Family Night by Maria Flook

they could do for her. It wasn’t just TB; it was lung cancer.” After all, they had expected her to live with just the tuberculosis; the physicians said it was improving. Sandra was at the Granville Sanatorium resting, taking steam, then sunning. She had been sick throughout her pregnancy. Margaret was born early, terribly scrawny. They said she looked like a beef tongue lying in the cradle. They gave her rice formula, then soy, and she responded. But Sandra never improved; she coughed until the cough itself weakened. It sounded small, closed off, then the red drifted up to her lips and she touched the hankie to her mouth.
    When Sandra was hospitalized, it was just Margaret and her father. Instead of hiring a nurse, he brought her down to the plant and she played in the cinders outside an office trailer. One of the secretaries watched Margaret from the window as she lotioned her hands to clean off the blue carbon before she started in on another one.
    “A little girl needs a mother,” her father said to her. “These tragedies shouldn’t happen.”
    “But did she have a will to live?” Margaret wanted to ask him. Whose fault was it if she didn’t have a will to live?
    “I
do
get it,” Margaret said to Cam. “It’s kind of a free-for-all, isn’t it? I guess it’s par for the course that you take your rightful name. Just for the record, I do feel a kind of love for Elizabeth.”
    “That’s your problem,” he said.
    “Well, I do, and you can’t do anything about it. Wehad good times. Elizabeth and I used to iron clothes and listen to Pegeen Fitzgerald on talk radio. You know, on WOR? She used to talk about her cats.”
    “You’re getting it mixed up, Margaret. You’re remembering your good times with
Pegeen
,” Cam said.
    Cam signed up to work for a contractor, and on weekends he began riding bikes again, competing. Her bond with Cam seemed strong as ever. Cam didn’t like Margaret’s clothes. Margaret wore black turtlenecks pulled up to her chin, and she carried a fringed bag that always had a little sheaf of incense sticks and an eyedropper bottle of patchouli oil. She scrawled political slogans on poster board. Her favorite hitchhiking sign said ANYWHERE , WORLD . Cam wore a dirty nail apron and his jeans were straight-legged at a time when everyone’s pants ballooned and swirled around the ankles.
    He started to win an assortment of glossy Motocross trophies, which he displayed on the back windshield of his truck until they obstructed his rear vision and a policeman gave him a warning citation. He tried to get Margaret to appreciate his bike’s conformation, the rise of the handlebars, the elongated globe of the tank, solid chrome with yellow stencils, the rich, throaty tones of the engine. He raced the same Triumph Trophy Trail for years, and she teased him, saying it was his bride. He didn’t like a Japanese bike, complaining that the engine sounded like a can of bees. His racing career left him with pipe burns and injuries; he took the reverberations through his feet, ankles, into his kneesand hips. Riding the street, he lost a footpad at fifty miles an hour and he put the bike down; the skid burned through his boot and shaved his anklebone against the asphalt.
    Cam’s most interesting accident happened when he was working on a clutch in the driveway. As he was lying underneath his bike, a metal shaving chipped off from the head of a screw and implanted itself in the iris of his eye. He had to keep from blinking until he reached the hospital. Margaret was fascinated by his willpower. Cam stalked through the house, his face tilted, head angled forward, his posture frozen, rigid like Frankenstein, as he kept his eye with the metal shard, wide open.
    One day Margaret came home from the high school for lunch and Cam was there, in the kitchen, with a girl. Margaret noticed the girl’s hair was blond like hers. Margaret’s hair sifted in loose gold snarls to her shoulders, but the new girl kept