— See, you lie. If you’d thought that was me, you would have said something.
— I wasn’t in the best of shape those years.
— But you are now?
— You know I’m better.
— I don’t know that. You’re never better. You know how many times I wanted to do something like this with you, get you and lock you somewhere so you couldn’t do anything stupid? So you couldn’t mix meds and drive around, running into telephone poles? I dreamed of it since I was twelve. Just to have you locked up till you were clean.
— Well, I’m glad you didn’t. You would have been locked up yourself. As you will be when this is all over.
— Don’t threaten me.
— I’m not threatening, Thomas. I’m just stating the obvious. This one goes beyond any of the other petty crimes. This one means you’ll never be outside again. How many people did you take altogether?
— Including you, four so far. And I have one or two left.
— You’ll get twenty years for each crime. I won’t visit you in prison. I can’t handle it.
— I’m not going to prison.
— Don’t you dare kill yourself.
— That’s not what I mean. I’ll be gone.
— Thomas, you won’t survive wherever you plan to go. You don’t stand a chance.
— I don’t stand a chance? You’re telling me this? You can’t tell me about survival. I barely survived you.
— You did fine. You’re tall, you’re healthy.
— I’m tall? I’m healthy? That’s your defense? You did a good job with me because I’m tall and don’t have leprosy? You are phenomenal.
— Thomas. My point is that you turned out all right. Outside of this and the hospital, you’ve been fine. You’re functional.
— I’m functional? That was your goal, to raise a son who was functional? A tall and functional son? Your ambition is incredible. Do you remember what you did with our family photos?
— Excuse me?
— The family albums. Do you remember that?
— Of course I do. You bring it up every few years.
— I’ve brought it up once, and you were probably high when I last did. One of your boyfriends, whose name was actually Jimmy, stole them when he cleaned out our house. Do you remember this?
— Of course I remember.
— I have no idea why he needed to clean out the whole house. He took everything. He took my bed, my stuff, my clothes. He took my backpack. He took my homework.
— Well, first of all, he didn’t do it himself. He hired someone, Thomas, and they didn’t know what to take or not to take.
— You know this? You know he hired someone?
— Yes. He told me.
— He told you afterward that he hired someone?
— Yes. I called him because I knew it was him, and I asked him why the hell he had to take everything from that house, instead of just the TV and the stereo.
— I can’t believe this. You spoke to him afterward?
— I was trying to get our belongings back.
— Why the hell would he have taken that stuff in the first place?
— We owed him money. I’ve told you that.
— We owed him money? I was thirteen.
— You were old enough to contribute if you’d wanted to.
— Holy shit. Holy shit.
— Stop jumping around. You look like an idiot.
— You’re the one chained to a post. You look like an idiot.
— Please free me, Thomas. I’m sixty-two. You have a sixty-two-year-old woman chained up. Are you proud of that?
— And never insult me again. You get that? Never again. You’ve called me an idiot a thousand times and that was the last.
— You’re about to hit me.
— No. Even touching you would make me sick. You owed money to someone named Jimmy. You sold our belongings to pay him back. You sold my belongings. And now you say it was my fault.
— I didn’t say that. I am not saying that at all. His taking our belongings was not your fault. And when I came home and saw he’d done that, I called him immediately and told him it was out of line.
— Out of line. Holy God.
— He hadn’t done it himself. He hired some men.
— This is so much sicker than I ever would have thought. How much did you owe him?
— Three months’ rent.
— And that was what? A thousand dollars?
— Twelve hundred.
— And you had no one to borrow it from. No way to work for it. Were you employed at the time?
— I was on disability. You know I had my injury.
— Your injury. Your injury, holy shit.
— You want to look at my arm? It’s still healed wrong.
— And I should have contributed to the household income.
— I didn’t say that. All I’m saying is that some young men do work. In many parts of the world, you would have been considered the man of the house and expected to contribute.
— You are so great. One in a billion. You know, the reason I was bringing up all this was to note that in all my life I’ve seen no more than ten pictures of my childhood, but you’re making it all so much more fascinating. I give you a chance to explain one thing, and you remind me about a hundred other examples of your insanity. Your crimes multiply every time we talk.
— We had plenty of pictures of you.
— Do you know what kinds of pictures we have of me?
— I do know, because I broke my back reassembling those photo albums.
— Stop. Stop there. I knew the rest of the story, but now I can fill in the beginning. What you did was this. First you date a man named Jimmy, who I believe was a former taxi dispatcher from Salinas and was unemployed when you met him. A man on the way up in society. Then you bring Jimmy into our home and he pretends he’s my dad and mentor. He takes me for drives where the windows are closed and he smokes and tells me about how hot his sister is. He says he’ll set me up with her even though I was thirteen and she was twenty-eight. Then somehow you and Jimmy have a falling out. Next thing I know I come home and you’re making phone calls on the floor of an empty house. The kitchen plates are gone. The clothes in the closets are gone. My schoolbooks are gone. I go into my room and there’s nothing left, nothing but an empty aquarium. You tell me that we were robbed, but somehow I don’t believe you. Something seems wrong about that. All our photo albums are gone, so you call up your friends and my friends’ parents, and your sisters and cousins and ask everyone to send any pictures they have of me or us.
— I spent weeks on that. Why was that a bad thing to do?
— The result was an album with exactly ten pictures in it. And in every picture, I’m on the side, I’m in the background. These are pictures of my cousins or my friends and I’m incidental. I’m blurry and half my head is cut out.
— I thought I was doing something nice.
— That was my birthday present that year!
— You liked it.
— Oh shit.
— Thomas, I was there when you went to bed and when you woke up. I got you to school. I fed you. Beyond that, you’re quibbling.
— Quibbling? See, I guess the one thing I never gave you credit for was how entertaining you are. The things you say are just unprecedented. No one talks like you. Do you remember bringing me to your boyfriend’s apartment in New Mexico?
— Of course. He got you a bike.
— He gave me the bike his son left when his wife and kid fled him.
— It was a fine bike, and he bought it for you.
— No he didn’t. It had this kid’s name on it. Robin.
— Well, we can disagree about that.
— And why take me to Albuquerque in the first place? Why not just leave me with someone?