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

gather those knots between my fingers and comb that mangled head with my hand.
    I do not know what the girl thought about me. She folded a slice of bread and bit a hole in the middle. Then she unfolded it and glared at us through the hole. Faron stared back at her, and I felt for the first time the pinch of fraternal envy. I know it might be hard to believe, but I rarely envied my brother. I was content to take cover behind him for the rest of my life.
    â€œWhat’s her name?” he asked.
    â€œWho?” said Nguyen. He was dishing out macaroni salad.
    â€œThat one there.”
    â€œHow insensitive of me,” said Terry. “Meet the Reades’ daughter, Sylvia.”
    At Pop’s urging I tried to make conversation. I cannot recall the first thing I ever said to Sylvia Reade. I only know that it took me a long time to say it. When I was finished she looked at me and said, “Are you going to talk like that the whole time?”
    She winged the slice of bread into the bushes and stalked back inside her trailer. To my father Bill Reade said something unkind about the temperament of daughters. He winked at me. Umma stared into the cooler.
    It was just as well Sylvia had left the picnic. I was feeling the initial stages of the shits. Even as I sat down to those rich boiled meats, my tubes went knotty. I mean no offense to the food. We had not seen such a spread in our whole lives. My discomfort was on account of the contrast. Everything last night’s simple family dinner had been, this fancy outdoor luncheon was not: no laughter, no song, no solidarity. Only the flap of the palm fronds and the sound of compulsory chewing. I excused myself to pass the rest of the afternoon in our private toilet.

 
    6.
    When lunch had run its course I ventured outside again, pulling the door tight against the odor of my anxiety. Terry Nguyen sat behind the wheel of his Darling Vanster. He clucked the horn and waved us over. We were to enjoy a grand tour of Kennedy’s Space Center, starting at Launch Control.
    He parked beside a mound of soggy drywall and we entered through a plastic tarp that hung over the doors. The lobby, littered with bits of glass, Terry called an antechamber. He did love that word. A faded mural covered one wall: ghostly winged craft and gleaming sharp missiles floated around colored globes. A thickset human form with a fishbowl for a head towered over the quarter Moon. Bill Reade studied this man intently, wagging a finger as if he recognized him.
    I was drawn to the wall opposite, where triangles of clean white showed in the dingy stucco. Plaques had once hung there, said Terry, but he declined to tell what they’d commemorated. I know now: each one recalled a space flight—carrying humans, virus monkeys, or machines—to the Moon, past Mercury, or into the rings of Saturn. Some craft are out there still, scaling the mountains of Mars or sprinting through interstellar space.
    Down a cinder-block hallway, we were shown the auditorium where we would receive our morning lectures and evening recaps. It had probably been a snack room, but Nguyen had dressed it up with a projector and dry-erase board like a proper classroom. Pop, who had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse, bounced on his toes and said well, well. The folding seats had apparently been pried out of a multiplex. Our names, and others, had been stenciled on the backs, assigned seating. Nguyen invited Pop to experience the spring action, and he was glad to oblige. The bolts strained against the floor as he settled in for a good sit. He declared the upholstery to be soft beyond words. This was how the old man behaved when he was kind. He overpraised, abused his intensifiers. He talked with his hands like a borderline dandy so that you sometimes wished he’d go back to breaking legs.
    One flight up we toured the makeshift gymnasium. Terry fiddled with a boom box until the music of old Miamy filled the air. In its