Free All My Relations by Christopher McIlroy

mother is ill. Meanwhile she’s fighting fires, working construction—laid block on the new kindergarten wing.
    â€œI don’t know how I’m talking to you,” Dooley says. “I look so atrocious. At the university I maintain myself, but here I don’t even bother with makeup. At least I’ve had the morale to keep biking, so I don’t swell up like a pig.” Unconsciously—I think—she skims her belly. “I’ve done two hundred miles in a day.”
    â€œYou must get hungry,” I say. We settle on Chinese food in Worthington (home of six AIS clients), forty-five miles away. I feel dwarfed by my good luck. This admirable person.
    In Dooley’s triplex I wait and wait while the shower gushes, followed by an even longer silence. Mottled zigzags break up the TV screen. Dooley’s mother is blind. A calico dress envelopes not only her shrunken body but the chair, stretching over its frame. The old woman seems to be resting in the embrace of a larger skeleton. She mutters to herself, not English. I can enjoy situations like this, if I have to.
    With her Ph.D., knocking down fifty-sixty grand, she’d be able to afford decent medical care for her mother, Dooley had told me. “Indian Health Service”—she’d grimaced.
    An hour after she started, she is beside me in a filmy black pajama suit, lavender sash matching her lip gloss. The black hairis a teased mane, heavy-lidded eyes shadowed blue. Her stalking prance ripples the black gauze and makes her silver earrings fly.
    She drapes a blanket around her mother, leaves steaming tea beside. Her hand falls into mine.
    Rolling onto the highway, I pull out the Stolichnaya 750 from under the front seat. The liquid filling my throat, it’s as if an I.V. has hooked Dooley to me, and common fluids are circulating between us. I know we will be easy together.
    She slides beside me and gently pushes the bottle down. “I don’t think of alcohol as a pleasure,” she says.
    â€œYou haven’t drunk with the right people.”
    â€œI don’t drink at all.”
    â€œSure, no one says you have to. I can respect that. Just two more.” I knock back the first.
    Dooley sinks lower in the seat, the settling of her weight spreading her thigh against mine.
    Through dinner I order tropical cocktails.
    â€œYou don’t get drunk,” she says.
    It’s true. Drinking is an eyepiece screwed into my head, that shows a woman standing forth as she should be, freed of all the crap that obscures our best selves. Dooley, model-gorgeous, on the cutting edge of space metallurgy, studying zero-gravity alloys, junks all to tend her sick mother. She’ll get down and grunt to build a school for kids. She throws her body on the line, fighting fires. When Dooley excuses herself to the ladies’ room, her turbulent walk concentrates the energy around her, releases it slowly, like a sky filling the restaurant. I lean back, floating in it.
    Dooley’s gone so long I worry that she’s ducked out a back door. I enlist my neighbor, a ruddy, wind-whipped girl with taut braids—tough, understated, and hardworking, I can tell, the best qualities the Southwest offers, and she knows it, by the way she returns my look—to check on her.
    â€œJust brushing her teeth,” the girl reports, with a teasing poke to my shoulder. “Flossing now.”
    â€œFood catches in the spacings between my molars,” Dooley explains. “Pop is a dentist.”
    Flying along the thread of road in the cool dark, I do the rest of the Stoly.
    â€œYou have to understand,” Dooley says. “Everyone around here is a drunk. My father subjected my mother, my sister, and myself to abuse.”
    That’s sickening. I can’t bring myself to ask how. Instead, a tangent speaks. “A drunken dentist. What balls.”
    â€œNo, no, that’s Pop,” she laughs. “He’s Mormon.