34.

Audrey began with the building she loved most. That was her way. She would never let emotion stand between her and her mouth. (At age eight, she’d swallowed four of McKenna’s favorite Star Wars figures.) The normal rules of empathy never applied to Audrey. Not that she was a sociopath, no more than a landslide is a sociopath. She was obeying some primitive, nameless drive that we couldn’t understand. An instinct. Or, if you prefer, a law of nature that the rest of us have either evolved past or haven’t yet evolved to—it’s not clear which, but the difference is purely semantic since it’s in the eye of the beholder. And anyway, emotions had nothing to do with it.

Still, Audrey did love. She was capable of love. She did “feel.” In her early years, and perhaps even throughout her life, she undoubtedly favored McKenna, and yet she hugged every one of her family members on occasion. She cried a box of Kleenex into paste when Mister T the hamster ate his last pellet (1986, when Audrey was nine). Contrary to some opinions, she wasn’t dead inside—not at all. Remember, life appears in all forms on this big blue marble. Even cancer is alive.

Audrey loved a tiny restaurant called The Caboose, a one-room dive on the corner of East Main and Rambling Road, if not a stone’s throw then certainly a skilled disk-golfer’s throw from the Kalamazoo River. The Caboose was one of those all-night greasy spoons that served swampy coffee and soggy bacon under lights that made every customer look like a pedophile. It was a favorite spot for truckers and unsigned bands passing through town on their way from Detroit to Chicago or vice versa. The bands, who’d usually just played The Club Soda downtown, propped their combat-booted feet on the tables. Dressed in leather and long hair in even the hottest months, they giggled into their hands, stunk like reefer, and paid with wadded dollar bills. The truckers, meanwhile, chewed toothpicks and stared without expression at the black and white television mounted in the corner above the orange juice dispenser. There were also the solitary old women, necks rubbery, eyes like empty napkin holders. They sat at the bar and craned to sneer at whoever walked through the front door.

(Audrey ate that door fast, I’ll bet. Probably ten bites. That TV, two bites. And the bottles of ketchup—down the throat like M&Ms. Sometimes, in spite of everything, I’m quite proud of her.)

Audrey, along with her friends—a painter and sculptor gang from Western Michigan University—had become affectionate about this dump because spending time at The Caboose gave them credibility. Most of them were children of 150K-a-year parents from Detroit suburbs, but living alone in a college town on the opposite side of the state let them pretend to be starving artists. These artists longed to touch the common man in order to express the dimness of his soul. These artists chain-smoked, downing pot after pot of coffee while splitting an order of fries five ways. These artists suffered physically, hunger being a tried-and-true method of unearthing the worms of their genius. These artists would impale the wrigglers onto hooks that they would then use to pierce a nose, a tongue, or, in the case of Audrey, a labia. A tortured metaphor, to be sure. But lest we forget, these were “creative types.”

None of Audrey’s college freshmen pals knew about her secret diet—the heaping helpings of Corningware, the bowls of hair-clips, the 12-packs of ankle socks, and the doughy slabs of poster putty that got her through each day. Perhaps these bohemians wouldn’t have minded at all. They might have even urged Audrey into performance art or into a Battle Royale against Herr Es-senalles.

Or maybe they would’ve done what her family did. Sought help. And when that failed, maybe they would have hidden her secret, would have internalized the shame Audrey should have felt for her unnerving, freakish tendencies. The burden of this secret, and Audrey’s unwillingness to feel guilt for it, might have led them to resent her. Maybe each of her friends, then, in their most private moments, would have given serious thought to what it was, exactly, that had made them like her in the first place.