[Appeared in Cimarron Review #174, Winter 2011; excerpt below, full text here]

My new father Steve said he would be waiting there for us at six o’clock, but it was almost eight. It was as dark as eight, and under the eaves of our new home my mother and I sat on our luggage, because it was raining and there was nowhere dry to sit. My mother saw me shiver and she squeezed my fingers and said You’re going to love him as much as I do, and I wondered about that: about how much that was.

This was a time when everything new to me was older. My new father was older than my old father. The new town was an old Connecticut paper town with that evacuated look to it, half-cemetery. And my new home was a bungalow with faded Sears-brown paint situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, not substantially different from the one-room efficiency where we had been living since the divorce. The flagstone walkway leading to the front door had fragments missing, leaving behind wide troughs in which brown water collected, too big to cross in one stride. Holes older than me.

I had never met Steve or seen where he lived, probably because my mom believed that the negotiations of post-marital courtship, the unromantic complexity of adult love, was something I should be shielded from. For the whole span of their acquaintance up until their abrupt engagement, all I knew about Steve was what I’d gleaned from a photo of him a New Year’s Eve party, where even in his rented tux you could see he was a big bruiser of a guy, one who wore a cross on a gold chain with links wide enough to thread a shoelace through. My mother and I were of solidly Jewish stock, but the religion didn’t matter to my mother; what mattered was that Steve was strong. Strength, it seemed, was his strong suit. Stronger than my other father, my mom assured me. That was important for my mother, for since the afternoon one month ago when my father had explained to us in a voice full of mucus that he had been seeing a woman for two years—no, okay, paying a woman for two years—it was my father’s weakness she blamed. He was powerless to resist, she had said.

Resist what, I had asked. Resist himself, she said.

[Read the full story in Cimarron Review.]