Very Cold People

Amber’s father was a mechanic, but not in the way that other people’s fathers were lawyers or bankers. The other fathers were what they were only at work, in offices in the city, and while visible in our town they were just fathers. Her father was a mechanic even at home, with his tools and his overalls.

My father wore a fake Rolex that ran about four hours before it stopped. Get yourself a better watch! my mother railed at him, and he said, with perfect hatred pinching at his eyes, Better than a Rolex?

My mother hated Uncle Roger’s wife, her aunt Rose. Why? She had an operation on her stomach, and when Nana and I walked into her hospital room, she said to the people there, “And these are my poor relations.” My mother clung to that story. She wasn’t classy like Aunt Rose or Uncle Roger, but she wasn’t poor enough to be called poor. I carefully rem

Once, at home, I ran around the backyard while my mother sprayed me with the garden hose. I laughed so hard I thought I might burst. Many times after that I asked my mother to spray me with the hose again, but she always said no. She didn’t say it angrily or impatiently; she said it dreamily, as if she were under a spell that prevented her from cau

My father was Italian, too, but he wasn’t officially Jewish. He’d been prepared to convert, but he and my mother had had to take the class at the local temple together, and when he had outscored her on the test, my mother had said she didn’t want to take the class anymore.

My mother hung antique prints of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the walls as if we lived inside a schoolgirl’s report on the United States of America. The fact that some of them were ugly or damaged was beside the point. My parents weren’t after shiny things or even beautiful things; they simply liked getting the things that stupid people

My father was an accountant, and he used his boss’s old computer to type up reports for work. He couldn’t figure out how to use the tab key, so he typed spaces between the characters and hoped they’d print as they appeared on the monitor, but they never did. Over and over, inserting and deleting individual spaces. The reports were a mess. I tried t

My mother found a fancy wristwatch catalog in the book swap at the dump. The front cover was crumpled, but she ironed it, as she ironed crumpled dollar bills. On the coffee table, next to a glass bowl from a garage sale, it looked like something a rich person would have. She set it just askew on the table, as if someone had been reading it and care

Snowfalls have unique bouquets. Snow isn’t just frozen water; it carries a remnant of the sky. A blue hailstone tastes different from a white one because they’ve taken on air at different altitudes.