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 ^{(it's beta!)}

My diabetic father stands at the stove, pouring melted butter over appropriately doughy, white loaves, making carbohydrates he can't enjoy; because everybody copes. Maybe he thinks they'll ease his wife's pain, but the garlic rolls are grainy, poorly executed things. Like old monster movies or a little matchstick girl with eczema. I eat one while it's warm, with a sense of charity. Across the room, I bake with more alchemy than science, mixing the flour and salt with my hands, as though in a wooden trencher from the Village of Yesteryear at the state fair in Raleigh, measuring by taste and guess, like a real Southerner. The distinctive noise of dishes not shattering as they're replaced in a cabinet claims my attention over The Unicorns musical accusations , and I regret that he will not leave.

And I wonder if he knows he will. He hasn't given any indication, and I've watched for it. Still, the apartment opens up most probably today, RIP Grandma, and mum's statement is "a lot can happen in two years." She'll stay until my sister graduates high school. Stay here or stay with him? Again, no indication. As we walked across the rain-soaked parking lot, lit like a film noir and speaking staccato, I asked directly. "A lot can happen in two years." "Yeah, lady. Like pianos dropping on heads. Mysterious accidents." I used that joke earlier, though, not then. I used it the first time I met that phrase, "A lot can happen…" she laughed, and turned back to her over-cluttered desk. I use over-cluttered to indicate a "Hoarders" level mess, the kind you need the Magic School bus to examine the components of, or maybe just a backhoe. The kind that merits the term "excavation."

She thanked me. My mom thanked me for letting her cry on my shoulder this morning, for all of thirty seconds before she straightened herself up and went to brush a horse, no euphemism. Thornton Wilder writes in The Wreck of the Five-Twenty-Five about looking through windows. You've got no business looking through windows at your own family.