In February I turned eighteen, and my mother invited me to their new house, or new to me—they had been living there for over a year. She gave me a flask as a present, engraved with my name. “Did you think I was turning twenty-one?” I asked. “What? No!” she said, laughing and hurt. “Why would—I just—nobody waits to be twenty-one to drink.”

“True,” I said.

“Now you can seem like the cool guy at parties,” she said. I don’t know who she thought I possibly was. “Speaking of cool guys, I wanted to inform you: Surprise! There’s a new member of your family!”

My smile was frozen. Was she saying she was pregnant?

“Me and James got married!” She squealed.

“Wow, when?” I asked.

“We went to Vegas just before you went into the hospital,” my mother said. I always noticed how no one ever said “when you were attacked” or “when you were beaten.” They always phrased it as my “going into the hospital,” like it was a line of work, or like I was a nun entering a convent. Obviously, I had not been invited to their wedding.

“Gabby was my maid of honor,” my mom said, smiling shyly. I knew that on some level my mother was embarrassed. As though she had no right to get married again, to wear a white dress and feel loved and important, no right to be happy. She held out her ring for me to admire, but then took it back too quickly. “It’s not real,” she said.

“Well, that’s great,” I said, but it was the most I could say and she could tell.

I was alienated by their house. I’d never been here before, the new house. I’d been plenty of times to the old apartment, and of course we often met at the beloved Denny’s on Hawthorne Boulevard. Their house was so clean, much cleaner than our house had ever been in my memory. There were candles burning, even though it was still light out, which was very my mother, but the furniture was all new looking and matching and everything was gray and teal. The walls were a muted gray, the couch was gray, the rug was a lighter gray, then teal accent colors: couch cushions, coffee table items, candles, wall art, all teal. It was like the house had been decorated by a T.J.Maxx HomeGoods specialist. I had remembered my mother’s taste as so much more bohemian, but then I wondered if perhaps our furniture had been mismatched and bizarre because we couldn’t afford furniture that coordinated. I realized, too, that I was sitting in a house, albeit a small one in a not very nice part of Culver City, but it was a house, and I understood now what that meant. I didn’t know if they owned, but even if they were renting, the feeling was different. I had been so overwhelmed by her new boyfriend’s similarities to our father that I had failed to notice this key difference: He had money. Not a lot, but enough. And maybe that would change the way the story unfolded.

As we talked and ate (my mother had baked several different Trader Joe’s appetizers, little spinach-and-feta cups, tiny pigs in a blanket, it was all very fancy), I kept finding myself evaluating the cost of the items in their home. I noticed Gabby was wearing socks that looked new, an unblemished snowy white with electric-orange toe caps. Her jeans seemed fashionable, with little rips in the knees. Her hair was cut in subtle waves that framed her face. There was a cookie jar in the shape of a French Bulldog in the kitchen. They had a spinning spice rack. While I had been living elsewhere, they had been buying things, acquiring things. Strolling through the aisles of Target or Marshalls and finding something they liked. I do not know why the idea of this made me so achingly jealous, but it did.

Now that my mother’s boyfriend was my stepfather, I figured it was time to try to learn more about him. I knew that his name was James and that he worked in a garage as a mechanic, but I knew very little else. I guessed that they were still drinking because of the beers and box of wine I saw in the fridge, as well as a faux-rustic sign hung in the kitchen: DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY WINE. Maybe that was okay. Maybe I was wrong about everything. Maybe it was okay to just cast off one of your children, focus on the one you liked more, drink until you felt happy, and buy stuff. Hyena pups kill off their brothers and sisters until only one from the litter remains. The females even have pseudo penises with which to show dominance and rape each other.

But James was watching Ancient Aliens in the living room, and he did not feel any social need to engage with us. He had shaken my hand very warmly when I first arrived, and now he was a kind golem steadily absorbing the trickle of false information. I let my mother and sister take me outside to show me their yard.

“Show him the fairy garden,” Gabby was saying.

“I will, I will,” my mom said. She led me past some daisy bushes that were frankly thriving and much prettier than daisies had any right to be, and then held back the bladed leaves of a calla lily so that I could see a small clearing between plants. There I saw several tiny houses, their roofs painted to look like mushroom caps. There were tiny lanes paved with pebbles and some miniature white picket fencing. There was a small ladder that led up the trunk of a camellia tree with low branches so that it looked like a fairy had climbed up there to go about their fairy business. A little figurine of a hedgehog was swinging on a tiny rope swing behind one of the toadstool houses.

“Isn’t it so, so cute?” Gabby was saying.

“Oh, he doesn’t like it!” my mom cried.

“No, no, it’s not that,” I said. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. It struck me as both wonderful and very sad. The child part of me was enchanted, and also deeply jealous, while the adult part of me thought it was stupid and bizarre. The figurines were cheaply made, the colors garish. I didn’t know what to think. “Whose idea was this?”

“I saw it on Pinterest,” my mother said, “and the very first time I saw it, I just thought: I have to have that.”

“So interesting,” I said. “It’s very cute.”

“You think it’s dumb,” my sister said. Her brown eyes were hurt. She looked more like our father, and that had always been the family lore, that I took after our mother and Gabby took after our father, but now, seeing them standing side by side, their arms crossed against the cold, I could see the resemblance almost vibrating between their bodies, the similarity in the way they stood, the way they moved, the dark chocolate color of their hair, though my mother had several strands of silver coming in. I was overwhelmed. I was suddenly extremely upset and worried I would cry, but I had no idea why and it seemed so inappropriate that I was horrified by myself. I couldn’t seem to breathe correctly.

“Michael, are you okay?” my mother asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “This is just so weird. I haven’t seen you guys in a while, and then the house, and I…”

“I know,” my mother said.

“Cause you’re a traitor,” Gabby said. She did a fake little ninja kick at my leg.