38.

Audrey doesn’t pass. But she doesn’t fail, either. Psychiatric tests, it turns out, have something in common with our great American pastime: A tie goes to the runner. This means . . . she passes!

Audrey is unbound, unmuzzled, uncaged again. She returns to Grand Rapids, to The Cave (as she calls the house on Moriarty Street), to her family.

Things are different now, though. It’s not her choice to return. She has compromised her college career, has killed the flower of higher education before even a bud broke through the soil. Murray “won’t waste another goddamn dime” on her tuition. He yanks her from her classes.

Trust is a vase. It slips through the fingers. You regret it the moment it leaves your grip, in that breath of time before it explodes on the linoleum. Careful where you step. Use a broom. Wear shoes.

Toby and McKenna are twenty-three years old. Toby is a humorless, thick-armed, thick-necked stallion who works full time for Fast Way Moving and Storage. Each morning, he drags his hungover slab of a self out of bed, performs seventy-five pushups and one-hundred sit-ups on the carpet, then drives to McDonald’s and inhales three Egg McMuffns with Cheese, one order of Mc-Griddles and Sausage, and two orders of hash browns. Washes it down with a Supersized Coke.

He and Murray have teamed up to construct a wooden privacy fence in the backyard. Other than that, Toby has accomplished nothing in his life. Oh, yes, more body density. Bigger arms. A membership to Gold’s Gym. A steady stream of girlfriends who believe strongly in halter tops and are skilled at popping back pimples and waxing body hair.

McKenna is a full-time student at Aquinas College, in her fifth year, studying English and Religion. Her sense of humor, she tries to convince herself, remains intact, although now it’s like the world’s largest spider—the wolf spider, which peeks out of its cozy hole only when provoked, and then, bites. She has a 3.8 GPA and is trying to believe in God. One night a week, she attends catechism class. Her conversion has begun. If only her breath didn’t stink so badly, she might have friends. Or a date. But she doesn’t socialize much with other students. Sometimes a study group or a passing chat before class. That’s all. She reads novels. The characters are a form of company.

Misty wears her yellow spring dress every day. Her eyelids are sewn closed, the long sleep she always wanted. Her hands are folded atop her breast. Her cheeks are packed with sawdust. For five years, she has lived in a wooden box in the earth. Mc-Kenna thinks of her every day.

“She’s at peace,” says Grandma Pencil, licking an envelope and passing it across the table. “At rest.”

McKenna inkstamps St. Monica’s address onto the top left corner of the envelope. She gasps in surprise: “You mean my mom?”

Grandma clucks her fat tongue before thrusting it out of her mouth and lubricating another gummy strip. “There’s that cynicism again,” she says, sealing the envelope. “That was not a feature of my generation.”

She calls it cynicism. McKenna knows it’s the wolf spider. “I’m just giving you a hard time, Grams,” she says. She stamps another envelope, another invitation to Sister Maximillian’s “heavenly reception.”

Sister Max passed away in her sleep ten days ago, and now, according to Grandma, she is “at peace.” It never fails to impress McKenna that Grandma knows such things. She really does know. Somehow. After all, that’s how faith works: Somehow.

But even considering Grandma’s admirable belief, there are questions.

To be “at rest”—is this really our ultimate goal?

Congrats, Sister Max! You DID IT! You’re RESTING!

And by the way, Misty? You failed.

McKenna has asked Grandma Pencil many questions. These days, she enjoys a surfeit of opportunities to push Grandma’s buttons, all ostensibly in service of McKenna’s curiosity about Catholicism. She loves to watch Grandma squirm, loves to make her squinch her lips in rage, sip her tea before it’s cooled. After all, McKenna lives in Grandma Pencil’s thoroughly unmodern two-bedroom house. It’s a 1200-sq.ft. two-story just down the hill from Murray and Toby.

McKenna moved in five years ago, soon after Misty OD’d on a combination of antidepressants and gin.

Misty’s death. Imagine a woman walking down the street. Now imagine the skeleton vanishing from her body. The remaining skin, muscle, fat, cartilage, and arteries—once bound together and given direction and purpose by the bones—plunge to the concrete in a thunderous sploop, leaving a dense blob that can twitch but not really move. That’s what McKenna’s life turned into when her mother died.

McKenna couldn’t have seen this coming, this squishy dead weight of daily existence. In her heart, in fact, she thought her life had been like this all along. Spongy. Flat.

She didn’t realize she had a mother until she didn’t have a mother.

It’s a common mistake. It’s why we want to see ghosts. It’s why we dream.

Now imagine that woman again, walking down the street, skeleton intact. Imagine her flesh and muscle disappearing,leaving only the bones. That’s McKenna. She’s a sight. Ninety-four pounds. Sunken eyes that bob in her skull. Veins in her temples that love the daylight. She wears baggy clothes to hide her body, although honestly, if she wanted to wear non-baggy clothes, she’d have to shop for an eleven-year-old. She’s twenty-three. She’s not anorexic. She knows she looks awful, but she can’t stop. She has tried stealing Toby’s high-calorie shakes. But liquid doesn’t do it. She needs to chew. Can’t chewing be enough?

Murray’s hair has gone white. A full beard, also white, touches the top button of his work shirt. The hearing in his right ear is effectively gone; he wears an aid. His hands are still strong, but they’re stony and cold to the touch. He’s forty-two.

He has given up inventing. There was no grand proclamation. One day, he simply cleared out the basement, hauling armfuls of scrap metal and wood, assorted scales, tubes, and saw horses, stacks of Popular Mechanics and Inventors Digest, to the curb. He even set the inventions themselves out there, for anyone to take. All of his tools, except what fit inside one small toolbox, were sold through the classifieds for a total of $1,100.

To Murray’s credit, he has tried to connect with his children since Misty’s death. The living room television, upgraded to a 16" color set, glows around the clock. He ponied up for basic cable. This gives him football, basketball, hockey, bowling—anything that might provide a bonding moment (with Toby). Not that Toby has much time to hang. He’s got a life. Murray has learned to cook asparagus and spaghetti, although he still relies mostly on Burger King and frozen dinners, and he mostly eats alone. You see, the twins aren’t children anymore. An old tree can’t reattach the apple that’s been dropped, bagged, cored, and baked into a pie.

And his baby girl isn’t a baby girl anymore. Audrey is a 5'6¹¹, 132 lb. adult woman who wears a C-cup, menstruates heavily for three days a month (spotting for two more), has had sex with three different young men, is getting ready to leave for college,and can’t wait until next year, 1996, so she can vote for Bill Clinton.

Audrey knows she was never really a baby girl to Murray anyway, never a daughter. To him, Audrey was only two stumps on the end of a tulip. Her deformity, the mechanical conundrum, was all he saw. She stood as a living question mark to the quality of his genetic material. She was The Horrific, The Real, The Heartbeat of the Beast. She terrified him.

McKenna has mentioned these ideas to Audrey on a few occasions. McKenna provided evidence: For all of Audrey’s life, Murray scampered down to his dungeon whenever his nose detected strawberry shampoo in the air.

“Saintly in his patience . . . Murray’s passion and love provided more than soda pop cans to stand upon. He gave spiritual footing to the footless girl of his dreams.”

“A genteel blue-collar man—a truly Thoreauvian figure who only longed to fulfill the American Dream but whose demanding family choked each of his aspirations until they died.”

Let’s not give the authors of these quotes any free publicity by mentioning any names, nor the titles of their books.

Let’s just say that what most imbeciles have written about Murray Mapes isn’t true.

Even the non-imbeciles could never get it right.

Makes you wonder why people write anything at all.