The cabin air is dry and chemical. Everyone around us is watching My 600-lb Life. Poppy’s head is back and her mouth is open and she’s making throaty snores. Amy Klobuchar, in a purple vest from Amazon that says SERVICE DOG DO NOT PET, pants belly-up on Poppy’s thighs. Valiantly I have taken the middle seat, leaving them the window. The guy to my left has his shoes and socks off. He’s talking very loudly to the person across the aisle from him, ostensibly his buddy. They want to buy snack boxes, but they’re arguing over who will be the one to pay. When Poppy and I argue about who’s buying something, we’re always begging the other person to pay, but these guys are ready to fistfight each other because they both so badly want to be the one to pay.

“I got it, I got it,” says the guy across the aisle. 

“Don’t listena him, don’t listena him,” no shoes no socks says to the flight attendant, pushing his credit card up toward her face.

“Fuck you, it’s forty bucks, you think I don’t got forty bucks?”

“The day I ask you for money is the day I’m sucking your dick, all right? All right? The day I ask you for money is the day I’m sucking your dick.”

The flight attendant takes no shoes no socks’s credit card and slides it through the reader.

“Fuck you,” his buddy tells him.

“Fuck you,” says no shoes no socks.

The flight attendant hands them their snack boxes.

“Whadda we got,” asks the buddy, opening his box. “Fuckin’, cheese, fuckin’—crackers, here, we got—grapes—” He lifts a sad clump of grapes out of the box and pops one into his mouth. “Pfft,” says no shoes no socks, “fuck outta here.” Then he pokes me in the arm. “You want my snack box?” he asks. “It’s full of these bullshit snacks, but I just paid forty dollars for it so my buddy here could suck on some fuckin’ grapes. Here, take it, Ionwannit.”

“Are you guys from Long Island?” I ask, eyeing the fuckin’ grapes for slime as he passes me the snack box.

“You fuckin’ bet,” says no shoes no socks. The teeny-tiny plane avatar on the flight-tracker screen before me tells me we have two hours and thirty-two minutes left to go.

◆

Outside the chilly airport, the weather is wet and hot: Florida in November. Amy Klobuchar, nose to the ground, struggles against her harness. She finds a place to pee, but then a blue-haired, meth-skinny woman dressed in a unicorn-print pajama onesie yells at us—Amy Klobuchar is peeing in the smoking area. 

“I’m gonna fricken do something if that dog pishes on my pajamas,” the woman says, shaking out a Newport and pulling up her unicorn-horn-adorned hood. A massive guy standing near her is smoking with one hand and, with the other, using a Theragun to massage his body.

We make our way to the very back of the parking garage, following instructions our father has texted us. Amy Klobuchar sniffs the tires of every car she can. Soon we hear honks: our father in his brand-new Range Rover. When we walk up and open the doors, a Range Rover logo projects onto the ground via LEDs, and motorized steps fold out so we can haul ourselves into the car with ease. The front seat is more comfortable than my own mattress. Retreating home into the soulless hug of my parents’ wealth—it always feels so good at first.

“My girls,” our father says, leaning in for cheek kisses. His face looks tight, plasticized. He’s been microneedling himself again. Amy Klobuchar howls at him from the backseat, wagging her tail and spinning in circles, trying to get to him. Poppy lets her scrabble her way up to the front, where she lodges herself on his lap in the driver’s seat.

“Holy shit,” our father says, patting her flank. “Three legs.”

On the drive, our father tells us all he’s been up to lately. He’s been getting back into weight lifting, he’s been loving this great new Xbox game where you play as a fourteenth-century French orphan trying to survive the Black Death. “And I’m into crypto now,” he adds.

“No,” Poppy and I both groan.

“It’s— No, listen, it’s very lucrative, it’s the currency of the people. It’s doing very well. You two oughta each put about fifty thousand into it, see how you do.”

“Daddy,” I say, “we don’t have fifty thousand dollars.”

“Okay, well. Your mother’s been doing a lot of research about, you know, the state of the world. And how bad things are, and how things could be close to some kind of a big collapse.”

“A collapse?” we both say.

“Whoa,” our father says, “whoa, I said could be, could be. Anyway. She feels like maybe it’s important for us to get our money out of the banks, maybe start looking into some, you know, alternative things. Frankly, I don’t know what to do about some of it. Some of this new stuff, you’ve heard about this new stuff? But what can I say, I’m a feminist. I respect my wife. I’m not gonna stand in her way.”

“What new stuff?” Poppy asks.

“Are you guys, like, buying gold bars?” I ask. “Are you prepping?”

“Your mother can tell you more.”

Poppy and I look at each other.

Our father merges onto the Sawgrass Expressway, nearly hitting a big truck with an Oath Keepers sticker on one side of the back window and a Minnie Mouse sticker on the other. He drives over the rumble strips for a few seconds while Poppy and I squeal. 

“God,” Poppy says, “you’re such a bad driver.” 

“There are no bad drivers,” says our father, “just bad passengers.”

We don’t say anything.

“That’s a metaphor,” he continues. “For life.”

◆

When we walk in the front door of our childhood home, the first thing we hear is Christmas music. Poppy raises her brows at me, then goes to her room right away to drop her bags. She keeps Amy Klobuchar leashed and drags her along.

In the kitchen, my mother fusses with her iPad. “Fuck,” she says. “Steve, how do I get Michael Bublé on here?”

“This fucking music,” says our father.

“Hi,” I say to her, kissing her cheek.

“So your sister’s not going to bother to say hello?” my mother asks. Something animal inside me grows warm. Right away, Poppy’s the bad one and I’m the good one.

“I missed you so much,” I say, going in for the full hug, doing all I can to pull ahead.

“No no, watch out for my hair,” says my mother, grabbing my arms and setting them back by my sides. “I just saw my hair girl today, what do you think?”

It looks unnatural and dated. “It looks beautiful.”

“Ruth Ginsburg’s in the hospital again,” she says, as if she and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are close. “This could be it.” Michael Bublé pours from the overhead speakers. 

My father flips closed the case on my mother’s iPad. “All right,” he says. “I’m gonna visit the little boys’ room.”

“Thank you,” says my mother, “for the announcement.”

Poppy enters the room with Amy Klobuchar in her arms.

My mother looks at me. “You let her get a giant rat.”

“God, stop saying that,” Poppy says. “She’s a collie mix.”

“Corgi mix,” I say.

“I think she’s a collie.”

“I think it’s a pit bull. If it’s not from a breeder, there’s always pit in there,” says our mother.

“Where’s Pepper?” Poppy asks. Pepper is our parents’ thirteen-year-old standard poodle. Who came from a breeder.

“I have her locked up safe in our room. I had no idea what kind of animal you’d be bringing into my house; I had to protect my Pepper.” Pepper, like a sufferer of a Victorian malady, stays on a blanket in our mother’s closet most of the time anyway.

“Okay, so I think Amy and Pepper should meet outside,” Poppy says, “where it’s neutral, so no one feels territorial and no one feels small.”

“Small?” my mother says. “Feels?”

“Dogs have very real feelings,” Poppy says.

“Look at you, the dog whisperer. If you stopped feeding her, she’d eat you.”

“You think Pepper would eat you?” Poppy asks.

“If I stopped feeding her, yes,” she says. “I’m under no illusions about me and Pepper.”

I collect Pepper from my parents’ bedroom. When I flip on the closet light, she doesn’t even lift her head; she just swivels her eyes at me. Her cataracts make them look like big wet Cinnabons. I scratch her behind the ears.

“You wouldn’t eat anybody,” I say. “Blink once if you wouldn’t eat anybody.” An old game I used to play with her: Blink once if you’re human, blink twice if you can understand me, blink three times if I’ll get into Yale. Pepper, who’s always liked me in a quiet way, looks at me now and blinks twice.

I leash her and pull her outside, where Poppy has brought Amy onto the grass. My mother slips on some flip-flops and follows me. Pepper and Amy spot each other. Amy barks.

“If she fucks with Pepper, I’m suing you,” our mother shouts at Poppy.

“If Pepper fucks with Amy,” Poppy shouts back, “I’m suing you.”

Pepper yoinks herself away from me; her leash jumps from my hand. Amy bolts, too. They chase each other in circles, already friends. 

◆

Since I was last home almost a year ago, my childhood bedroom has been wallpapered, recarpeted, and, as Poppy warned me back in March, fitted with stage-bright LED high hats. When I flip on the light switch, the room seems to glow. Disturbingly, there’s a white WayLife-branded tote bag sitting on my bed. Inside are three mini-bottles of essential oils. On my bedside table, a diffuser pumps ylang-ylang or something into the air. The light at its base changes color gently, from pink to blue to green.

Get Well With Wendy. Ring Around the Toesies. All those Instagram comments on the pages of women who use WayLife, sell it, swear by it, claim it was sent to them by Jesus himself to heal them, prosper them, anoint them. Oils are just a part of it. There’s so much more; there has to be. Her temple. Her smoothies. Her getting my dad into crypto. What if she is buying up gold bars, storing drums of dried food in the garage, getting into flat-earth Reddit? What if she, too, believes humanity’s being controlled by an off-planet ancient builder race? My mother is a mommy. 

◆

For dinner we order in. When the food arrives, Poppy and I open up the boxes to find that every dish has meat in it.

“I told you I’m plant-based now,” Poppy says to our mother.

“Did you?” she asks, taking a slice of sausage-topped pizza. “I can’t really remember the last time you called, actually, so I certainly don’t remember you saying anything about being plant-based. And even if you did, I have no idea what ‘plant-based’ could possibly mean. We all need meat, we all need iron. What we should all be eating, actually, is offal.”

“What?” Poppy asks.

“Offal. Animal organs. We’re animals, we need to eat other animals.” 

“Are you hearing this?” Poppy looks at me.

“Don’t mock me to your sister right in front of me,” says our mother. “Don’t try to pull her into this.”

Things are like this every time we’re home. Poppy and our mother fight constantly, our mother antagonizing Poppy, Poppy antagonizing our mother, our father and me sitting quietly, looking at our devices.

When I was first with Gage, I told him how things often went at home, and he told me that if he had a family who talked to each other the way my family talked to each other, he’d simply never see them. The problem for me, however, is that when I’m home, I have access to a dishwasher, and a very large shower, and my parents pay for everything, and I always leave with new clothes and shoes and face injections. I’m very easily Stockholmed by any promises of money and comfort. Gage called me a champagne socialist unironically mid-breakup. I never said I was a socialist, I told him, even though we’d held a joint membership with the Democratic Socialists of America for two years. All our friends were getting engaged and I was obsessed with the sizes of everyone’s rings. That’s a sixty-thousand-dollar ring, I’d say, showing him a picture of a friend’s ring. The implication was that I would never be happy until I, too, had a sixty-thousand-dollar ring. I can see now how that could kill a relationship. But maybe, it occurs to me, I never really wanted a big ring; maybe I don’t really care about all the stupid material things I think I care about. Maybe I just want a life that looks more like my mother’s so that I can have her approval. 

“Am I even still allowed to say ‘orphan’?” my mother’s asking when I tune back in to the conversation, woozy with epiphanies. 

Poppy picks at a wet side salad. “Of course you can say ‘orphan.’ It’s a descriptor, it’s not a slur. You can’t say slurs.”

“There are so many things I’m not allowed to say these days, or that you and your sister tell me I’m not allowed to say, I can’t keep up. Everyone’s so sensitive. Your generation. And what’s with the tattoos?”

“We don’t have tattoos,” Poppy says.

“But your generation does,” says our mother, like it’s our fault that they do. Like we made our generation go out and get tattoos, just the two of us, alone.

“The other day,” our father says, “I was asking Dr. Kang how he feels about the word ‘Oriental,’ and he said: It’s old-school. That’s all. It’s just old-school. It’s not racist.”

“Jesus Christ,” Poppy says.

“Don’t talk like that in front of me,” says our mother. “Don’t you dare take the Lord’s name in vain in my house.”

“We’re Jewish,” Poppy says.

“You really can’t say ‘Oriental,’ Daddy,” I tell my father.

“Dr. Kang said it’s okay.”

“He didn’t say it’s okay,” Poppy says. “He was just trying not to tell you that you were being racist, because it’s awkward, and because, as a person of color in the workplace—a workplace you control, where you employ him—he probably has to constantly defer to the racist things you and your patients say so that he’s not fired or maligned or whatever.” 

“Wow,” says my dad, looking at me. “Maligned. Guess I can’t say ‘Oriental.’”

“Are you selling WayLife?” I ask our mother.

She shrugs. “Maybe, why?”

“Because it’s snake juice,” I say. “For Mormons.” Our mother hates Mormons, or claims to. She always used to say that they were gentiles who wanted to create for themselves the persecution the Jews felt so they could imagine themselves as special.

“Essential oils help a lot of people. They’re helping me.”

“How are they helping you?”

My mother looks at me. “Each oil helps me in a different way. I don’t have to explain myself to you. I’m running my own business.”

“But I bet you have to report to someone,” I say. In the bathroom earlier, I googled a list of things to say when someone you love has gotten into a cult, things to say when someone you love has gotten into a conspiracy, things to say when someone you love has gotten into a pyramid scheme. “I bet you have to buy in. How much did you have to pay for all the stuff? Can I ask that, how much you had to pay?”

“The dog has to go out,” says Poppy, standing up from her seat. “Amy,” she calls, “wanna go walkies?”

I keep going. “I bet you had to buy in, and you had to buy it from some woman above you, and you have to pay it back by the end of next month, and you’re trying to sell to your friends but not your best friends, because you’re embarrassed, but no one’s buying, and you’re going to have to pay even more to catch up. Has anyone mentioned anything about Holocaust denial, or the waters above the firmament, or tradfem stuff, or a mass globalist takeover, or intergalactic human trafficking rings run by the governor of California, or an ancient builder race—” I stop myself. Our mother is staring at me, her mouth hanging wide. This is the most I’ve ever said to her at once, probably, in the last five years.

“Take Pepper,” she says, flicking her hand at me. “Get out of my face.”

“I’ll go too,” says our father. “It’s nice out.”

“And I’ll just sit here,” our mother says, “alone, worrying about intergalactic trafficking. I mean, what is wrong with you? What do you think of me?”

“Sorry,” I say.

“You should be. I’m your mother. If I want to believe in intergalactic trafficking, I’m allowed. If I want to believe in it, your ass should believe in it. Because I’m your mother.”

On the walk, our father carries his phone as a flashlight and tells us about everything that’s happened on the street in the last nine months. “Remember the Lowes? Their son got killed in their house, bad drug deal?” 

“Yes,” Poppy and I say together.

“Husband just died. Liver something. Real shame. Now Claudia’s all alone in that big house.” As we pass the Lowes’, we see a very old pickup truck parked prominently in the driveway with a FOR SALE sign in the window.

“Just so sad. And over here,” he says, pointing to a hideous wall of giant stacked rocks one neighbor has used to line their driveway, “we’ve got this monstrosity. I called the city five times, I wrote a letter, and guess what?”

“What?” we ask.

Our father smiles brightly. “They’re making ’em take it down. Look.” He points his phone at the far corner of the rock wall, where it’s clear that some rocks have been removed from the top. “I did it.”

Amy Klobuchar takes off barking, chasing something, probably a possum. Her leash slips out of Poppy’s hand. “Shit,” Poppy says.

“Wow,” says my dad as Poppy clops down the road to catch up with the dog. “She can really still get some mileage on those things. The dog, I mean. On her three legs.”

“You don’t have to keep pointing out her number of legs,” Poppy says.

“I don’t think Mommy should be getting involved with the oils,” I tell my dad.

“Oh, the oils are great,” he says. “They really relax my mind. I put some here at bedtime,” he says, tapping his temples.

“How do you feel about the deep state?” I ask.

“The what?” he says.

“Never mind,” I say, and I leave it at that. Already I’ve said too much.  

◆

In the morning, the air-conditioning is out. The air in the house is still and wet. By noon, it’s cooler outside than in. “Mi trabajo me está matando,” our parents’ housekeeper, Myrna, says into her phone. “Y ahora han llegado las hijas.”

Poppy and I look at each other. Silently we gather our laptops and our snacks and move to the patio. “She says her job is killing her,” Poppy whispers, “and now ‘the daughters’ are here.”

“I can speak Spanish,” I say. “You’re not the only one who speaks Spanish.”

Our mother pokes her head out onto the patio. The hair around her face is curled from the humidity. “The house is about to be listed,” she says, “and we’re going to have showings every week.”

“We know,” Poppy says.

“Don’t interrupt me.”

Poppy opens her computer.

“Don’t ignore me.”

Poppy closes her computer.

“You eat out here, you clean up and wipe the table when you’re done. We need to sell this house. It’s your father’s retirement.”

“Mommy,” Poppy says, “how would us eating on the patio stop you from selling the house in two months?”

“Six weeks. And if the house looks like hoarders and pigs live here,” our mother says, swanning back inside, “like I imagine your apartment does, I would think that might keep us from selling the house, wouldn’t it?” We say nothing. “I’m going into the office in half an hour for some lasers. Jules, are you coming?” 

The uncanny experience of my father shooting my face up with Botox or Kysse while his longtime PA, Puella, holds a blue vibrator against my face to distract me from the pain is one I don’t think I can take right now. “Um,” I say, “I was thinking I might not want to?”

“We don’t cancel doctors’ appointments last-minute in this family.”

“Well, it’s Daddy, and it’s not really a medical appointment—”

“Jules, let’s go.”

Through the big glass doors, Myrna looks at us. I give her a limp smile which she does not return.

◆

On the door to my father’s office, there’s a shiny new sign: GOLD AESTHETICS, it says.

My mother greets all my father’s employees with air kisses. She asks them how their children are, so on. One of them brings us some numbing cream in tiny glass pots.

“Ching ching,” my mother says, cheers-ing the pots like we’re celebrating.

“I don’t think I need this,” I say. The cream smells terrible, like Vicks.

“You always say that and you always regret not putting it on,” my mother says, smearing the cream across her nasolabial folds.

“I got him to pull out some extra syringes for you. Make sure you thank him. It’s valuable.”

“I don’t want to do too much.”

“No, it’s gonna be just a zhuzh, right on your cheeks. Imagine how gorgeous your eyes will look, how fabulous. They’re so small, like Nana’s, you just need some help to make them pop. Your grandmother, her poor soul, my poor mommy,” she says, “she never had that, she never had the chance to make her poor eyes pop. You can do this whenever you want. You should be coming home three times a year to do it. You should move home and work here, even better, and then you could be doing regular peels, and then you could meet someone interesting.” She leans in close to whisper to me. “Wait till you see Puella. She goes to this trainer now, she doesn’t eat anything. She looks like a concentration camp victim.”

“Mommy,” I say, “her family was in the Holocaust.”

“No they weren’t.”

“Yes they were. In, like, Latvia. She told me once.”

My mother sighs. “That’s a shame. I’m gonna have to speak with her. She shouldn’t be talking to patients about things like that.” She takes out her phone. There’s a message on the screen. Instead of reading it, she turns to face me and widens her eyes. 

“I forgot to tell you,” she says, “about the Frangis.”

The Frangis are a family from our hometown whose kids I went to school with from elementary on. “What,” I say. 

My mother scoots her eyes around the waiting room. “Jason Frangi,” my mother says, “is in prison.”

“Oh my god,” I say.

“Or might go to prison. I don’t think he’s in prison yet, or maybe he hasn’t had a trial. But still.”

“What happened?”

“You won’t believe me even if I tell you. God, it’s so horrible I can’t even say.” I doubt that very much. If there’s one thing my mother loves, it’s saying horrible things. 

“Child porn?” I ask. Many people from our hometown have been caught recently with child porn; my father’s pulmonologist, one of my old history teachers, so on.

“Worse,” she says. “He fucked their dog.”

“He what?”

“He fucked the family dog. Little dog named Franky. Fucked it right to death.”

I think of Amy Klobuchar. 

“Oh my god,” I say. “A dog can die from that?”

“Of course a dog can die from that. A little dog like that, imagine the physics. And then he dismembered it. And then he buried the pieces all over the yard.”

“No.”

“And the gardeners found them. Imagine his poor parents.”

“Imagine the poor gardeners. Imagine the poor dog.”

On the wall nearby that leads down the hall to the exam rooms, I see that sometime in the year since I’ve been here, my father has hung statement art: three enormous hot-pink canvases that read LASERS, BOTOX, and FILLER. In the exam room, Puella sweeps in wearing cool mulberry-colored scrubs; she’s positively skeletal. I tell her she looks great. 

“Ladies ladies ladies,” she says, “my favorite ladies. Time for some zhuzhing from me and Dr. G., huh?” My mother is getting some sort of fat-removal thing done on the flesh beneath her chin. It involves her sucking on a tube of laughing gas while Puella aims lasers at different parts of her face and neck. I sit in the corner, wearing a sticky pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses, listening to my mother get high.

“And you should see this dog they brought home,” she squeals. “It’s got”—she sucks on the tube, laughing—“it’s got three legs.” Puella laughs. I fill with rage.

When it’s my turn, my mother sits in the corner, her face reddened. She comes down slowly, hissing through her teeth as her face burns more and more.

My father walks in. “My treasures,” he says, kissing us both on the head.

“Long time no see,” I say, and he laughs—it’s so easy to make him laugh.

“Sit in the big chair,” he commands, “and smile for me.” I obey. “Oh, yeah. You’re pulling up here where you’re always pulling up. Puella,” he says, motioning for her with two gloved fingers. She scampers up beside me with the vibrator and lays it on my cheek.

“I don’t need the vibrator today, Puella,” I say.

“No, feel how calming,” Puella says.

My father hits me with two stinging jabs in the corners where my nose joins to my face. “Smile now?” I smile. “Gorgeous as always. No gum.” He holds up a mirror so that I can see myself. I’m always shocked by how immediate the effect is, how quickly my face becomes new. Now, when I smile, it looks like I’m trying not to. “And we’re doing cheeks, right, honey?” he asks, preparing a new needle.

“Um,” I say, assuming he’s talking to me.

“And lips?”

“Yes,” my mother says. I can hear her texting.

My father sticks a cannula into my top lip. My eyes water from the pain. Puella wipes the tears away with a tissue. “God, I wish your sister would let me at her face just once,” he says. 

“I know,” I say, feeling horrible. “She could be so pretty.” 

There’s a new employee at the billing desk with a shiny gold name tag that reads Amy. “Amy,” my mother says to her as we breeze out, “have you met my daughter? She just adopted a dog who’s also named Amy. Isn’t that funny?”

“That is funny,” Amy says, staring at her computer screen.

“What kind of dog is she?” my mother asks me.

“Oh, we don’t know for sure.”

“She’s some kind of pit bull with three legs.”

“She looks like a corgi to me,” I tell this new Amy, suddenly desperate for her to like a dog she’s never met and never will. “And she’s really sweet.”

“All dogs are sweet until they maul someone,” says my mother. “But I sincerely hope she doesn’t maul you,” she continues, donning her sunglasses with a little magic in her wrist, “considering your father’s just put so much hard work into your face, and for free.”

◆

That night I stay in bed, my whole face pulsing and swollen. The air-conditioning still hasn’t been fixed. Around nine Poppy comes into my room, her eyebrows severe.

“Someone died by jumping off the roof of our apartment building,” she says.

“What?”

“Someone who lives in our building jumped off the roof into the courtyard and they’re dead.” Amy Klobuchar bounds into the room and leaps onto my bed, exposing her belly for a pet.

“How do you know?” I ask, ignoring the dog.

“The building Facebook group. Someone posted and was like: Why are there all these cops in the building? and three people commented to be like: Somebody jumped and was taken away in an ambulance but everyone on the sidewalk could see their whole body all fucked up, their head all exploded like a watermelon.”

I pick up my phone and go to the Facebook page.

Hey y’all, recent events just have me thinking about how you really don’t always

know what others are going through, even you’re neighbors. Just want to throw out there—if your going through a tough time and need a human to talk to, I’m always happy to hold space. Anywho, hope all y’all are doin well, the post says, and then there’s a peace-sign emoji. 

Everything about it strikes me as fake, annoying, idiotic: the use of “human,” the use of “y’all.” 

“It’s so fucked up, isn’t it?” Poppy’s been reading over my shoulder. Her voice is soft, emotional. “Someone said it was a woman, but I don’t know how you could possibly, like—determine that? From a crushed-watermelon body?”

“Clothes, maybe? Boobs? Or if she was pregnant?” This makes me think gaspingly of Nina. Nina the cool mommy. Nina, the one person I’ve met in recent memory I didn’t hate on sight. Nina who played with her baby on the roof even though the super wouldn’t like it. I read through the post again, scroll through the comments. Nothing points to Nina. Nothing points away from her. I try not to give the thought any more air. “Thank god we’re not there right now,” I say. “So much weird shit happens in that building. Do you think it’s, like, that person would’ve rather died than live another minute in our building—”

Poppy gets up and walks away. At the door, she turns and starts walking back toward me. “You know,” she says, “you need to learn some fucking empathy. How reductive to joke about this.”

“You were kind of just joking about it—”

She ignores me. “People who kill themselves are at the very end of their pain. The terminus of their pain.” I’m impressed by her use of “terminus.” “Their pain is so huge, so real, so consuming that they can’t see or feel anything but pain. They’re on fire. How dare you. Whoever it was probably loved living in our fucking building.” She’s close enough to smack me, and she does.

“Get off of me,” I say, shaking her away. “You’re deranged.”

Poppy goes quiet for a minute. “Being here’s really hard on both of us, isn’t it?”

“I’m not doing this, get out.”

Poppy nods. “At least we’re only here for a few days,” she says. She looks at me. “Then maybe when we’re back home, we’ll be able to talk again.”

◆

In the morning the air is fixed, but the water’s out.

“Motherfucker,” says our mother, peering through the window of the cabana bathroom at the water tank in the yard, which is spilling gushes into the crabgrass.

“Motherfucker,” she says again, struggling to reach the water-tank guy on her phone. “I’m going to divorce you,” she says to our father, “keeping me in this house like this. I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner for nine tomorrow. For nine. And for your family.” Any time someone from our father’s side of the family is involved, our mother points out that it’s his family, not hers. “I need you girls to pick something up for me.” She’s texting. “It’s some kind of water purifier. I’m sending you the address. Sunshine State Supply or something. It’s in that shitty plaza with the Albertsons up near the bad mall. I reserved it under my name, and it’s paid for. The guy’s name is Stan. Pick it up by two. Don’t flush anything.” She swoops off to the grocery store with her phone to her ear, dialing and redialing the water-tank guy.

◆

Sunshine State Preparedness Supplies. Hazmat suits and mini-grills hang in one window; in another is a rack of pamphlets whose covers read Dare to Prepare! and Your Apocalyptic Pharmacy and Grow the Best Rhubarb and Survival Mom and Solving 9/11 and The Infidel’s Guide to Understanding Islam, ISIS, and the Quran. A typewritten sign in the window reads ARE YOU PREPARED FOR STHTF? It’s an acronym my mommies use a lot—it means for shit to hit the fan. There are a couple magazines—Guns & Ammo, Backwoods Home. One magazine has Anne Frank’s face on it. It’s just called ANNE FRANK.

LIFE IN THE SECRET ANNEX, says one headline.

WHO BETRAYED ANNE? says another.

THE DIARY—REIMAGINED

HER LASTING LEGACY! 

“Look,” I say, putting a finger on the glass.

Poppy swats at my hand. “What is it with you and Anne fucking Frank? Stop touching the glass.” Movement: an old white man with thick white hair and a thick white beard behind the counter waves at us. He looks like Tracy Letts. He’s wearing a shop apron. This must be Stan. I wave back. “This is South Florida,” Poppy says. “It’s not supposed to be like this here. This is, like, a place for luncheons and plastic surgery and bubbes and zaydes and pink tile.”

“Soon everywhere’s going to be like this,” I say. “Wave.”

Poppy waves.

Inside there are shelves and shelves of gardening tools, gas masks, sacks of dehydrated potato flakes, canned meats, molasses; up at the counter, a case of knives and tough-looking lamps and watches; boxes and boxes of gleaming Berkey filters.

“Hello,” says Stan, suddenly behind us.

Poppy and I both jump. “Hi,” I say. “We’re picking something up.”

“When did you guys open?” Poppy asks.

Stan puts his hands on his hips and winks at the ceiling.

“Let’s see, five months ago?”

“Prime real estate here,” Poppy says. “You get the mall people, you get the surgical center people, you get the Albertsons people.”

Stan puts out his fist for a bump. “Right on,” he says.

“How do you think the world’s gonna end?” she asks, bumping him. “The world as we know it,” he corrects. “I could see a nuclear attack taking place high above ground level, taking out all the electric. I could see riots and looting, high-level Antifa stuff. I could see mass incapacitation of the population through the food supply.”

“Antifa,” Poppy says. “Interesting, interesting.”

I poke her, very gentle. I want her to stop. I’m afraid to fuck around with these kinds of people; it’s the first time I’ve been face-to-face with one, and I feel sweaty and terrified.

“When you say midair nuclear attack,” Poppy starts, “are we talking—”

“We’re picking something up,” I say again. “It’s under Wendy.”

“Wendy!” says Stan. He goes for a box on the back counter: it’s a giant Berkey. “Are you Wendy?” he asks, looking at me as he sets it down between us. He’s attached carry handles made of plastic to the top of the box.

“Yes,” I say for some reason.

And now Stan offers me his fist. “You’re a smart woman, Wendy,” he says.

◆

When we get home, our mother’s on the sofa with a blond woman. Amy Klobuchar sits prettily in front of them, panting with joy as the blond woman pets her head. Spread out across the coffee table are lots of different little WayLife packages. The room smells like pussy, but I know it’s just the oils.

“Hi,” says the blond woman. “Oh, you’re looking so mature.” “You remember Belinda?” my mother asks. She has a very specific look on her face. “We were in the booster club,” she offers, “at your school. Belinda Frangi.”

Belinda Frangi. Of the dog-fucking Frangis. “Booster club,” I say. “Right, boosters,” I say again.

“Boosters. That’s how we know each other.” Belinda nods a lot, and gratefully.

“And now,” my mother says, “Belinda’s one of my WayLife colleagues. Isn’t that funny?”

Poppy, carrying the Berkey, adjusts it up onto her hip. “Is she your boss?”

Belinda laughs. “There aren’t any bosses in WayLife,” she says, “but if there were, your mom would be my boss.” Belinda reaches out to scratch one of Amy’s ears.

“Oh, she has this thing with the ears—” Poppy starts, but Amy closes her eyes in pleasure at Belinda’s touch. 

“We’re gonna put this down now,” I say, hustling Poppy to the kitchen.

“Her son raped that little dog,” Poppy mouths once we’re alone.

“I know,” I mouth back.

“How could that woman ever touch a dog again?” Poppy whispers, unboxing the Berkey. “How could she even look at a dog? Is it bad that I don’t want her touching my dog?”

“Life goes on,” I say.

“I saw him once, in Publix, when I was still living here,” Poppy says.

“What did he look like?”

Poppy lifts the shining hulking Berkey barrel into sight, setting it gently on the counter.

“Like a guy who’d fuck his dog to death.”

◆

I nap until Belinda leaves. Once she’s gone, I go back into the kitchen to find a snack. Poppy and my mother are sitting at the breakfast table by the window. Poppy’s crying. When I walk in, the two of them look up at me, animal, afraid. Poppy gathers a pile of tissues sitting in front of her and holds them in her fist on the tabletop.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“We’re just having a chat,” my mother says. She puts her hand on top of Poppy’s fist. “We’re just crying it all out.”

“You’re not crying,” I say.

“I was,” my mother says, but it doesn’t look like it to me.

I open the fridge and pull out a small cup of yogurt. I look at the expiration date; it’s a week gone by.

“It’s fine to eat,” my mother says.

“Okay,” I say.

“Eat it,” says my mother.

“I’m eating it,” I say. I peel back the foil; the yogurt inside is curdled and runny. I sniff it.

 “Oh my god,” Poppy says. “She’s so anal.”

My mother laughs. “Does she do this with you?”

“All the time,” Poppy says. “I told her to see a therapist, but she won’t.”

My heart blackens. “I’m much better than I used to be,” I say. 

“Clearly,” says my mother, gesturing at the yogurt.

I grab a spoon and shove a huge watery bite of yogurt into my mouth, staring at the both of them. I can’t tolerate being ganged up on.

“Whoa,” Poppy says. “Psycho.”

“What are you guys talking about,” I say through the yogurt.

My mother dusts dust that isn’t on the table off the table. “It’s none of your business,” she says. “It’s just between us.”

I look at Poppy, desperate. But she’s staring down at my mother’s gorgeous bony hand atop her own.

I take the yogurt cup back to my room and throw it out in the bathroom trash. When I turn around, Poppy’s standing there.

“We really were just talking about nothing,” she says. “Seriously, nothing. I just cry so easy when I’m around her.”

“You’re icing me out.”

“Your life is icing me out with her,” Poppy says. “Have you ever heard the term ‘triangulation’?”

“Shut the fuck up with triangulation,” I say, pushing past her toward my bedroom. I shut the pocket door that connects to the bathroom and lock it and put my head against it. I’m breathing so hard. It’s miserable to be on my mother’s good side, miserable to be on her bad one; miserable to be Poppy’s confidante, miserable to be a joke to her.

“I’m sorry,” Poppy says. I don’t answer her. “I knew you’d throw the yogurt out in here,” she calls. I open the door. Poppy’s putting the yogurt down the sink, rinsing out the plastic. I know she feels me watching her. She looks mild as Jesus. I close the door back up.

◆

Excerpted from Worry (Scribner, March 2024)