The Mother Garden Read Free Page B

half and toss it in the recycle box at the end of the bar.
    We stare at the refrigerator. I want to ask what she did the moment she found out. Did she drive? Did she sink to the carpet and cry? But I look at her ears, still a faint pink from yanking the earrings out, I think of her drifting on the wave toward shore, and I don’t ask.
    My mother comes into the kitchen, arranging her tubes. The creases from the bipap mask make her face look even more childlike. She glances at Gracie and the delight from this afternoon is gone; in its place is a flat, drugged fog. Gracie presses herself nervously against the counter’s edge.
    â€œCan’t sleep?” I ask. A lighthouse down the coast tosses silver-white beams over the water. They dive and quiver, then disappear. The refrigerator kicks into a low rumble. Gracie rubs her palms over her hips, then turns and reaches for another glass. She pours my mother a shot. I start to object. She’s not supposed to drink.
    Gracie holds up her glass. “To arriving,” she says.
    My mother holds up the amber liquid with those magenta nails and seems to see something in it.

LOST AND FOUND
    T HE FIRST IMAGE THAT COMES TO ME IS NOT THE ONE I might expect—my father lying naked in the desert, wrapped in nothing but a dirty sheet. Instead it’s a moment indistinguishable from so many moments: my father’s thick steak of a body standing in my dim living room, the television blaring, his mind reeling, his life a set of cards stamped in symbols known only to him.
    But let me start at the beginning.
    I was out walking the dog in the hot Arizona morning, tumbleweeds and cacti punctuating the barren landscape. I liked the emptiness of this particular road. No cars whooshed by, no other dog walkers walked. I could wake up, put on my shorts, and wander for miles without seeing anyone. My dog trotted dutifully beside me, but he didn’t like to walk. I was the one who liked spending my mornings out here, the sun on our shoulders, the dusty desert air in our ears.
    The dog hadn’t shown interest in chasing jackrabbits—or anything, for that matter—in a number of years. I held his leash loosely, looped over my thumb. The leash was just part of the ritual, not a means of establishing control. But the day it happened, the day we found him, the dog became bizarrely animated, tugging wildly and leading me off the gravel road, into the sand and sagebrush, whining and gulping. Surprised, I fumbled for control, lost it, and followed him partly out of curiosity, partly because my thumb had become painfully entangled in the leash.
    We walked a short distance to a patch of scraggly desert brush and there he was, a full-grown man, curled like a fetus, lying naked on a sheet beneath the paltry shade of a damaged cactus. His eyes were closed in blissful delirium, his fists balled like a child’s. He was humming faintly, starving, near death, and a note hung from his foot on a decaying piece of twine.
    This is your father, the note read. Do as you will.
    â€œMy father!” I said to the dog. The dog looked up at me, sad and patient, and tugged back in the direction of the car. I wrapped my father as best I could in the sheet and dragged him behind us.
    At home, the dog slept fitfully, twitching and snorting on the rug near the door. I rubbed ointment into my father’s burned skin as he slept on the sofa. In his delirium he cooed and reached for my face. The touch of his hand was like the leg of a large dry insect.
    For a while I sat on a chair, watching my father sleep. His eyes were set far apart in his face like a lizard’s. Deep lines stamped his sweaty brow. His skin was burned, but the color beneath the burn was peach, nothing like my own olive skin.
    As he slept, I began to grow nervous. That unblinking desert sky left no room for doubt; but here in my living room, dark clouds gathered. What does a person do with a found father? It’s easy to lose