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Spearses, one fat, one thin. Once he had them all stacked against the brick wall, he felt more in control, not only of the immediate surroundings but of his own life. So his father was somebody else, and his parents didn’t want him to know. It was big, but he could handle it. He’d just ask his dad about it, and his dad would apologize and tell Kevin the real story. Simple as that, no big deal, life goes on.
    After sweeping up the floor, he went to work on the green plastic table and the two plastic Adirondack chairs. In the corner next to the rusted charcoal grill, Kevin found a sun-faded box of trash bags, so he plucked one out and filled it up with empty beer bottles, sticky plastic cups, and almost-empty bags of soggy potato chips that were crowding the tabletop. On one chair were more magazines and newspapers while the other supported a Jenga-inspired tower of pizza boxes. The last time Kevin saw a disaster like this was back in college, when he’d shared an apartment with three other guys, though he had to admit, Judy trumped even the combined entropy of three male nineteen-year-olds. When he was through, he had filled two trash bags to the top, barely able to tie the knots to keep the contents from spilling out.
    She hadn’t bothered to draw her vertical blinds, so he cupped his hands and leaned against the balcony window. Not surprisingly, the chaos wasn’t limited to the patio. It was actually worse inside, her clothes lying twisted and crumpled everywhere—on the carpeted floor, off the armchair—a sleeve of a shirt desperately clinging onto the finial of a lamp. By the shapes and locations of her discarded clothing, he could guess the actions that precipitated their final repose. Next to the torch lamp was a pair of shorts she had simply dropped and stepped out of, the two holes for her legs looking back at him with fuzzy brown carpet eyes. Skin-colored pantyhose, peeled away after a tiring day of brain-dead temp work, hung limply off the back of her loveseat. Food-encrusted dishes competed for real estateon her coffee table, and an open pizza box with two slices remaining was balanced on top of the television set.
    This is how his sister lived, and Kevin felt sorry for her, which was how he felt whenever he visited. A coverless pillow and a frayed blanket were haphazardly piled and pushed against one corner of the sofa, which meant she was still sleeping on the couch. She started doing that when Brian moved out, but that was more than a year ago. As far as he was concerned, Judy was about six months behind in breaking out of her funk. An ex-husband could no longer be an excuse for her to just let things go like this. He knew this better than anyone; when Alice left their house, the hardest part for him was getting used to sleeping alone, accepting her vacancy as the new normal. He would wake up in the middle of night, his hands scrabbling for her body and finding nothing, like a tongue probing at the hollow of a pulled tooth.
    It was now a quarter past two. Kevin sat down in one of the chairs and took in the parking lot of the apartment and the row of tall evergreens blocking the view of the strip mall beyond. Rain fell, the soaking kind that came down all day long, the beat of the raindrops so steady that it faded into the background.
    What it means is that your father is not your biological father.
    Not a big deal? Who the fuck was he fooling? This was the single most devastating news he’d heard in his life. Not the most difficult—that honor would go to the doctor who announced with sociopathic dispassion that his mother had advanced colon cancer and would at best last a year. How Kevin had wanted to choke him so he’d never be able to speak again.
    Kevin had trouble even thinking about his recent unpleasant discovery for any length of time. Every time he recalled Dr. Elias’s words, other thoughts pushed them out and took their place, like his mother’s death or