My son returned a month after the funeral. He was sleeping sweetly in his bed. I wanted to wake him right away. I wanted to shake him gently and to hold him against my body, while telling him how much I had missed him and loved him. But I didn’t dare. What if he were actually dead, again? What if he vanished the second I touched him? I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the crown of his head, where his hair swirled, at the backs of his stick-out ears, at the nape of his neck. The covers …

Once when I was seven, I locked myself in the bathroom because my brother was threatening to tie a firecracker to each of my wrists and explode me like a melon. It was my cousin Henry who knocked on the door and coaxed me out with a dollar bill. Look, he said, crumpling the bill in his fist. Now close your eyes. My mother always told me not to shut my eyes around a boy, not even my own cousins and uncles and especially not my grandfather, who once impregnated thirty girls and a herd of goats in …