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cheekbones, while my father’s sagged toward the milk like a man who was so so tired of everything, especially cereal made 100 percent out of fiber, a breakfast that made him “shit all the goddamned time,” he told my mother. “I’m a working man,” he said, holding up the box. “And I can’t be shitting between calls.”
    My mother had laughed in his face. My mother was thirty-seven, thirteen years younger than my father, and she often used her youth as leverage to win arguments, something I didn’t realize was even possible since it was youth that was always my handicap. But my mother was always successful in her attack, walking around the house in her underwear to show my father how smooth her legs were; she was only thirty-seven and still happy in her skin. She had only about three visible varicose veins and they were on the backs of her knees. My father refused to look at her when they fought. He would sit down, stroke his chin, and look out a window like he couldn’t believe the world was ending in this particular way. My mother would stare at him across the room in disgust, squint her eyes as though she was counting his wrinkles. Every day she denied my father the peace he had hoped would come with age and in response my father always shouted some variation of, “You knew that when I married you, Gloria!”
    You knew my pants would shrink! You knew I would move less, hum more, analyze important American revolutionaries at dinner!
    “A pretty Michael Bolton,” Mark said.
    “That’s still mean.”
    Mark moved his head toward mine. As I leaned in, and felt only the air against my lips, I realized that I was accepting a kiss that was not being proposed. I opened my eyes. Mark was looking at something behind me.
    “Who’s over there?” he asked.
    I turned around to see two figures in the dark, holding each other.
    “Let’s go find out,” I said.
    We crept over to get a better view of the adults. We leaned against the tree and watched them kiss deeply.
    “I bet it’s Mr. Bulwark and Mrs. Trenton,” I said. “She was leaning into his large ear earlier.”
    “Nah, Mrs. Trenton’s a wolf.”
    “Like, good wolf or bad wolf?”
    “Bad wolf.”
    “Is that like, a wolf you wouldn’t sleep with?”
    “Shh. Get your camera.”
    I got my camera, steadied it against my eye. I focused on the two adults, centering them. I pressed down on the button.
    The flash illuminated my father’s face. But my father didn’t even notice, didn’t even budge. His arms were steady around Mrs. Resnick’s waist. He was burying his face in her neck. His mouth was on her throat, and the rest of her neck looked raw under the moonlight. Mark and I stood by our tree, watching my father’s mouth pull away from Mrs. Resnick’s neck while her skin remained so covered in him.
    I was going to be sick.
    A caterpillar crawled away from my hand like he was fleeing the scene. For one moment, I thought about picking it up, holding the caterpillar in my hand like a friend who needed to see the animals too but wasn’t tall enough. I thought about putting my hand on Mark’s back, pretending that was all I needed to keep me from falling over from the sight of our parents. But balance was what the tree was for and Mark probably would have looked at me and said, “Emily, then what is the tree for?” and I would have had to respond, “Oh,” or “Yeah,” or something equivalent as though I had never stopped to consider that things had another function separate from being all around us.
    Mrs. Resnick laughed. Apparently, my father was being incredibly funny.
    “Baby, shhh,” my father said. “You’re going to wake up the party.”
    Mark turned away from the sight, but I kept staring. We stood quietly and then suddenly I remembered everything I wanted to say earlier. Uncle Vito hated carrots, especially the baby ones, and Mrs. Trenton didn’t think it was right for someone to hate baby anything. Alfred groped his wife’s butt by