I am in the kitchen again, trying to comfort my mother with a glass of ginger ale, a cigarette, some apple slices sprinkled with salt.

"Did you check the park?" she asks. "He's been going there to meditate. Or maybe he went to Honeydew for a coffee. Did you look there?"

"I looked everywhere," I lie, wiping dirt from the bottoms of my feet with a dish towel.

"That's for dishes," my mother says, flicking ashes into her blue mug.

"And that's for coffee," I tell her.

"Why are your feet so dirty?" she asks. "Did you go looking for your brother barefoot? How far can a girl go without shoes?"

I sit across from my mother at the kitchen table, try to find her face behind a cloud of smoke.

"I looked all over town," I tell her. "I checked the same spots I always check—park, Honeydew, Star Market lot, down at the tracks, under the bridge, up in the trees."

I lift up the place mats and find where Asa carved into the wood of the table with his pocketknife all those years ago.

Asa and Shelly 4-EVA. Asa is king. Asa was here.

"He'll come back when he needs money," I say, tracing my brother's jagged words until my fingers sting. "Did you say he's been meditating?"

I would like to tell my mother about the last time I found Asa at the park, dozing in the grass by the chain-link fence, his body inching slowly forward, his face nearly touching the ground.

"Remember what used to be on the other side of this fence?"

This is what Asa asked me when I sat beside him and said his name.

"Yes," I'd said, "the mulberry tree. It's still there, see?"

Asa wouldn't open his eyes to see.

"We used to climb the fence and eat the berries," he'd said. "You used to chase me around the tree."

"Yes, meditating," my mother says. "Since re-hab. And he's been going to meetings and helping Neil at the shop. He's put on weight, too. Haven't you noticed?"

I picture my brother's hipbones poking out over the top of his jeans, the sharpness of his collarbone, the hollows under his eyes, his arms hidden under long-sleeved shirts, even in the heat.

"I didn't look for him today," I confess.

I tell my mother how I went to the park and sat in the grass, away from Asa's spot by the fence so that I wouldn't have to see him.

"I took off my shoes," I say, "and I listened to the birds and I fell asleep in the grass. When I woke up, I ran around, and I felt the sun on my face and the dirt on my feet and it felt good. For once, I didn't wonder if Asa was okay or if you were okay, sitting here in this kitchen, waiting for him."

My mother drops her cigarette butt in the mug and runs her fingers through her hair.

"It's all tangles," she says, like she hasn't heard a word I said.

I get her brush from the bathroom and stand behind her at the table, longing for the scent of the strawberry shampoo she used when Asa and I were kids.

"Let me brush it for you," I say, because I know hugging her would destroy us both.

"You used to hate it when I brushed your hair," she says. "You'd scream the entire time."

I pull the brush through my mother's graying tangles, but not hard enough to make her scream.

"I knew you were lying," she says, "but I had to ask anyway. I'm too tired to go out looking for him myself."

I ask, "Where do you think he went this time?"

"Maybe to church," she says. "He used to like looking at the stained-glass windows, said it calmed him down. Or maybe he's swimming with Frankie. Your brother loves to swim."

I remind my mother that Asa hasn't talked to Frankie in years, ask her if she remembers the money Asa borrowed, Frankie pounding on our door at night, Asa hiding in the closet. I try to picture Asa swimming, but all I see is my brother struggling to keep his head above water, his blonde hair green with chlorine, his body sinking to the bottom of Frankie's pool.

"Enough," my mother says, pushing my hands away from her head and reaching for her cigarettes.

"Your brother's getting better," she says, and I glance at her. My mother will not look back.


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