The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter Page A

resolutely shag, in the corporate colors of Bosom Industries, yellow and brighter yellow. Through a beaded curtain Terry revealed the master bedroom. I had never seen a Californdulia king outside a catalog and could not resist giving it the old bounce test. “Come on, Faron,” I said. He joined in, but only to give Umma a laugh. On either side of the bed, matching lamps stood on built-in nightstands. They had been artfully formed in resin to represent some species of mythical sea beast.
    â€œManatees,” Nguyen said. “The original Floridayans killed them for sport, with motorboats.”
    A shelf atop the headboard groaned with paper books. Terry Nguyen told me they had been found in a bunker beneath Launch Control. These volumes, he said, represented the private library of an ancient Astronomer called Bob Sprell. “He must have been a vastly wealthy man.”
    From the stacks he offered me a paperback. “You look like a reader.” His selection had not been arbitrary. The First Men in the Moon was its title, and Mr. H. G. Wells the man who wrote it. The story took the fanaticism of the Astronomers into the realm of madness. There used to be Jesus Lovers in the Gables. They would enter their trances right there in the lobby and embarrass everyone. They shouted and sang to the Fanta machine in a homemade language, did so with narrowed eyes and lolling gray tongues—with such crisp articulation that you almost believed they saw something you didn’t. H. G. Wells must have been one of them, and his book a seizure of belief.
    â€œHey, look at that! You like a good reading book, too, hon,” Pop said.
    I could take no more of his attempts to coax Umma out of her gloom, so I climbed into the padded loft above the master bedroom with Mr. Wells and his moon bugs. Better company. A skylight showed the cool blue of late morning. A gull shot past, giving the loft the sensation of flight. Below I heard Nguyen say good-bye. Faron joined me in the loft, and pretty soon the snoring was general across our pretty new home.
    Noon came and the great Peeping Tom of the sun crawled into view. While the rest of my family slept, I lost myself in the old plastic dome of the skylight, in its network of tiny fractures brightened by the sun. As a boy, I looked everywhere for patterns. Patterns held the world together or did the opposite.
    Our siesta was interrupted too soon by Terry Nguyen’s three-finger knock. Lunchtime. Under a sickly black oak he showed us a picnic table laid with cold cuts, cheese singles, sacks of snowy white bread, a tub of macaroni salad, and iced tea in pitchers. Beers floated in a styrofoam cooler. If we were human sacrifices, Terry intended to fatten us up like calves.
    We weren’t the only livestock invited to lunch. Butt to butt on the opposite bench sat a family that looked almost as shitted-out as the Van Zandts.
    Terry started the introductions with Mae Reade. She was my own mother’s age, but where Umma’s hardness radiated heat, Mae appeared to be frozen solid. She smiled with greater conviction on one side of her face than the other. Her chin showed a bruise, but so did her knuckles. She lavished mayo on a disk of boiled ham, not rising to shake Pop’s extended hand.
    Bill Reade was her husband. He wore sunglasses and a straw hat and sat upright like the decorated soldier he had once been. There was no kindly feature on his face. He seemed like a man who delivered bad news for a living, went door-to-door with no other intention than to crush your dreams. I disliked him on sight.
    The girl who sat between them, on the other hand, was someone I could look at forever. Not that she was overly pretty. One of her ears was tattooed green, which is how I learned that the Reades hailed from Canaday. Her hair had been buzzed close to her scalp some days before and had grown back in oddly spaced whorls like there was no consensus about the way forward. I wanted to