My neighbor’s walls are falling down, only you wouldn’t know it by the way she sits on the step, cigarette in one hand, cheap paperback from her physical therapist’s office in the other, watching our boys play trucks in the road. There's a certain way she shrugs off the story of her baby daddy, caught fooling around with his thirteen year old niece, locked up for twenty years.

In the morning, on the way to market, we all walk together in a quickly paced cluster of laughter and chatting -- talking we don’t have time for on other days.

It is different on the way home. We spread out, silent, thoughtful or too tired to laugh.

He wanted to see the house where I was raised. So one morning Alexander and I drove downstate through a rainstorm in his friend’s rumbling truck, the brake drums long corroded into a color like red earth. Out on the patio my mother dried the cushioned seats of the raindrop splattered cast-iron chairs. I never recalled the white paint on the chairs being chipped. The table we sat at had a huge white umbrella that looked like the bottom half of a petticoat. He drank ice tea and ate slices of the greasy pound cake she bought from the market and laughed at her wry sense of humor. My mother broke off bright orange flowers from the stems of three tiger lilies and tossed them into the pool water. The flowers floated up and down and I shielded my eyes from the sun and shifted my chair closer to under the umbrella. A large hornet, its body solid black with coils of vivid yellow, looped around my mother’s head, the sound of its buzzing like the hum of a chainsaw in the distance. She swatted it with the back of her hand, which only further enraged the aggressor. Alexander went inside the kitchen, emerged with a rolled up newspaper, and fervently smacked at the wasp in the air. Wings broken, its body drifted to the teak of the patio, droning once more before falling silent. “Thank you,” my mother attempted a smile, forming her lips in a rather unflattering slant. She opened the sliding glass door to let the tabby cat outside, and offered to refill everyone’s ice tea glasses. I reminded her only Alexander was drinking ice tea. The ginger-colored cat weaved himself in and out of our legs.