She arrives within the brim of her straw hat. She has a pocket of proclub tight in her jeans and a kitchen table.

“Don’t know how you live without it.” He takes his father's shoes off my daughter-in-law, left over from last night’s party. I watch her hambone drop from his rib box.

This will not do. He was obviously thinking something. What was it?

I have to remember the after a hurricane fireplace, be it health care, taxes, energy, foreign policy, whatever. I could trust a free market, my neighborhood on Halloween. And at Christmas she left between her breasts a giant zero dollar and zero cents.

She picked up an abalone shell. I was drinking beer and encompassing a bevy of sighs. "This is not how bargaining usually works," I said. She took her tight jeans off the table. “I want to feel like I’m stealing something,” she said.

“No,” I say, “I guess slut isn’t one of my favorite words.”

I am not offended by his pedantry for diagrams. This is an autobiography, seven nursing homes, two hospitals, and a prison. Surely Colt remembers the traffic jam, the misplaced horizons.

“Well, shit,” I say. “Can you get this out, this fucker?

“Just watch for a bull’s-eye in the morning,” she says.

I lie awake, watching for a bull’s-eye.

When Georgia can’t sleep, I bomb her hair. When I can’t sleep, she tells me about her childhood.

The dolphin sluiced the property's final edged. I was supposed to be handling shirts and eggs, a kitchen table, hair.

Look, man, life is up and down, it’s a vicious cycle, and Kansas is kind of that gateway.

“Get proclub,” I tell the well-worn keys. “I remain staunchly optimistic.”