Free A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Page A

know?”
    “They’ve never been like boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re like siblings.”
    “I’m not so sure about that,” I said.
    We got onto the main road and we rolled up our windows. Edith rode in silence for a while. “You know Jim, Adrienne grew up really unsupervised. Eventually she started dating guys in bands. It got pretty intense. They heard her sing and…have you heard her sing? She was fourteen. There were all these guys. Without Chase she never would ever have survived.”
    “You mean literally survived?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Maybe not, Jim.”
    The late-afternoon sun glared in my windshield. It was dirty. I wondered if it would seem passive-aggressive if I stopped at a gas station to wash it. I felt irritated: I should have had that drive home to myself.
    Edith had said: “Adrienne and Chase were little kids together, their families were friends. I don’t know how gradual it was, but he just started being there for her. And no matter who she was seeing she always had Chase. He gave her a lot of stability.”
    “You mean she slept with him and other men too?”
    “I guess!”
    “And so I can be a new version of those other men.”

    My parents complained about the cigarette smell in my car. They had not driven it since I came home. I arrived back from Bartlesville however and fell asleep, and that was when my dad took it upon himself to get my oil changed.
    “I guess because people don’t roll their windows down,” I said.
    This took place not at the dinner table, which would have been too theatrical for my parents’ tastes, but cleaning up afterwards. I was carrying plates, while mydad washed the dishes. My mom took up position in the doorway and lobbed questions at me.
    So who were these friends, that I let them smoke in my car?
    It didn’t seem necessary that I should name them. “People,” I said. “I don’t know. Are you worried about secondhand smoke?” But that obviously wasn’t the point, any more than olfactory contamination was the point. My mom persisted. “Look,” I said. I took up the chopping knife and the cutting board. “My friends smoke. So I let them smoke in my car.”
    “But how do you know they’re your friends?”
    I looked at her. She had gone too far. And she knew it. “By looking at their art,” I said. “I know them by their works.”
    I was trying to pretend to be exasperated. But my Bible quote was gratuitous. “I know it seems all bohemian,” I said, “and therefore stupid—or stupid and unconvincing to be bohemian, maybe, in this day and age.” I still tried to shrug. “I don’t know, I learn more from them than I do from my professors. I guess that seems naïve.”
    This was the biggest fight I had had with my parents in memory. They were very quiet. My dad stood by afterwards, sort of waiting as I dried the dishes. I told him about a Kissinger book I was reading, transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone conversations with Golda Meir and others from 1973. I knew it would interest him. He took up the plates to shelve them.
    “I guess what I should say to Mom is something like—I won’t lose track of who I am.”
    My father had an equilateral nose with long, wolfishnostrils, and thin, neat lips, and it seemed to cost him nothing to process what I had said, to find a kernel of goodwill and good sense in it. I immediately regretted having said anything at all, and at the same time was helped, beyond reckoning, by my father’s grace.

    The day I brought Adrienne her gun—I’m still so proud of how crazy that was. I parked outside Adrienne’s studio one bright July morning with a small blue pistol in my glove compartment. Which I retrieved and hefted—the way you heft any present for which you have paid too much and which, held in your own hand before you give it, trembles less with the recipient’s desires than with your own.
    At Adrienne’s invitation I had started going to the studio again, that week after Bartlesville. But still my bid