Free Casebook by Mona Simpson

been a while.”
    Hector wanted to check her e-mail. I didn’t say he could, but he opened her computer and the program popped right up, no password or anything. She didn’t erase messages, apparently. He easily scrolled back to June.
From: [email protected]
Subject: in way of apology, not exoneration
Date: June 17, 2004 12:26:59 PM PDT
To: [email protected]
something the neurologist showed me on encephalitis
The classic presentation is encephalopathy with diffuse or focal neurologic symptoms, including the following:
Behavioral and personality changes, decreased level of consciousness.
    “I’m not sure what that proves,” I said.
    “Listen to your mom,” he said, and read out. “ I’m feeling so happy and myself in this. You’ve given me a life . July eighth.”
    That went through my body like a shock. “Stop,” I said. “I mean, she likes him, maybe she loves him, I like him, too, but it’s not like she didn’t have a life .”
    I pushed the lid of her laptop down.
    “Wait. I found you a nice one.”
    There’s nothing so deeply consoling as sitting in my children’s music lessons .
    But she meant my sister. I’d quit piano years ago. “Enough already!”
    I yelled that, startling us both.
    Espionage had a life of its own. Secrets opened to me when I wasn’t even looking. My dad took us to dinner at a place that served Mexican Coke in glass bottles, the same ones I had in my closet! “It’s the old formula,” the waitress told me. “Made with cane sugar.” My dad asked if they came in diet. When the bill was set down, I asked to see: six dollars each! I’d been right to hold off; I had to convince people that Mexican Coke had added value. That night I stayed up late researching, with a bowl of cereal at my dad’s steel counter. In an early hour of the morning, while I read about MexiCoke, a lettershot under the front door, and through the glass, I saw the back of a short trench coat dashing across the lawn. It wasn’t Holland, I didn’t think. A letter under the door after midnight! I held it up to the computer glow. The envelope just said Cary in turquoise ink. No Hart . I put it back on the concrete floor for him to find. He’d jam it in his desk drawer or mix it in with the pile of bills and scripts on the counter. I’d have to read it after it was open. But the next night, we were back at my mom’s house, and so I couldn’t check.
    While my dad was probably ignoring the letter, we sat at the table, on the other side of Santa Monica. Boop Two, who’d always lived on chicken tenders, announced that she was going to stop eating animals, including birds. “I decided not to eat anything that has a face,” she said.
    “What about Thanksgiving?” I said.
    “I’ll just have pie.”
    A few weeks later a woman phoned for her. I was finding a pen to take a message when the woman said, “It’s Dorie from the shelter. Could you tell her Hunter’s been adopted?”
    I started hopping on one foot. I should have asked more, but I was embarrassed at how happy I felt with this stranger on the phone. Later, Boop Two called her back. She sat down after, her hands underneath her butt. “He got a good home, a family with five kids. One is developmentally disabled. So Angeldog is somebody else’s. I thought if nobody adopted him, we’d get him.”
    All of a sudden, I was mad at Boop One, who’d made such a fuss that first day and then forgotten, and even at the Mims. We agreed not to tell them until they asked. They didn’t ask.
    Dogless, our lives went on. Angelless too.
    I looked everywhere at my dad’s for the envelope with the turquoise writing. It gave me something to do at his house. But I never found it. He must have thrown it out.

27 • Are You Still in the Same House?
    Up until then, my dad had come to all our holidays, but this year he was going to Hawaii. My mom tried to talk him into leaving the day after Thanksgiving, but she could never get him to do what he didn’t want to. I was