been decorated by a T.J.Maxx HomeGoods specialist. I had remembered my mother’s taste as so much more bohemian, but then I wondered if perhaps our furniture had been mismatched and bizarre because we couldn’t afford furniture that coordinated. I realized, too, that I was sitting in a house, albeit a small one in a not very nice part of Culver City, but it was a house, and I understood now what that meant. I didn’t know if they owned, but even if they were renting, the feeling was different. I had been so overwhelmed by her new boyfriend’s similarities to our father that I had failed to notice this key difference: He had money. Not a lot, but enough. And maybe that would change the way the story unfolded.
As we talked and ate (my mother had baked several different Trader Joe’s appetizers, little spinach-and-feta cups, tiny pigs in a blanket, it was all very fancy), I kept finding myself evaluating the cost of the items in their home. I noticed Gabby was wearing socks that looked new, an unblemished snowy white with electric-orange toe caps. Her jeans seemed fashionable, with little rips in the knees. Her hair was cut in subtle waves that framed her face. There was a cookie jar in the shape of a French Bulldog in the kitchen. They had a spinning spice rack. While I had been living elsewhere, they had been buying things, acquiring things. Strolling through the aisles of Target or Marshalls and finding something they liked. I do not know why the idea of this made me so achingly jealous, but it did.
Now that my mother’s boyfriend was my stepfather, I figured it was time to try to learn more about him. I knew that his name was James and that he worked in a garage as a mechanic, but I knew very little else. I guessed that they were still drinking because of the beers and box of wine I saw in the fridge, as well as a faux-rustic sign hung in the kitchen: DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY WINE. Maybe that was okay. Maybe I was wrong about everything. Maybe it was okay to just cast off one of your children, focus on the one you liked more, drink until you felt happy, and buy stuff. Hyena pups kill off their brothers and sisters until only one from the litter remains. The females even have pseudo penises with which to show dominance and rape each other.
But James was watching Ancient Aliens in the living room, and he did not feel any social need to engage with us. He had shaken my hand very warmly when I first arrived, and now he was a kind golem steadily absorbing the trickle of false information. I let my mother and sister take me outside to show me their yard.
“Show him the fairy garden,” Gabby was saying.
“I will, I will,” my mom said. She led me past some daisy bushes that were frankly thriving and much prettier than daisies had any right to be, and then held back the bladed leaves of a calla lily so that I could see a small clearing between plants. There I saw several tiny houses, their roofs painted to look like mushroom caps. There were tiny lanes paved with pebbles and some miniature white picket fencing. There was a small ladder that led up the trunk of a camellia tree with low branches so that it looked like a fairy had climbed up there to go about their fairy business. A little figurine of a hedgehog was swinging on a tiny rope swing behind one of the toadstool houses.
“Isn’t it so, so cute?” Gabby was saying.
“Oh, he doesn’t like it!” my mom cried.
“No, no, it’s not that,” I said. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. It struck me as both wonderful and very sad. The child part of me was enchanted, and also deeply jealous, while the adult part of me thought it was stupid and bizarre. The figurines were cheaply made, the colors garish. I didn’t know what to think. “Whose idea was this?”
“I saw it on Pinterest,” my mother said, “and the very first time I saw it, I just thought: I have to have that.”
“So interesting,” I said. “It’s very cute.”
“You think it’s dumb,” my sister said. Her brown eyes were hurt. She looked more like our father, and that had always been the family lore, that I