1.

The story of Audrey Mapes begins with butter. Actually, Imperial margarine. The Mapeses couldn’t afford real butter.

She rubbed sticks of Imperial on her elbows, forearms, shins, and knees. Not always, not every day. Not even every other day. But it felt like always, it felt like every day. Let’s say that four times a week, Audrey the footless toddler slid in a blur across the kitchen floor. She barreled into the wheeled caddie, toppled tin canisters, ignited powdery explosions.

Nobody yelled at her. She was never told, “No.” One of her parents—or, more often, one of her eight-year-old siblings—or, even more often, the meeker, kinder of the twins, McKenna, would dutifully take up broom and dustpan, careful not to mutter any profanity loudly enough that Audrey could hear while she swept away Audrey’s mess and erased the Imperial glaze with a wad of paper towels.

On other days—the in-between ones when she wasn’t lubricating the linoleum—Audrey gave herself a toothpaste mustache and lurched through the house on crutches while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the voice of Groucho Marx, who she’d never actually heard but who her daddy imitated in the basement when he was in the best of moods. This was a preschooler, mind you. She had the makings of a star, even then.

Another source of fun for Audrey was filling her right ear with cream cheese and letting Snoodles the basset hound puppy lick it clean. An hour later, still half-deaf, Audrey would slap her cheeks with handfuls of baking soda before climbing, confident as a shirpa, onto her daddy’s lap.

“Gah!” he would say. “My bank statements. Get off!”

They weren’t bank statements. Murray Mapes was seated on the couch, surrounded by papers—notes, drawings, schematics, the occasional hardware store shopping list—all hand-scrawled in blue ballpoint and legible only to his eyes. He had trained himself to call any important piece of paper a “bank statement” to kill any interest his children might have in what he was doing. He wanted, above all, to be left alone with his equations and crude sketches. Whereas the twins had learned, from nearly a decade of practice, to respect this dream of their father’s, Audrey had only learned how to eat dirt, Play-Doh, crayons, and paper. That and how to walk on flattened soda pop cans.

Audrey would kiss her father’s face, persisting through his weak objections until his light-blue work shirt was speckled with powder and his three-day scruff was white as the snow on the front lawn (more accurately, “front patch of grass”—five-minute mow time).

“Why do you hate me?” Audrey would ask, after he’d calmly gripped her shoulders, lifted her, and set her back onto the carpet.

“I don’t hate you. I hate the idea of you.” He pretended to return to his papers, but it was easy to see that his sideways glance was trained on Audrey’s legs, on the careful rigging of straps, mounts, and clamps designed to stabilize the two Dr Pepper cans upon which his three-year-old precariously balanced.

Unflappable, Audrey mounted her dad again, stepping with her aluminum feet upon his thighs. The patches of baking soda made Audrey’s cheeks resemble skin grafts, or the makeup attempts of an ill-trained clown. She gripped Murray’s shoulders, mimicking what he’d done to her. She shook him, gently (in a silly way, no threats—even at such a young age, she recognized her provider).

She pouted. “Am I a bad idea?”

“You’re a wonderful thought,” he answered, licking the sweat from his lip. “An amazing gesture. A spectacular plan. A perfect theory.”

(It’s disingenuous to imply that this dialogue actually occurred when Audrey was three. It’s true that Murray uttered these exact lines, but only once, many years later, moments before a furious, split-lipped, twenty-year-old Audrey, employing a dramatic high-step she’d learned by observing high school color guard practice from the sidelines, marched through the living room on her nationally recognized $30,000 prosthetic feet [designed by MIT graduate students], out the screen door, across the front patch of grass, and to the street, where she tossed her tortoise shell suitcase into the trunk of her Porsche and sped away to ingest the city of purple-capped lumber yards and railroad tracks.)

Normally, when Audrey asked, “Am I a bad idea?” her father answered:

“Your eyes are burnt matches. Your hair is a scented galaxy where time stands still. Your mouth can’t be real, unless God, who doesn’t exist, has performed a miracle and sent to Earth not a bearded savior but a pair of strawberry lips and teeth as crookedly perfect as wave-battered rocks under a maizy sun where no man could fear death. Now get the hell off my lap! I’ve got work to do.”