Free Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams

cranberry sauce. It broke my heart when you said you ate yellowtail last year. I don’t think you can do things like that. Life doesn’t go on forever, you know. Your sister was born on Thanksgiving Day. She weighed almost nine pounds.”
    Liberty was getting confused. The fluorescent light in the kitchen dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. She turned it off.
    “I fell so in love with Daddy, I just couldn’t think,” Liberty’s mother said. “He was so free and handsome and I just wanted to be with him and have a love that would defy the humdrum. He didn’t know anything about Brouilly. I had kept Brouilly a secret from him.”
    “Brouilly?” Liberty asked, not without interest. “That was my sister’s name?”
    “It’s a wine. A very nice wine. She was cute as the dickens. I was living in New York, and when I fell in love with Daddy I drove Brouilly eighty-seven miles into the state of Connecticut, enrolled her in an Episcopalian day-care center under an assumed name, and left her forever. Daddy and I sailed for Europe the next day. Love, I thought it was. For the love of your father, I abandoned my firstborn. Time has a way, Liberty, of thumping a person right back into the basement.”
    “You’ve never mentioned this before, Mother.”
    “Do you know what I miss a lot,” her mother went on. “Playing Ping-Pong in the cellar. I haven’t always lived in this cellarless state, you know … Your father is saying ‘don’t start trouble, don’t start trouble …’ I chose the Episcopalians because they are aristocrats. Do you know, for instance, that they are thinner than any other religious group?”
    “I don’t know what to say, Mother. Do you want to try and find her?”
    “What could I possibly do for her now, Liberty? She probably races Lasers and has dinner parties for twenty-five or something. Her husband probably has tax havens all over the place.”
    “Who was her father?” Liberty asked.
    “He made crêpes,” her mother said vaguely. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
    Liberty hung up. The room’s light was now gray and Clemglowed whitely in it. A particularly inappropriate image crept open in her mind like a waxy cereus bloom. Little groups of Hindus sitting around a dying man or woman or child on the riverbank, waiting for death to come, chatting, eating, behaving in fact as though life were a picnic.
    She poured dog food from a sack onto the ice cream and set it out for Clem. The phone rang. “I just want you to know,” her mother said, “that I’m leaving your father.”
    “Don’t pay any attention to this, Liberty,” her father said on an extension. “As you must know by now, she says once a month that she’s going to leave me. Once a month for twenty-nine years. Even in the good years when we had friends and ate well and laughed, she’d still say it.”
    Liberty’s mother and father were both over five hundred miles away. The miracle of modern communication made them seem as close to Liberty as the kitchen sink.
    “Once,” her father said, “why it couldn’t have been more than a month ago, she threw her wedding ring out into the pecan grove and it took a week and a half to find it. Once she tore up every single photograph in which we appeared together. Often, she gathers up all her clothes, goes down to the Winn-Dixie for cartons, or worse, goes into Savannah and buys costly luggage, boxes the books and the French copper, makes a big bitch of a stew which is supposed to last me the rest of my days and cleans the whole damn place with ammonia.”
    “It’s obviously a cry for help, wouldn’t you say, Liberty?” her mother said.
    “I don’t know why you’d want to call Liberty up and pester her. She has her own life.”
    “I am a victim of neglect,” her mother said. “Excuse me,everything’s just dandy here. I made pork chops last night for dinner.”
    “Damn good pork chops too,” her father said. “So, Liberty,