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 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 parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway. My mother answered the first knock at the door of the new house, expecting a casserole. We’d painted the house Evening Fog, she told me, but the woman from across the street wanted to know why we’d painted it purple like Italians. Some people wore their difference honestly, but my

I recognized the difference between the houses that were the oldest and those that were merely the most expensive. I liked the old houses, and I swooned over the girls and boys at school with names like Verity and Cornelius. I knew that I could never build the kind of relationship with money that the people in those stately, drafty, oldest houses e

One day my mother emptied my jacket pockets and found two half-used matchbooks and screamed at me. I could have started a fire. But I wouldn’t have wasted a match to start a mere fire. I’d found what someone else had thought was trash, so I took it.

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

An old Irish cable-knit cardigan with leather buttons hung in the downstairs coat closet, which smelled of hot farts and smoke. If anyone ever needed a sweater, they could go and put on the warming sweater, which was its name, as if other sweaters were merely decorative. My mother kept the house just cold enough for me to need to wear the warming s

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 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