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dresser pasted
     with Super Friends stickers, the nightstand and water glass, even her parents, sleeping right across the hall and snoring
     like a cave of bears, maybe I could borrow a little luck too. A thimbleful, a knuckle’s worth, a smidge.

O UR REAL MOTHER HAD been gone since early in the fall of 1970. Up and gone, gone and went, winked out like a dead star. She went to the movies
     with Roger, the boyfriend, and never came back. I was four then; Penny was three, and Teresa was six. They took us to our
     grandmother’s house in central Fresno and left us on the stoop.
    “It might go late,” Mom said to Granny, smoothing one hand over her bubble of brown hair. She wore a fitted blouse and a tan
     wool skirt with white threads woven through. The pattern was slanted, a spattering that looked like driving rain or like snow
     blowing across an open field, though I had never seen snow. She fished in her handbag for a cigarette and then held one, unlit,
     while she touched each of us lightly through the metal railing. “If it’s late, we’ll be back tomorrow. In the morning.”
    Granny just nodded and waved. She told us to wave too, and we did, none of us knowing Mom’s movie would last just short of
     sixteen years. Perhaps not even she knew this as Roger adjusted his mirrors and guided the car into traffic on First Street,
     where the streetlamps were just coming up.
    Granny, who was my father’s mother, set us up a pallet on the living-room floor and let us sleep in our clothes. The next
     day was Saturday, and she promised waffles. When we woke up, our mother still hadn’t come back for us, but there was the full,
     good day at Granny’s. We walked to Radio Park and played on the swings, leaning back so our long hair swept the wood chips
     in the hollow under each. Days passed this way, but Granny didn’t seem worried. Then Deedee — our aunt and Mom’s best friend
     — came by to say that Mom and Roger had left the state. They were headed east for Montana or Wyoming, one of those states
     that’s flat on the map but wide-open to the eye. We never got a postcard, so I don’t know if they stayed in old motels with
     fluttering vacancy signs, if they stopped to see the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon or the world’s largest frying pan. I don’t
     even know if they got there, wherever
there
was, or if it eluded them, moving always just ahead of the car.
    For the next few months, we stayed with Granny and waited for our dad to come and collect us, to make known how things would
     be. I imagine we were a handful for Granny, who near as I could tell was born old. She wore see-through-thin cotton dresses
     and cat’s-eye glasses, heavy lace-up shoes and peach cotton stockings, an endless supply of which were curled in her bureau
     like sleeping gerbils. Granny had survived two husbands and was being courted by Mr. Dobbs, a heavyset mouth-breather who
     sold peanut brittle from a cart on Fulton Mall. Her little rat-dog, Tiny, wasted no time getting friendly with Mr. Dobbs.
     They napped together, Mr. Dobbs in the green-vinyl armchair in front of a silent baseball game, Tiny knotted up in the bib
     of Mr. Dobbs’s overalls, entirely hidden but for the velvety tips of his long ears. We liked Mr. Dobbs too. One rainy afternoon,
     he cleared the lunch dishes from the table and showed us how to make an edible Christmas tree out of food-dyed Cheerios and
     marshmallow cream and a toilet-paper-roll holder. We used Red Hots as ornaments, holding them in our cupped hands until Mr.
     Dobbs was ready for the delicate placement. After, our fingers were stained and sticky, lickable.
    Sometimes Mr. Dobbs attended services with us at Granny’s church, the Gospel Lighthouse, but more often he stayed home and
     snoozed with Tiny. We preferred this only because it left the front seat free and gave us complete control of the radio, which
     had buttons like piano keys that you pushed down instead of in. Granny was a serious