Claire Klee wore a pale green T shirt with the name of a Ford dealership in fading letters on the back. The T shirt was old enough to be translucent and holey. She ate cold oatmeal and rocked back and forth on the vinyl chair. She wasn't wearing underpants. Daryl was washing the dishes. He finished and then started to leave. Claire didn't look at him but she started crying, "Don't leave me, Daryl. Don't leave me here. Don't go." Tears were streaming over her puffing lips, down into the oatmeal. She seemed to be pleading to the bowl. "God Baby, please don't go. Daryl..." she said to the bowl. Daryl never took his eyes off her but slowly backed out of the door.

And that's how every day began since he was thirteen. It coincided with the start of his pubic hair but didn't seem directly related to it.

To Daryl, it seems like his mother misunderstood the objects in her world. She talked to the cereal bowl like it was her son. She looked at her oven like it was a wild animal that would consume her and she stared at the water in the toilet bowl, engrossed, like it was a television. She ignored the television set and urinated into old peanut butter jars in the kitchen. All the things in her life seemed to have been yanked out of their groove and she wandered from thing to thing disoriented because no one could yank them back. Daryl thought one yank could save her. But this thought was a confection that wilted whenever his mother looked at him. All of the ways a person looks at a meal and a wild animal and a television and a toilet were all the ways his mother looked at him. Famished and terrified and dazed and relieved.