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By Root 504 0

look as good as you,” not realizing the insult. But whereas I felt my mother had possessed, throughout her life, true beauty, I had always believed that I lived on borrowed time. I knew that the same bones that made my mother a domestic Garbo underpinned my more average looks. My father, though delicate around the eyes, was also long-jawed and bulbous-nosed, and so I had inherited just enough of his qualities to blunt my mother’s. I believed it galled her that a painting of me existed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I had rushed to point out that it was only my body. “My face wasn’t interesting to Julia Fusk,” I said, trying to please her when I saw on her coffee table a monograph of the exhibit that Mr. Forrest had brought.

The steam from the shower filled the bathroom. I thought of the box of my mother’s slips that I’d stolen from the basement some years before. I had put them in tissue paper in the bottom of a spare bureau in the walk-in closet. Sometimes, I would open the drawer and stare down at the rose-petal pink. It was such a simple thing, the satin piping on the bodice that became the spaghetti straps that looped over her shoulders. The slight swish and sway of the silk around the middle of her body. The tug of it when it met her hips.

I could see the general outline of my body in the fogged-up mirror. Having lost all shyness by having spent my career taking off my clothes in public, I enjoyed how demure the steam made me seem. Quickly, just before stepping in the shower, I leaned into the mirror and drew a smiley face. In the clear spots, I saw my reflection. “Ugly is as ugly does,” my mother would say.

I heard Jake coming into the bedroom as I closed the frosted shower door. The idea of him being so close by after all these years both scared and delighted me.

At some point my father began sleeping in the spare room. Every morning he would wake up and make the bed perfectly as if no one had lain down there the night before, as if the empty bed waited for a never-invited guest. Even I believed this for a very long time until, like my mother, I began to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the house. When my grandfather’s rifles were pulled off the rack, I could hear from my room the popping of the clasp that held the stocks. At least once every few months, I noted this distinctive sound, and in September of my senior year in high school, I decided to investigate.

It was unusually hot for September, and the humidity seemed only to increase after dark. The night noises coming through the open windows made my progress across the hall and past the top of the stairs go undetected. When I reached the spare room, I opened the door as quietly as I could.

“Go back to bed, Clair,” my father said in irritation. He was looking down at the rifle, which lay across his lap in the deep blue of his terry-cloth robe.

“Dad?”

He looked up and came to standing immediately.

“It’s you,” he said.

The rifle dangled from his arm, its barrel pointing toward the ground. Behind him I saw the rumpled sheets of the bed. The pillow, I knew, he had brought in from the master bedroom. The case matched the sheets on my parents’ bed. On the table was a tumbler of orange juice.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m cleaning them,” he said.

“Cleaning them?”

“Guns are like everything else, honey. They need to be cleaned to keep them in working order.”

“Since when do you care about guns?”

“Right.”

“Dad?”

His eyes seemed far away. He would focus on me for a moment and then drift.

“Why don’t you just bring your stuff in here? You’re not fooling anyone.”

“No, honey, that’s silly. I come in here sometimes when I can’t sleep. So I won’t disturb your mother.”

“Are you done with that?” I said, indicating the rifle with the thrust of my chin.

“I can rely on you not to tell your mother about this, can’t I? Her father’s guns are very precious to her, and I wouldn’t want her knowing that I was fooling around with them.”

“But you’re cleaning them, you said.”

“Right.” He nodded his head in agreement with himself, but I was unconvinced.