Mom’s gestures were all familiar—the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items of
potential value that she’d hoisted out of the Dumpster, the way her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked.

The wiener was hot, so Juju licked at it
tentatively, but when I stood up and started stirring the hot dogs again, I felt a blaze of heat on my right side.

I put it in my mouth and was
stunned by the sharp sweetness.

It was a disgusting low-class habit, and the nurse should have consulted her before encouraging me in such
vulgar behavior.

Tinkerbell’s once perfect little nose had completely disappeared, and her saucy red lips had been replaced with an ugly,
lopsided smear.

Quixote landed with a screeching meow and a thud, Dad
accelerated up the road, and I burst into tears.

“Don’t be so
sentimental,” Mom said.

To distract us kids, Mom got us singing songs like “Don’t Fence Me In” and “This Land Is Your Land,” and Dad led us in
rousing renditions of “Old Man River” and his favorite, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Sometimes he would make mysterious references to
executives from Standard Oil who were trying to steal the Texas land that Mom’s family owned, and FBI agents who were after Dad for some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn’t want to put us in danger, too.

That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were tracking us looked in his ashtray, they’d find
unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him.

We moved around like
nomads.

The more
desolate and isolated a place was, the better Mom and Dad liked it.

Most people had trouble surviving in the desert, but Mom
thrived there.

One time when a neighbor’s TV set broke, Dad opened the back and used a macaroni noodle to
insulate some crossed wires.

“There’s many a damned
foolhardy thing that your old man has done, but this one was harebrained even for a crazy sonofabitch like Rex Walls.”

Dad was on the
verge of perfecting his cyanide gold process, Brian and I had the desert, Lori and Mom painted and read together, and Maureen, who had silky white-blond hair and a whole gang of imaginary friends, was happy running around with no diaper on.

It grieved Mom that the mine was destroying so much white rock—she said it was real marble and deserved a better fate and that, by making her sculptures, she was at least
immortalizing some of it.

She didn’t have any particular style; some of her paintings were what she called
primitive, some were impressionistic and abstract, some were realistic.

Mom got upset at Dad’s
blasphemy, reached her foot over to the driver’s side, and stomped on the brake.

He dug a bunch of
irrigation ditches that drained water out of the Colorado River to grow lettuce and grapes and broccoli right there in the middle of all the cactus and sagebrush.

One of her friends pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the face; then they all ran off, the girl I had hit holding her head as she
staggered along.

But we’d call the baby Maureen, a name Mom liked because it was a
diminutive of Mary, so she’d also be naming the baby after herself but pretty much no one would know it.

Toxic and
hazardous wastes were stored in another: corner of the dump, where you could find old batteries, oil drums, paint cans, and bottles with skulls and crossbones.

Before, whenever we were out of food, Dad was always there, full of ideas and
ingenuity.

She thought rules and discipline held people back and felt that the best way to let children
fulfill their potential was by providing freedom.

They’d stick their heads into her classroom and see the students playing tag and throwing erasers while Mom was up front, spinning like a top and letting pieces of chalk fly from her hands to demonstrate
centrifugal force.

If she tried, he’d argue and
wheedle and sulk and bully and plain wear her down.

So she resorted to
evasive tactics.

Billy lived with his dad in a house made of tar paper and
corrugated tin, down the tracks from our house.

After all, Billy was a certified JD—juvenile
delinquent.

Dad had always said that self-defense was a
justifiable reason for shooting someone.

We tried to explain that Billy had started it, that we’d been provoked and were defending ourselves and didn’t even aim to kill, but the cop wasn’t interested in the
nuances of the situation.

“My art career is going to
flourish in Phoenix. I can just feel it.”

Mom, however, said nuns were
killjoys who took the fun out of religion.

Although we lived outside the district, Mom begged and
cajoled the principal until he allowed us to enroll.

They prevented people with
feeble eyes from learning to see the world on their own.

If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of
pithy sayings—one was “Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in”—which she’d titled “R. M. Walls’s Philosophy of Life.”

After a while, entire armies were
scuttling across the walls and the floors and the kitchen counters.

From time to time, a
vagrant or a wino would wander through the front door, assuming the house was deserted.

Since the weather was
sweltering, she suggested we cool off by jumping into the fountain in front of the building.

He didn’t do it to be
hostile.

Dad gave the cheetah the kind of hardy,
vigorous petting you’d give a big dog.

Even though it seemed awfully
coincidental, I didn’t want to push my luck by asking too many questions about who this someone was.

Lori said it sounded outright
felonious, but Dad said all he was doing was outsmarting the fat-cat bank owners who shylocked the common man by charging usurious interest rates.

Once the fire was out and the
sodden, burned tree lay smoldering on the floor, we all just stood there.