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Prologue: Family Clutter
 
There had  been  others,  in the early days  after  Mom's  divorce, men who  looked like Magnum, P.I., and carted  us around in  their  midlife-crisis-mobiles. This  was back when most guys liked to wear  the least amount of shorts possible to show  off the greatest amount of body  hair possible: the mid- 1980s. I'd witnessed the worst  of it from  the backseat  of cars driven by dudes who  never stuck  around. Dating, I'd learned by the  time  I was  nine, was  full  of embarrassment and  let­ down. Not  for  kids, but  for  the  single  parent.   Mainly, I'd learned, it was a means to see who  would  stick around after Mom started yelling.  By the time she was in her second  year of architecture school in Tampa, two months deep into the fall semester, she'd found  a new victim.

Molly and I knew  right away. We found Mom in the bath­room  one Saturday acting  all nutsy: applying a home  perm, trying on a new shade  of rouge, and singing Linda  Ronstadt into the  mirror at the top of her lungs, locking us out, though I was about to soil my pants.

"I can't  hold  it any longer," I told  her.

"Well, that's nothing new," she said, waltzing out with her silk  kimono draped over  her thin shoulders.

"What's wrong with you?" Molly  asked Mom, but  we al­ready knew. Soon she  would have  her  good   pair  of  suede boots on, pretending she didn't count screaming as a hobby.

"Nothing." She smiled. "Can't I just be happy if I feel like it?"

On  Saturdays, she  usually liked  to  wallow in  bed  until noon, warning us to keep it down with our  WCW  impersonations and  suffocation-by-pillow competition. Then she'd  rise like  the dead in her frilly cotton nightgown, downing a pot of black-tar  coffee  and  slumping over her drafting table  for hours. We thought that was her happy.

'I’ve met someone," she told us, buffing her nails, sharpening  them perhaps, a deranged twinkle in her eye.

"You should go lie back  down," I insisted.

"Yeah," Molly  said. "You got a new Spiegel catalog in the mail."

That was the  spirit. A healthy dose of perfect models in clothes you couldn't afford was a sure way  to bring any single mother back  to her normal state, but  Mom  wasn't having it.

"His name is John," she continued. She said  this  as if John were  the most exotic  name ever spoken.
 
"John," I said, and yawned. I couldn't help it. If pronounced in German, John basically was  yawn.
 
When John swung into our side yard that evening at fifty miles an hour, screeching to a halt next to our rusted wagon, it was no surprise Mom still wasn’t ready to go. My mother ran late for everything, always had. There never was a chorus recital, movie, living Christmas tree, or Easter pageant we’d ever seen the first thirty minutes of. The story of Jesus, for me, had always begun with the wino years. Some people blame repeated tardiness on selfishness and just plain being rude, but there were things working against Mom. She had a hard time getting out of bed due to the stresses of life—no child support, two nagging daughters, graduate school, an ailing father.

My sister and I sat on the back steps and watched as John emerged from the ugliest car I’d ever seen, uglier than our own even, a turd-boat on wheels with one ill-fitting, sickly green driver’s-side door. It opened with several loud pops, like bones being ripped from their sockets.
John was a good-looking guy with a head of dirty-blond hair and an overgrown mustache, wearing aviators and denim on denim, smiling at us with perfect white teeth. He wasn’t perfect though. He was from Ohio. Land of corn and white bread. We were from here, Florida, land of lightning and man- grove swamps, and could detect interlopers as easy as red ants in the sugar sand.

“Nice car,” my sister said under her breath as we watched John try to slam the green door shut three times. He leaned all his weight against it and gave it a big bump with his hip like I’d seen some fat, drunk bridesmaids do to each other at a cousin’s  wedding  over  the  summer, knocking  the  baby’s breath out of each other’s hair during “Disco Duck.”
 
 "Thing's broke," John said, instead  of introducing himself. "I had  these  guys  at a body  shop  fix it and  they screwed  me over. Story of my life."

He spoke  to us like we were his drinking buddies, at nine and  twelve  years  old. He took one look at our skeletal  plum trees, our inflatable kiddie  pool folded  in on itself like a yard omelet, and said, "Sure is a nice place you got here."

"Isn't it?" we said, showing off the tarp-covered junk and a pile of wood  where a playhouse used to be before the neighbor kids burned it down.

"No, it's really nice. It's real old Florida,"  he  said,  and smiled.

I'd heard  that before. Real old Florida meant  overgrown and mysterious. It meant  unpaved and  unlike the rest of Holiday, Florida, with  its strip malls and  developments. It meant  cow patties, and rotten oranges, and septic  tanks  that occasionally flooded  the yard. It meant oak trees draped in shawls of moss as  if they  transformed into  elderly  women at  the  stroke  of midnight.

Usually when  people came over, their eyes bulged in fear of the  house, wrapped in vines  and  giant  spiderwebs. John walked around with  his eyes  bulging in wonder, claiming, "They don't make  beauties like this  nowadays." Rubbing  his hands on the siding and  concluding, "Why,  I bet that's lead paint."

"Taste it and tell us," Molly said.

It was  obvious Mom  and  John  already had  one  thing in common: the ability to stand and stare  at a building long enough to drive  any  normal  person  insane. Mom  had  been hauling us across the state every weekend for a year to visit private universities, skyscrapers, and other so-called structures of architectural merit that she wanted to study and sketch. Where I saw various buildings with no public restrooms or trees and hard benches that hurt my tailbone while I writhed around with boredom, she enthusiastically commended concrete slabs for their clean lines and postmodernism. For studying so many aspects of architectural design, she certainly didn’t apply them to our own house, besides creating new walls out of stacks of baskets and magazines. When we moved into Aunt Ruby’s old cracker house three years before, we never moved any of her things out. We just stacked our things on top as if preserving some avant historical movement: “Southern hoarder trapped in haunted house” chic.

“Enter,” we said to John.

Mom, of course, wasn’t done in the bathroom. Give that woman a day, and she could spend it scrutinizing every hair, pore, and new development with her body. Give her a date, and she’d need to be locked in there overnight.

“Your date is here,” Molly screamed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Your date is here.”

“Just a second,” she said.

We showed John our ancient piano that poured out dust like a steam engine when you played chopsticks too fast, our sewing machine underneath mounds of fabric, our book- shelves and the bookshelves behind them. Aunt Ruby hadn’t lived here in a while, not after she kept wandering into the woods and the men in our family had to come out and capture
her like she was a wild animal. Found her sitting on a stump in the  forest, asking them if they'd come by for iced  tea.  No, ma'am, they said, we come to take you to Anclote Manor. But all her  things were preserved under our  own. Coming from a place like Palm  Beach, where we'd lived with enough space for our  things in a sixties-style ranch house until our  parents split up  in 1986, was  not only culture shock  for Molly  and me  but also an electric shock if you  attempted to plug  certain lamps into certain sockets.

"Look at these Caboodles," we instructed John, but he paid no mind.

"Why, get a load  of these window moldings."
 
He had  us cornered in the living room, lecturing us on the difference between craftsman and  shotgun houses, when Mom emerged from the bathroom, resplendent and dewy. She could turn it on when she wanted to; she  had  the  ability to become somebody different with makeup and  an outfit alone. She was so beautiful then, so fluffy haired, so stinking with the toxic combination of Elizabeth Arden Red Door  and  perm chemicals that I could no longer detect the smell of the decay­ ing  animal in  the  wall  or  the  years of fried-chicken grease emitted by the kitchen, where the wallpaper had  begun to un­ peel  itself in rebellion.

"Is  the  perfume too much?" Mom asked. "I can't tell."

"No, it's great," John  said, a clear indication he had indeed tasted the  paint.
 
I applied my Dr Pepper lip gloss and  pulled on my deflated Nike  Airs, watching Mom give  John  a hug  before saying her world-famous line, "Well, excuse our  junk."

Certainly if you  went back  in  time and researched our family crest, it would read Lord, bless this mess. But John didn’t mind our junk. He felt comfortable with it, excited even.

“You have a lot of cool stuff,” he said. “This place is great.”

She smiled, and I knew it was over then. We’d be stuck with these two loonies forever, listening to them talk about the joys of accordion doors and carpet samples. Molly sulked and wrapped herself up in a baggy sweater, loathing her existence like every middle-school student who’d ever been forced to come out of their bedroom. By bedroom I mean the square foot of living space she had carved out in the front junk room.

“Well, where are we going?” I asked. At least we usually got a free meal out of the deal.

“We?” Mom laughed. “Oh, no, honey. You’re getting dropped off at Grandma and Grandpa’s. John and I are going dancing.”