Pop leaves to buy a six-pack in 2007 and never comes back. Not for a while, anyway. Fourteen years pass before he materializes on our doorstep. Stunned and breathless, sweat advertised all along his forehead. He topples to the welcome mat. For a second, I think he just might pucker up and kiss Mom's feet.

Instead, he says he was kidnapped. Taken by a woman named Rita from the Circle K parking lot a few miles from our house. With a gun to his spine, she coerced him into the trunk of her Camry. He says that very same gun was aimed at his heart as they made three children together. That it was there when they rode the teacups at Disneyland. When he shouted from the sidelines at their soccer games. Chauffeured them to orthodontist appointments. When he carried them sleepy-eyed and half dreaming from the back seat of the minivan to their tiny beds.

It was also fixed to his temple when Rita held their monthly dinner parties. The safety always off as he refilled his guests' glasses with red. And he says that at work the gun's jammed so hard into his back, colorful bruises span his shoulder blades. He unbuttons his shirt. Bears his back to us. And there they all are in dusty clusters of yellows and purples and pinks and blues like beautiful miniature galaxies.

And where is it now? Mom wants to know.

He says his family—his other family—went to the movies. It wasn't the first time they'd left him alone to hold himself at gunpoint. But this time there was suggestion in how the sun entered the blinds. How it shone off the car keys on the coffee table. The car was parked at the edge of the driveway. It was as simple as swapping the gun for the keys. It was only a 30-minute drive. How close I've been this whole time, he says through a sad laugh—What've I missed?

Mom tells him about:

• the time at the petting zoo. Me milking a cow. How it got spooked by a classmate popping her Bubble Yum and knocked me out with one swift kick.



• the Christmas I thought it was clever to create a treasure hunt with her gift, a candy cane bauble I'd painted in art class. How she never found it until a pipe burst in the basement, and it bubbled to the surface in a sea of debris.



• the road trip to Maine we took just to get lobster rolls and gape at Stephen King's spooky house.



• scoliosis in high school. How it curved me into an S. The long recovery after spinal fusion. The titanium alloy rods in my back. And how, no, I don't beep going through airport security.



• the semester I studied in Portugal. Beatriz with the lazy eye who I fell in love with because we had matching crescent moon scars on our knees from motorbike accidents and fathers that left...

Mom pauses while summarising my life, and Pop asks to come inside. Even before she says yes, her eyes already accept. Part of me wishes she'd refuse. Send him away. Tell him we've done fine all these years without him. But I've got zero fight. It's the cold barrel jabbed between two of my ribs, the metal so startling it speckles my skin with goosebumps. Makes my muscles tie in knots, my jaw clench. I could move, push it away from me. But something tells me that try as I might, it's going to find its way back.  


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