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almost purposefully uncomfortable. I stayed with her until I had to leave for school, braiding herhair or decorating her wrist with bracelets. “Momma, get up. Don’t cry.”
    Once Phil tried to lift her off the floor, as Dad did. He had always wanted to be the little man—hammering scrap wood when Dad built bookshelves, handing him tools when he changed a bike tire, shaving beside him, but with a comb in place of a razor. He wrestled his arms under Momma’s and tried to stand her up.
    “Leave me alone,” she snapped, and he removed his hands from her as if he’d received a shock, Momma crumbling back to the carpet in tears.
    My brother was not the type who had to be told anything more than once. From that day on, he left her alone—walking around her in the mornings, going straight to his room after school to do his homework or build his model airplanes. When the weather was good, he left the house. He liked to play at the very edge of the yard, digging roads for his Matchbox cars around the roots of our piñon tree, or near the fence, poking things through to the other side. When Dad allowed it, he hopped on his bike and rode to the opposite side of the base where the planes took off, and tried to outrace them.
    My father’s plan for getting control of Momma was clearly failing—she just wasn’t cooperating, he said—and it interfered with his work. He didn’t have time to wake her up or lift her off the floor or check on her throughout the day. He understood that leaving us with her was the same as leaving us on our own, and so he began coming home when we returned from school, but with no patience for stories about what we’d learned in class or what we’d played at recess. There were dishes and clothes to wash and dinner to cook, and in every spare moment he sat inthe armchair with papers in his lap and a ballpoint pen in the corner of his mouth.
    If we needed him, we stood near his chair until he looked up and asked, “What is it?” And when we told him that we were bored or hungry or had had a disagreement, he gave a frustrated sigh, and we knew we’d interrupted him with something unimportant.
    After a while, I could predict his answers: “I suppose, if you’re hungry, you’ll eat all your vegetables at dinner” or “You two will have to figure out how to resolve it, then.” Phil stopped going to him at all. But I kept trying.
    “Yes? What is it, Tillie?”
    “A scrape,” I said, showing him my elbow and trying not to let him see my tears.
    “And you don’t know where the Band-Aids are?” he asked.
    “The hall closet,” I said, my shoulders dropping. I had not even taken a step away when he was scribbling notes again.
    I walked right past the hall closet and into my room because it wasn’t the Band-Aid that stopped the tears; it was someone pressing it where it hurt and saying, “There, there.”

    DAD WORKED DURING EVERY bit of free time, reading stacks of papers and filling up yellow legal pads with formulas, until one evening he set us on the couch. The government wanted him to work in a new office, he said, on something called DNSS. He used a ruler to draw a picture of a five-sided shape with a hole in the center of it, and tapping on the drawing with his pencil he said, “My new job will be right here.”
    Later, I asked Phil, “Did you understand anything he said?”
    My brother sat at the back table in his room, where he painstakinglyglued model airplanes together. His room was hot and stuffy, but he wouldn’t open the windows and risk letting the red dust ruin his work.
    “He’s designing guided missiles,” he explained. “They say his inventions will make our country mightier than we’ve ever been.”
    He opened his drawer and took out a notebook filled with newspaper clippings. Again and again, there were articles with my father’s name underlined, and pictures of him with important-looking people, receiving awards. In one picture, I recognized the faces of men