1.
M grew up in Birchwood County, North Carolina, where the mountain roads are lined with pale violet bellflowers and cheerful cartoon duck mascots selling pistol silencers. We went there once—early in our love, but not so early—to watch her father pack thirty years of his life into cardboard boxes while eating Kraft Singles straight from the packet under the fluorescent lights of the cabin he had until recently shared with his partner, David.

The cabin had creeped M out since she was a girl. Those lights made everything feel too close and raw, she said. They made it feel like God had stripped some necessary filter off the world. I'd never heard her say God's name like that before, like she/he/it was a real being who went around doing real stuff.

Maybe it was the mountain air that made her say it, or the distant whispering of the pines, or the fact that we could hear her father's lonely pacing through the floorboards, back and forth, forth and back all night to the refrigerator, punctuated only by the occasional hiss-pop of a beer can.

2.
We drank coffee with him every morning in the nook by the kitchen window, watching yellow-breasted warblers and ovenbirds alight on the feeder. Once a hummingbird hovered in midair for the duration of our breakfast. All that movement just to stay still, M's father said.

Martín—that was his name. I marveled at the little resonances between parent and child. The stock phrases in two languages: Escuchame una cosita, che. Let bygones be bygones. You can't make an omelet sin romper los huevos. The way they both stood: slouching left, arms in back pockets like gunslingers at rest. The way his eyebrows rose to a little peak when sadness hit him, just like hers.

Sadness hit Martín pretty often that week. You can't make an omelet, he'd start, but then he'd trail off into silence. The irony was, he was always a big omelet guy. He made us omelets every morning we were there, and oven-baked pear empanadas in the afternoons. His mother's mother's recipe, sweet and fragile as any prayer.

3.
Divorces are like Tolstoy novels, M said, the first time we talked about her parents. I was eager to show off the one thing I remembered from college, so I said, because all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way? But she shook her head. No, she said, because they're long and complicated, and I hate them.

She was fourteen when the deal went down. Her mother moved to Gatlinburg, which M saw as hell on earth, plus mini-golf. She bought a prefab condo with the settlement cash and sent M postcards with Dolly Parton's smiling face on the front that said things like thinking of you my sweet M, or Weather's nice this year! xx, ma.

Back in Birchwood County, M's father offered her a beer—her first. As calmly as he could, he explained that he had tried to love her mother, but he did not love women like that. Maybe he never had. It was hard sometimes to know the difference between trying and the real thing. Please understand, he said. Please let it be okay. M took her first sip of beer and spat it out.

4.
David moved into the cabin the same month M turned fifteen. He was ten years older than her father, with hair the yellow of ripe pears and the clean solicitous air of some sort of apprentice minister. He'd been a track star at UNC, but now he sold Mazdas in the valley.

M grew to like him in the end—who hadn't? He was gentle with everyone. He asked questions, remembered preferences, knew the names of flowers and trees. He ran five miles a day, down into the valley, past all six churches in town. He was out running, in fact, when he staggered onto the shoulder of the Blue Ridge Parkway, lay down on the ground, and began clutching at his chest.

I should've let him read before bed, Martín told us, poking at his omelet. The birds had all fallen asleep at the feeder, their beaks buried in those little holes. I should've asked him if he was stressed. I should've let him buy a goddamn Prius.

5.
On the last evening, after we'd packed the last of Martín's things into the U-Haul, M and I sat on the bare floor of what had once been her bedroom, eating Chinese takeout. The pine branches cast their waving shadows on the bare walls, and the hills outside were full of the particular quiet of hills. The room—once M's, once full of childhood's comforts and its hauntings—was just a room now.

M stood up and began to pace. I don't think Papá's going to like it up north, she said. The biscuits are no good up there. They don't put enough butter. He's not going to like those shitty no-butter biscuits. What's he going to eat, bagels? Fucking bagels?

I tried to tell her that he was moving to be closer to us, closer to home, but then I realized we were in her home, so I shut up. If I'd been smart, I would've told her this: that we were in each other's custody now, and it was up to us to preserve for each other the myth of home, the myth that there was anyplace unchanging and untouchable on earth. But I've never been smart, so I just took the last dumpling from her plate and lifted it slowly towards her mouth.