One autumn, a neighbor removed the hanging seats from his daughter’s swing set and trussed a deer he had shot to the top bar. I could smell it as I lay in bed.

I lean forward to your ear, touch my lips to the point where the hair curls over your lobe, and I wonder about falling inside. I purse them like a kiss and I whisper road trip.

I see him on a cold blue February night: He steps onto the back porch to drop a garbage sack by the bin and my mother pushes the door shut behind him, turns the lock.

By the time they pull you out of the car, the party is already half over. Harry from accounting has mown through the good cheese and the VP is opening the evening’s lesser quality wines.

I doodled your name a thousand times a day. Even before I seen you, I knew you was made like on a potting wheel, formed together by the fires of my womb.

My room is tiny and dark and smells like sweaty sheets. The window is wide open, but there’s still no air. A heavy pre-lightning gloom overwhelms my clankity-clank fan.

He’d pick me up from Mama’s early Saturday while she slept, always waiting in his truck down the street and staring down the sun while gnashing on a spicebush twig.

Their mother works hard, but the girls are unkempt and secretive, given to a layered, sarcastic wit.

It was March before anyone noticed. The first was Merlene Svensgard, whose husband Al had died on New Year’s Eve while he and Merlene were counting down the final seconds along with Dick Clark on TV.

One day he was cock-of-the-walk, full of jokes and juice, strumming his guitar, waxing the big fins on his red Chevy, knowing another woman in the biblical sense.