My father and I sit on the porch drinking homemade whiskey, watching the hazy red sky swallow the sun until twilight gathers and thickens and stars scatter across the blackness like a careless child’s toys. The moon is fat, heavy and mosquitoes feast on our flesh. My mother is dying in a cold hospital ten miles east, stuffed with tubes, her face no longer hers but a jumble of mismatched fragments. But we don’t talk about that. We talk of soybeans, weather, beetles. Because he and I are like skating on a frozen pond. A slippery, unreliable surface that might crack and drown us in frigid waters. My parents’ old dog flops in the dirt and flaps his tongue as if the night air is meaty, delicious. Hell of a thing, my father once said to me in the hospital hallway after we’d been sent out of her room by a doctor. And I wished he hadn’t said it because it was crumbs and I was starving but I knew my mother would want us to love each other, so I said, yes, hell of a thing, and we came home and watched the glittering fireflies as if nothing was wrong at all. Drink up son, he says. Made three gallons. Ain’t no sense in it going to waste. Give me a minute, I say, stuff’s like maple syrup mixed with lighter fluid. Hell, he says, you always did have lots of words for things. Don’t, my mother once told me, don’t make him feel stupid because he didn’t have the chances you did. I’m trying, I tell her silently, but that’s only half true so I guzzle more whiskey and say, it’s so sweet. Didn’t put no sugar in it. Can’t stand sweet stuff. I know. You never could. Guess the corn just gets sweet when it ferments. Guess so. That old dog’ll go soon. Got his gravesite picked out already. Where? Up under the crabapple trees. Dumb bastard always did love crabapples. Maybe he’ll use them to pay the ferryman. The hell that’s supposed to mean? Sorry, I say. Some cultures believe that to get to the underworld you have to pay a ferryman to get you across a river. It’s why you’ll find gold and jewels in tombs. Shit, he says, people and gods. Ever wonder what it is about it we need so bad? Yeah, I say, surprised. It’s part of the argument in my new book. It’s about Igbo creation myths. That’s why I was in Nigeria. The book is done in my head but on paper only a mazy profusion of notes. And I wonder if I’ll ever get it right. The way the sun sizzled my skin and how women shouted on market days and men sat in circles while children danced. The rightness, the ancient clarity of it all. Well, good for you, he says. Yeah. The dog sleeps in a patch of shadow, pawing the darkness. They dream just like we do, my mother would say, watch and you can see whether it’s a good one or a nightmare. But I never could tell from the scrabbling feet, the eyeballs rolling under twitching lids. My apartment in the city doesn’t allow pets. I like it better that way. I don’t want the chance to do damage. You hear from her these days, he asks. No. Told you. Ain’t no shame in trying to fix things, son. Saying sorry. If I was you— You’re not, I snap. You don’t have any idea what it’s like to be me. That’s the human fucking condition. We’re bags of skin impenetrable to the naked eye. Shit. Forget I said anything. I gulp from my jar. I’m sick of the moment and want it to be over but the night doesn’t care. It stretches, lazy and infinite. Some of the darkness coalesces into a thin column and a face and a body slip out, as if from another universe layered inside our own. I don’t know who he is. Just some guy with square glasses coated in moonlight and one of those puffy hipster beards and Vans with the soles worn to almost nothing. Sorry to bother you, he says. But my phone’s dead and I broke down up on I-23. His voice is trembly, whistling. Maybe he’s got asthma or maybe he’s just nervous because after all to him we could be anybody. Murderers, meth lab cookers. Ain’t no problem, says my father. Phone’s inside. We trudge to the kitchen where my mother’s chicken-shaped clock ticks relentlessly in the silence. My parents still have a landline and the stranger picks up the handset then looks lost, confused. Shit, he says. Cell phones, you know. I don’t know anybody’s number by heart. Call the police non-emergency line, I say, and rattle off the number. I know it because after my mom got sick they wouldn’t pick up the phone and desperate, I called the cops to do a wellness check. My mother made a joke of it but my father wouldn’t speak to me for weeks. I did it out of love but since when do gods, whoever they are, owe you anything for loving their creations. The guy mutters into the phone. Where are we, he asks us. Mile 82, says my father. I never knew that, I say, and he says, you never did pay attention to the facts, son. I tell myself he’s old, he’ll die before me, and for a second I see him stiff, empty, in a coffin. Maybe I’ll tuck something precious beside him and maybe I won’t. The stranger finishes the call and my dad gives him a jar of whiskey and we go back to the porch. Drink up, says my father. The guy swallows half the jar in one gulp. Take it easy, I say. That stuff’s no joke. Don’t worry about me. Okay. He tells us his name’s Sam and he’s a journalist for a paper in the city and he’s out here because some woman claims she sees the Virgin Mary in a barrel of sugar. Apparently Mary predicts wars, earthquakes, spree killings. It’s all bull, of course, he says, but there’s human interest and we have to fill the blank parts of the website with something. My wife now, says my father. She might believe it. She’d go see for herself. No she wouldn’t, I say. She’s not delusional. Neither is this woman, actually, says Sam. She’s got a Ph.D. In Classics and writes books on gender politics in Ancient Rome. I’ll play up that angle. How even the most educated of us can fall into ignorant superstition. It’s the fragility of the mind, which wants something it can never have. What’s that, I ask. Believing you know the answers. Guess so, says my father. But, says the guy, but the thing is, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. He takes another long swallow of whiskey and I think we’ll have to carry him back to his car. I’m good and drunk myself now and the crickets’ song is beautiful and the stars are tiny shimmering pockets of light and I wonder why I ever wanted this night to be over. Thing is what, asks my father. Um, says Sam, I saw something. Wouldn’t say nothing if I wasn’t drunk on this gasoline you call whiskey. But there was something. Hills, valleys, a certain thickness. Not a face but you could see why she thought so. And the wind whispered in just like a woman’s voice in the distance. In a barrel of sugar, I say. Believe me, I know how it sounds. That won’t go in the article. Sugar, I say, and giggles thrum up my throat and escape my lips and I laugh so hard I nearly fall from my chair. Sugar! You kidding me? Shut the fuck up, says Sam. He’s standing over me now. Just shut up. I’m not gonna be laughed at. Come on now, says my father, we’ve all had too much and we should get some sleep. You can have the spare room. In the morning we’ll go see. Gotta admit I’m curious. Okay with you, son? Sure, I say, why not, and it’s a stupid idea but somehow it comes not from my father but out of the stars and the melodic buzz of the mosquitoes, who after all aren’t doing anything wrong, just sucking the blood that gives them life. In the morning my father drives his rusted pickup west, Sam directing him. We end up in front of a farmhouse with dirty, ragged siding surrounded by sunflowers waving in the hot breeze. Sam rings the doorbell but no one answers. She’s not here, he says. But we can look anyway. Barrel’s in the barn. We file in, smelling pigs and mold. Sam drags a barrel from a shadowed corner and stands over it looking like a child who’s not sure whether he’s been good or bad. Hopeful but ashamed. Just look, he says. Listen. My father steps forward. Sunlight slants in and illuminates his sparse gray hair, the seams in his neck, his sloping, burdened shoulders. He stares into the barrel while I stare at him. I think about the shards of time we carry in our hearts. My parents decades ago, bright-eyed and in love, teasing each other over pancakes on a Sunday morning. My father teaching me to drive stick, waiting patiently for me to stop being so afraid so I could feel it, the perfect rhythm of the clutch and the gas, going in and out and in again. I can’t abide it, all of a sudden, the humming, immense beauty of our lives, and I want it all explained, filed away, so I step forward and shove my father aside. You’ve had your chance, I say. Now it’s my turn. I stare into the barrel. Whiteness and shadow. Smoothness and lumps. Fine powder, rough wood. A chaos of irreconcilable opposites. Then my vision blurs and my throat closes and there is my mother, how she once was but also how she ended up. Nothing is going to be okay and I suppose that’s my answer and I can’t rage against it, I can only reach out and put my hand on my father’s shoulder, feeling the hot skin and fragile bones, and I start to cry and the tears drip down my chin and spot what may or may not be the Virgin’s face. Fuck, says Sam, his voice far away, and I stand and drown in the knowing that this is all I have left. You