Annebelle had a tendency of passing out on the front lawn. It isn’t something she does anymore, but she did it often growing up. This was after they moved to town, Christmas City they called it. People drove from different counties across the whole state to see it, the string lights canopied over forty lit trees on main street. Before this, Annebelle along with her mother Queenie, father and brother Ryan, who was three years her junior, lived in an old farmhouse twenty minutes outside of town. They made their living raising pigs for slaughter and leased their back acre to the surrounding corn and soy farmers. Annebelle’s brother Ryan had cystic fibrosis and was often in the backseat of her parents car, turning blue. She remembers sitting next to him on the way to the hospital, watching the pink leave him as the gravel popped against the wheel wells. Ryan’s initial prognosis was grim. At first he wouldn’t live past two then seven then thirteen until the doctor’s stopped guessing. She does not remember much about her father other than that he was older. Queenie was sixteen when they married and needed special permission from the state at the time. His hair had turned a stark white twenty years before Queenie’s frown lines appeared. Annebelle also remembers that he was tall and violent. She noticed that the violence did not happen when her cousin was around. When Lucy came to stay with them in the summers her and Annebelle played with the pigs and rode bikes in to the town sweet shop. Sometimes she would find little baggies behind their toilet, and Lucy would insist that they were potpourri, or other times comfort rocks from her fish bowl. When she was about thirteen Annebelle came home from school and there was no sign of her father but her horse had been sold and there were three duffle bags packed by the front door. They stayed with a friend for a few months before getting a loan for a small house near the school. Around this time Annebelle gained the nickname “Double Bubble” due to her enormous breasts. She tanned on the roof doused in baby oil and the neighbors would stop to admire her, some took pictures. It made her feel famous. She taught herself to tailor her dresses so they would fit right. Lucy never saw their new house and didn’t come to visit in the summers anymore. Her phone number didn’t go through and any letters got sent back R.T. S. Restless, Annebelle spent her evenings rearranging the wooden bed and dresser drawer she had in her room, leaving scratches on the floor when she couldn’t sleep. When the Iowa air got heavy in the summers she put her pillow in the freezer for an hour or so before bedtime. This worked better than the remedy she was served as a child—Creme de Menthe on ice cream to fall asleep, which made her feel dizzy and sugar-sick and sent her on bouts of sleep walking. When she was a sophomore in high school Queenie left them to go to Orange County to be with her high school sweetheart Eric, whose profession was unclear but had something to do with outer space. Annebelle wondered why he would move to the California smog when you could see the stars so good from Christmas City. A neighbor gifted Annebelle and Ryan a Great Dane named King to keep watch but he didn’t live long because his tail kept breaking when he wagged it against the door frames and it got infected. Being the unsupervised household, the rest of the kids in town used their dirt basement to hide their liquor and Annebelle would use a turkey baster to plump oranges with Everclear before class field trips to the Living History Farms. Queenie came back for Christmas and New Years and in-between mailed boxes with blurry pictures of the moon, mortgage checks and asthma inhalers from Mexico. Annebelle carpooled with a friend on weekends to work retail shifts at the outlet mall in Cedar Rapids to cover groceries. They let her bring home the overstock items and she sold them in the locker room during gym class. Her first big purchase was six gallons of blue paint for the house. She bought them from the principal, who’s wife insisted that the shade was mixed wrong and they couldn’t return it. Annebelle painted the house that summer with her boyfriend Chip before he went off to the service. She was able to save up enough money to take care of Ryan, who was not taking it easy on his lungs or the wallpaper—chiefing two packs of smokes from the couch each day. He missed a lot of school and often sat out of gym class. Annebelle arranged a doctor’s note for him so that he could pass all his credits without having to spend the summers walking beans and detasseling corn. Annebelle drove Ryan to the hospital when she needed to and at the time did not get angry with him when he called her floor at community college to chat about their dead father, whom she did not know had passed. Mom never told you? Annebelle went to the library later and found his obituary which did not mention them but did mention a single daughter, Trudy. Annebelle always knew Trudy as her Aunt, she used to bring them over a box of oranges in the winter before the boyscouts even had them. One fall at the barn party Annebelle sat in a stranger’s lap, to ward off a man with a bum leg who wouldn’t leave her alone. She made a convincing girlfriend and they married and had two baby girls together. He started a good job in Big Tobacco while she worked as a preschool teacher at their church on the outskirts of Des Moines. The church taught choreography to classic rock hits that were re-recorded to mention the teachings of the lord. Starship’s We built this city on faith and hope or The Monkees and then I felt his grace, now I’m a believer. The church had beef burger and pie socials and one time a race car came to sit in the parking lot for vacation bible school. Annebelle got her hometown paper delivered in packs to their house each month. In the county obituaries she reads that Lucy has died at 39. Listed after the daughter of, she sees her own father’s name. She tore it out and kept the page scrap tucked under her glass-top table along with her father’s and miscellaneous recipes from church. She brought it up with Ryan that Thanksgiving, when he came over for the driveway turkey-fry. He didn’t seem particularly affected. Ryan had been living in the city for a few years doing writing for a sports radio station before he was fired for missing too much work. His girlfriend left him because he wouldn’t ask to marry her because he’d stop getting his disability checks. He moved back into their old house in Christmas City—It wasn’t still in the family, somehow it just lined up that the house was available for rent at the same time he was looking. Not going to work made Ryan lonely and he started acquiring cats. It started with Lou and Lou turned into eleven others and then he stopped counting. He didn’t need a litter box because of the dirt floor basement that he kept the trap door open to. Somehow the cats did not make his breathing any worse but their dander grayed all the walls that had since been ripped of their paper.

◆

One time we traveled with my mother and Ryan to visit Queenie and Eric. They lived within driving distance of Disneyland and Eric’s son David worked on the rides so we got in for free. David told us a joke about a man that went on a fly fishing trip. As the fisherman was reaching for his catch, a shark lept from the water and bit his hand off. The fisherman’s buddy, who we were told was strong but not bright, jumped into the water and fought the shark and was able to retrieve the fisherman’s hand. His buddy sewed the hand back on with a hook and line and someone on the boat asked the fisherman how he was doing, to which he replied Dude, Sweet! then extended both of his arms to reveal one thumbs up and one thumbs down. We have a photo of us like this, of me, my sister and him, grinning in mouse ears with one thumb up and one thumb down. It is important to know that this Dude, Sweet! came earlier in the story too, so it all tied together somehow but I don’t remember it. Queenie and Eric’s house was adorned with hundreds of Budai sculptures. I didn’t know what the Budai symbolized at the time so I assumed that they especially valued their Wednesday night Chinese food dinners because otherwise they just ate popcorn. I asked my mother years later if Queenie was Buddhist and she laughed and said no, that Queenie just liked the look of rounded bare bellies. The decor did not seem particularly unusual to me because my grandparents on my father’s side had a house that was filled with representations of cranes or other water birds. I could make sense of it, Crane was their last name and having married into the family, my grandmother enjoyed having a direction for her interior decorating, something she didn’t have to think about. There were birds on the rugs, the baskets and pillow shams, even on the kleenex box covers that were sewed to look like miniature couches. We didn’t have to stay on as strict of a schedule at the Hank and Estera’s house though as we did at Queenie’s. Here the days were pre-planned, their pet budgie would get upset otherwise. If we were even a minute late turning on the 6 o’clock spaghetti westerns the bird would flip. The bird somehow understood that this schedule did not apply to weekend evenings, when we watched the more contemporary american movies. There was one, some sort of thriller. A dildo chair was involved and one scene contained a lot of blood. After the scene cut Eric turned to me and offered a handful of crimson jelly beans from the glass dish on the side table. I remember laughing at the timing of this and the blank stare he gave in return. Queenie got us all matching t-shirts with butterfly outlines on them that filled in with color as you spent time in the sun. They made kiosks in the mall with things like this shortly after but that’s where I first got the idea that everything good starts in California. Their back porch had a slider and a garden with slugs that we were sent out to salt. The first time we did it my sister screamed and ran inside while I watched them fizz. When we returned from that trip I noticed after a shower that I had some water droplets that were not drying near my bikini line. My sister had them too, in the same spot. At first the doctor thought that they were warts and tried burning them off which left round indents and hurt more than something like that is supposed to. We didn’t see Ryan for a long time after that trip but he came to visit us for my sister’s high school graduation. We were in Texas at the time, outside of Houston. That June like others was hot and the air was heavy. Ryan skipped the ceremony to stay in the air conditioning, the humidity made his breathing worse. My sister had a heat stroke because the ceremony was outside and she refused to drink water that day, not wanting to stand in line for the bathroom. We left the ceremony early and found him and Jen shaking in the kitchen. He argued with Annebelle and I was sent to my room. I heard him shout. We met on the baseball forum! It was never confirmed or denied that he had hired her as a prostitute but her purfume was thick and syrupy and she was clearly on speed. I wondered if it was possible that this could be an alternative treatment path for his illness. That possibly the use of methamphetamine dried out his lungs and made for less hospitalizations. I hadn’t heard about him going in for a while, I just know that I have met many other people with C.F. and they never had that same jolt of energy he did, or the shakes. They have since fallen out of touch, Annebelle and him. They have not spoken in eight years because when she returned to Iowa her mother got angry that she did not want to take care of him. I tried thinking of the last time he wasn’t shaking like that. On the way to visit once we passed the American Gothic house. I had been copying the painting onto a ceiling tile for my fifth grade project because I was making a cameo as “the farmer’s wife” in The Music Man for the school play. I remember thinking that we passed other houses that more closely resembled the one in the painting and questioned if my mother had the right house.