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me?” Mom asked.
    â€œNo.” I was an honest child.
    â€œLance, I will try that again. Take this outside to the garbage, please.”
    Acting as though she were asking for my left eye, I got up and took the bag outside.
    When I came back in, she handed me a plate of winter squash with brown sugar on it. “I have a treat for you!” she said enthusiastically. My mother: the queen of treats. There was no fridge, no cupboard too bare that my mother, the ever resourceful woman, couldn’t scour to find a treat to make. I sat down and happily ate the squash; Court scowled at it, preferring something more junky—which would explain his bad teeth.
    She came up to me and started lightly and repetitively smacking my head: “Oh, you’re just so cute I want to beat you! Squeeze you until your head pops off!” A perturbed look covered her face, which conveyed the frustration she endured at not being able to properly express how much she loved us. These threats were known as “Allred terms of endearment.”
    My mother, Tana Mosier Allred, was raised in the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in Salt Lake City before her parents went through a painful divorce. Following the split, which was due to my grandfather’s infidelities, my grandmother was looking for something to hold on to, something to give meaning to her suffering, something greater than herself. She found Rulon C. Allred. She took her four daughters, my mother being the oldest at sixteen, and moved them up to Montana. She had an older son, twenty-one at the time and on an LDS mission in Japan, who would come home to no home at all. And she had an older daughter, long since married and on her own.
    My father was twenty and my mother sixteen when their marriage was arranged by Rulon. My father was in love with someone else, a woman he met in college, a woman outside of his extreme faith. Though she was LDS, she was certainly not a fundamentalist. My father didn’t wish to upset his father or family and went along with his father’s wishes. After all, Rulon was a prophet of God. *
    Mom gave birth to her first child ten months later, when she was seventeen. She quickly added another four, me being the final and most glorious project in her twenty-sixth year.
    My four older siblings were Raphael, Vanessa, Tara, and Court. Court and I were the two boys, with three older, nagging sisters to delegate their chores to us and then turn right around and tattle on us at every opportunity.
    Mom was kind enough to make me and Court some karate suits, which we donned whenever we watched The Karate Kid and then ran upstairs to imitate to the best of our ability the Daniel-san Crane stance.Court and I would assume our meditation stances, each bowing to the other, and then I would often sucker-punch him in the gut, leaving him on the floor, gasping for breath in the fetal position, while I strutted out of the room, tightening my black belt.
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    When I was five, my parents took me to get my first dog, a Norwegian elkhound mix. I found the ball of fluff sleeping underneath the breeder’s porch, hiding in the shade. We took him home and named him Szen, a minor mishap on my mother’s part, who mistook it for “Sven” in a telephone conversation with a friend while they were talking about Norwegian names.
    Although I won’t always mention him throughout my story, let it be known that Szen was the perfect watchdog and my own personal protector, always by my side. He never slept on my bed but always beside it, within reach throughout the night. Even though a mix, he was a beautiful dog, smart as hell, and well mannered, thanks mostly to my mother’s training. As a five-year-old I had kindergarten only in the afternoon, and Mom, Szen, and I passed the mornings away doing whatever we pleased until I left for school. He was my dear friend.
    Notice that I spoke about the dog before I did my siblings.