gambler” and a “damn good pool shooter.” In just a night, he could make a couple grand shooting pool. He played poker too, but not spades. People didn’t gamble on it. He had friends, but preferred to gamble alone. Didn’t like anyone else’s hands in his pockets.

            I asked him what he disliked most about D.C.. He said the crime, and that things had changed. “Bad morals,” he sighed: crime came from bad morals. Bad morals came from bad guidance. Bad guidance came from bad parents or no parents, no father or too much TV, too much TV or too much phone…or too much fast food. I watched his hands in the mirror as he stopped cutting, and threw them up resignedly. In his day, “kids wouldn’t rob somebody for their sneakers or their jacket.” My eyes followed his hands up the wall to a black and white portrait of M.L.K., who stared solemnly at us both. In his day, Blade clarified, “we went out and worked for it.” And work was never fun.

He didn’t gamble for fun. He didn’t do anything for fun. He did it all for money. And making money, or “separating a fool from their money” could be fun. It still was fun for him: he still played pool, and he was still damn good at it. He said he won eighty-five percent of his games. He told me stories of his best shots, stopping the clippers and mapping the cue ball’s flight with his hands on the edge of a rusty bronze mirror. He could hit the cue and spin the eight in a circle, or launch a stripe and stop it on a dime. In the pool room, he always looked for white men, any age. They had all the money. They didn’t think a black man could beat them. He beat them, though. And he took their money.

Blade lined my forehead with trembling hands, then wiped my edges with alcohol. I checked the mirror to look for mistakes, but there were none. Stepping outside into the mist, I told him I’d come back if I ever visited again. Eying a sandy construction site on the corner of the block, I began walking. A sign that hung from a chain link fence boomed back at me: “Luxury Apartments Coming 2024.”

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It was dark when Mom and I pulled up to our new house. The cottage, we called it, was a slumping single-floor cabin with a leaky roof located on my grandparents’ property. At six years old, it seemed a grand adventure to be nestled in the Maine countryside; a pastoral daydream pulled from a great American children’s novel where a walk down a dirt path or a tumble through shrubbery would land me on my grandparent’s doorstep. The lack of distance was the key. They were getting older, health problems amassing, and the 15-minute drive from our old house was 14 minutes too-long. My mother—the ever-dutiful daughter—had packed up our lives to be there.

“I just need a minute,” Mom said, clicking on one of the car’s overhead lights. Her voice was thick, and when I turned, her face was already red, tears tipping down flushed cheeks as her long brown hair hung lank. I could see my father through the lit living room window, unaware of his wife’s gulping sobs as he read the newspaper; Mom didn’t want to give him another reason to argue against the move. We were two moors of orange-smeared light in the darkness. My grandparent’s pink-carpeted living room we’d spent the evening in suddenly seemed far away as I started to tear up. I’d always been a sympathy crier.

“It’s like no matter what I do it’s never enough for them.” 

***

Mom was the eldest of three. All girls. My grandparents had given up trying for a boy after the third unsuccessful attempt. It must have been hard, Mom says, having to protect three daughters. She grew up poor, bouncing around New England with the rest of her family as my grandfather tried to find steady employment. Mom’s voice is almost fond as she recounts her mother’s efforts to keep them all fed when money was tight, and there was only the yawning maw of empty cupboards, dinners of buttered noodles, and desserts of frosted crackers.

I think Mom finds those memories soothing because they’re proof of affection—of care for her physical well-being—in a childhood punctuated by casual cruelty. Violent hands. Violent words. Violent actions.

Hanging above it all was the promise of my grandmother’s imminent death, despite the lack of a real medical reason. I might not be here next year, she said, voice airy and frail as she looked into Mom’s wide blue eyes. At six years old, my mother so terrified that she’d lie awake at night, huddled between her sisters in their shared bed as heat built behind her eyes. What would happen to her? To her sisters? Maybe she knew, even then, that the responsibility of care would always come down to her.

Mom was the oldest, but not the favorite. That title was reserved for the youngest, the baby, while Mom was adored in that particular way eldest children often are because they were first, and she was good at being first. Smart. Quiet. Well-behaved. She molded herself into the most pleasing shape, sparing her from some of the vitriol by being ignorable, and her sisters—the baby and the scapegoat—hated her for it. Sometimes I hate my mother too, in that fleeting way children do. She is too much, she is too little, she doesn’t say the right words, and she doesn’t understand me. But she tries. Pricking her fingers on the shards of her past to build something better for me. 

***

            On Sundays, almost every week, Mom makes her parents’ beds for them. It’s a chore she’s never liked, not because of the task itself but the knowledge that the final product will be found wanting or be dismissed in favor of a million other things her parents suddenly want done. But with one sister in the ground and the other in the wind, Mom is the only one left to help.

My grandmother is engulfed in the red recliner my parents bought her, watching as Mom disappears into the backroom. Her abandoned walker idles to chair’s left. Grandma used to use the walker when she was younger, often berating her now-deceased sister for refusing the help of her own, but now rejects its aid as she precariously shuffles along the length of the house. My grandmother has fallen. Multiple times.

Her body is pliant, dead weight, in my father and brother’s hands as they use the benches my parents bought to slowly return her to her chair; a practiced ritual only ended by my brother nearly throwing his back out while lifting her and Mom telling my grandmother she’ll have to call the ambulance next time. She hasn’t fallen since.

            “How are you feeling?” I ask from the love seat. A game show is playing on the new TV they got for Christmas. Grandma and I would play along with the contestants when I was a kid, but now my fumbling words, pushed out of my mouth too soon in my haughtiness to get the correct answer, are alone.

            “Pretty good,” she replies. The answer will change when Mom asks it, platitudes transformed into a long list of ailments recounted in a feeble tone reserved only for her.

            “That’s good,” I say. The silence that falls between us is familiar. Grandma has never been one to do the legwork in conversations. The game show host promises viewers they’ll be right back as the program cuts to commercial, and I try not to notice as Grandma leans forward with interest at the drug advertisement that plays.

***

Grandma’s belief in her own death is now a sixty-year-old premonition whose repeated telling has become a rite of passage between my mother, brother, and me. When mortality is cheapened by repetition it becomes easy to ignore its inevitability. We are the village, and my grandmother is the boy who cried wolf. Yet, the wolf’s howls get closer every year. One day I will wake up with his teeth pressed against my throat again, like when I was thirteen and Grandma was hospitalized with her first stroke, or two years ago when the cancer was found in her breast. I think she can feel him too. Her hugs have gotten tighter, possessing a strength I didn’t know she still had as she squeezes our bodies together, pulling me back down whenever I try to break away too soon. My arms fold around shoulders that never use to be so fragile. She’s given me family heirlooms and, most preciously, her safely guarded recipes written in wobbly letters on 3x5 cards.

We call these her moments of clarity when her normal moodiness gives way to something gentler. This is the same woman that appeared, a box of Scrabble in hand, at our doorstep when I refused to learn how to spell in kindergarten. But how do I reconcile this version with the one that left Mom sobbing in the driveway? Is it my responsibility—my mother’s ever-dutiful child—to take up the mantle of hate in my mother’s stead, or did she already pass the seven stages to acceptance when I wasn’t looking? Mom says she feels sorry for my grandmother. Sorry that she wasn’t a good mother. Sorry that she worked her whole life to still end up poor. Sorry that life couldn’t make her happy.

If time were compressed, I think I’d find Mom in its folds examining the shards embedded in her own mother’s palms. Lost amongst the shuffle of six children, my grandmother was married too young to a man too old; pant legs clutched in the fists of three demanding toddlers before she turned twenty. The illusion of the smiling 50s housewife was never a dream she’d gotten to indulge in before she’d had to sweep up its shattered fragments. I pity her. But she is a specter of a woman at the ends of my outreached fingertips, her reputation destined to proceed her while Mom stands solidly before me. It may not be my place to hate my grandmother, but neither is it to forgive.

***

Mom still calls her mother almost every night. Checking in. Over the course of the conversation, the years will slough off until she is that little girl being told her mother is going to die again. That same little girl who was half-convinced she could stop death if she only behaved well enough. 

“Could I be doing more?” Mom asks me after she hangs up. Hours of doctor’s appointments, running to grocery stores, writing checks, paying bills, and making calls reduced to nothingness. Mom’s always worn guilt too easily, like an unflattering but readily available coat. We both know she could pull the sickness from her mother’s body herself, and Grandma would still find fault in it.

“After what they put you through, they don’t deserve half of what you do for them,” I tell her.

            To deserve indicates worthiness. It’s a simple idea complicated by its inability to be truthfully quantified. Sometimes we do things for people who don’t deserve it because we feel indebted. Sometimes it’s because we love them too much to care. Well into her sixties, Mom says she’s lucky to have both of her parents still alive and, as a later-in-life baby, I cannot argue against a privilege I will never have. But I wish they loved her in the way she deserved.

***

With the excuse of home improvement on our tongues, we returned to my old house when I was in high school. It wasn’t a complete lie. By now, water had eaten away the cheap drywall of our living room ceiling. Our move was also enabled by my brother and his nurse girlfriend-turned-wife moving not far down the road; a go-between in case our 15-minute drive is 14 minutes too-long. Home visits still end with questions of when we plan to move back. Soon. Soon. Soon. The answer bounces around my grandparent’s living room, dulled pink carpeting squishing under our feet as Mom and I shuffle out the door.

“I loved being here, you know?” Mom confesses in a different car, in a different driveway. Her eyes roaming over the towering pines that surround my grandparent’s property. She’s always loved the quietness of the countryside, contented by the feeling of potting soil under her fingernails and the sight of overfed birds perching on feeders outside the cottage’s kitchen window. Dad and she have vague visions of building a log cabin there after an uncertain retirement date, but it’s a dream that must be stalled until my grandparents’ house stands empty, and the tears have long dried. For now, Mom deserves the distance.

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