a hangover. That night, he complimented my guitar playing and asked
me if I wanted a new guitar for my birthday. As usual, he ignored Patty
when she talked about her poems and her grades. After he fell asleep
at the wheel and we skidded off the road, he begged us not to tell our
mother. Later, he bought me the guitar he’d promised. It was a bribe. He
didn’t bother bribing Patty.
Patty slides into the car now. “We traded information.”
We sit, something heavy and tactile between us, the air gone solid.
“Do you want to get something to eat, or a coffee?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I just want to go home.”
She turns the key in the ignition. The engine sputters. “Goddamnit,”
she says, wrenching the key. “Goddamn motherfucking piece of Ger-
man shit.”
She knocks her forehead against the steering wheel. Not very hard,
but hard enough that I grip her shoulder until she stops and stares
through the windshield at the laurel trees bowed over the red hatchback,
the woman pacing on her phone, the water in the distance, the veil of
rain clouds above the water, the prickly sky. What if every bad thing
Patty and I have ever said to each other could be extracted from our
brains and trapped in a balloon, released over the bay, so that it blew
away, forgotten?
“Patty,” I say, “why did you say that Dad abused us?”
She sighs. “Not again, Iris.”
“That’s what you wrote. You wrote that he beat us.”
“Well, he was hard on us. He was hard on me.”
“But he didn’t hurt us. He wasn’t violent.”
“There was that time he shoved the TV off the credenza and it shat-
tered into a million pieces.”
“He lashed out at electronics. It’s not the same.”
“You don’t get it.” She rotates her body towards the driver’s-side win-
dow, her reflection magnified in the silver raindrops against the glass.
“He was hard.” I unbuckle my seatbelt. “He yelled, and he swore. He
was a sad, mean man. But everyone thinks—”
“Don’t be histrionic.”
“Everyone thinks he was some child-beating terror.”
“You always had it easy,” she said. “He liked you.”
“I don’t remember it that way. I could write my own memoir, you
know. I could tell my side of things.”
