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said it was the style there. Sure isn’t the style here, huh?”
    “Mmm.” Lyle closes his eyes. His hands rest under his head. He is twisting off each part of Thanksgiving and then putting all the pieces back together. Soon he will ask me a question about a wrong piece. Sure enough, a few minutes later, he opens his eyes.
    “Did you think he was too skinny?”
    My mind works on that one. Then I say something about how living at the beach, I guess a person’d get skinny. Running and swimming all the time. “Dustin told us he was always outside,” I remember. “He bought that surfboard. He said he was on the beach night and day.”
    “Mm-hmm,” Lyle answers. “He’s loved water since he was a baby. Probably we should have taken more vacations upstate, near the lake. That might have been—”
    “Even Mom looked skinny, for her.”
    “Well, but that’s from smoking,” Lyle says. “A pack-a-day habit destroys you. Appetite, lungs, metabolism. If you’re not smarter with your own health when it comes time to make those choices, then I must have raised you wrong.”
    Only lately Lyle has let slip a few bad things about Mom. Lyle’s words usually line up straight on a balance beam of caution. Could be it’s because I’m getting older, and he feels more man-to-man. Could be because by now he figures Mom isn’t coming back to us. Which is something I knew the day she left.

M OM MOVED HERSELF AND me into your house pretty quick after our first visit. I knew you weren’t one hundred percent happy about it, but I wasn’t the one making decisions. All I could try to do was to keep out of your way during your gloomy fits; let you eat the last of the taco chips or watch whatever you wanted on TV, even if I’d got to the remote first.
    Besides, it soon came plain to see that your moods depended more on what was churned up inside you than what happened around you, which made you hard to predict. One minute you were letting Mom dance you around the kitchen with the stereo turned up past the 40 dB line, the next thing we’d find you sitting in the dark on the back stoop, telling us no, you didn’t feel like eating dinner and no, you didn’t want to come inside. Lyle told me and Mom that your moodiness had been a part of you since always. He said this in a sort of emptied-out voice, like that lost way people comment on how the universe is too big for measuring, or how many hours a person sleeps in one lifetime.
    Meantime, Mom never seemed to be anything except for excited. On the phone to Grammie, she went on and on about whirlwinds and getting swept off her feet, like Lyle was a twister running her down. Most likely there should have been more waiting time, but I guess when two people don’t want to be alone, there’s nothing to stop them from crashing into each other.
    Mom dialed-a-lawyer to start the divorce from Dad, who finally showed up late that spring, wearing some extra pounds around his middle and smelling too strong of ketchup and coffee. He took me to lunch at the doughnut shop and promised to call me every week and maybe take me out to see the Space Station that summer, just us guys. I told him that the Space Station was a great idea, and I watched Dad’s car all the way down the block after he dropped me off, but he had been promising me the Space Station since I was four years old. Dad’s leaving was mud on my heart, but it was also a feeling I’d got comfortable with. Through all the years I remember of Mom and him, there was never a time when one or the other wasn’t threatening to go.
    Until Lyle’s, I’d been everywhere and lived nowhere. I’d camped out in apartments and trailers and mobiles and sometimes with Grammie, who’s way up north and lets me eat corn chips and red hots for dinner. I’d sat in passenger seats, slept in lobbies, waited on doorsteps, played at neighbors’ houses—it didn’t matter where I spent my time so long as I stayed Out of the Way while Mom and Dad messed