Wilde Lake

“Lu, don’t you have any friends your own age to hang out with?” That was cruel. AJ knew I didn’t. Although I did have a plan to take care of that, a strategy for transformation that would make me the most popular girl in the third grade.

That was one of the things I was famous for as a baby, according to my father. I never cried. Thinking back on this from the vantage point of having had two children, I now have to wonder: Did I really never cry or did my father just not hear me?

with the ease of someone who knows he has transcended the foibles of his past, a trick I’ll never master.

the one about the girl with moonlight in her eyes.

I think we hold the truth in too high an esteem. The truth is a tool, like a kitchen knife. You can use it for its purpose or you can use it—No, that’s not quite right. The truth is inert. It has no intrinsic power. Lies have all the power.

“Had they had the surgery?” my father asked and I tried to explain that the question is no longer allowed, that we accept people as they see themselves.

“Even pie?” I asked. I always liked to spell out all the terms. “With Reddi-wip and ice cream if I want?”

Would they get married? Would I get to go to the wedding? Would I be their flower girl? I didn’t want to be a flower girl. Or maybe I did.

I’m pretty sure he had told me that was the only reason to have sex. But maybe Lynne and Bash wanted to have a baby. Then again, they couldn’t drive yet and I absolutely knew you had to have a driver’s license before you had a baby.

Thirty-five years ago, I would have had no chance to have children with a biological link to their father; Penelope and Justin would not exist. How can I long for that world? Thirty-five years ago, people I loved made disastrous decisions that made perfect sense within the context of the world they knew, the moment in which they had to act. They we