The plane landed in Fort Lauderdale and Dick and Royce (Royal) were picked up by a pretty young woman wearing a tank top, shorts, and silver antlers and driven to Hertz. Royal’s brother Brandt arranged such things—or his secretary Jacki did (“Bag claim F. Laud surprise,” she’d texted.) When things like the Lexus Reindeer unexpectedly appeared, the secretary knew it made Royal’s day. It took his friends—it took him—a while to sort it out: Jacki’s kindness, perfectly paired with her taste for the absurd.
On Friday evening Glebov Senior took a turn for the worse: The ache started in his chest, spreading to his shoulder and then into his back. The ambulance was sent for.
We passed the baby over the bed, and later we passed tissue, and her Bible with its onion skin pages, its highlighted lessons and dog-eared parables she kept handy with bookmarks
It’s hardly even a matter of debate anymore that the demands of American motherhood have spiraled out of control. Yet there appears to be little sense that the excesses of our parenting culture are anything more than a personal problem We continue to be resistant to thinking more broadly about the subject: about the ways our society have created the high-pressure, high-stakes world of family life.
Somewhere in the post-Katrina wreckage and disarray of my grandmother’s house, there is a photograph of my brother Joe and me, our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, the Terrace Lounge, standing before the photographer’s airbrushed scrim—a border of dice and playing cards around us. Just above our heads the words HIGH ROLLERS, in cursive, embellished—if I am remembering this right—with tiny starbursts.
At first, there was nothing to do but watch. For days, before the trucks arrived, before the work of clean-up, my brother sat on the stoop and watched.
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