We’d just moved there and, outside of our parents and our bird dog, my brother and I didn’t know a soul. By the time we’d gotten to Chiefland, though, our father had been there for over a month, scouting the place, learning the back roads, and befriending anybody who’d smile or wave his way, and that was a lot of folks, given that most of the folks were small-town friendly and the others, well, they were just drunk.

So one evening not long after the move, a maze of boxes still stacked in the living room, my father made an announcement: “I’ve met some people who’ll be coming over this weekend, a man and a woman who’ve just married, and between the two of them, they’ve got two kids, although I’m really not sure who they belong to, him or her.”

My attention was piqued. After all, he’d said they had kids….KIDS! Strangers now, but potential friends, those who’d reaffirm my coolness or who’d be so cool themselves that they’d have some to spare. So I started the questioning, the who are they, what do they like, is there a boy and a girl or two boys or two girls and if there is a boy is he cute and if there is a girl, who does she like better, Shaun Cassidy or Parker Stevenson? Just the basics, of course, the have-to-knows, but my father dismissed them all by holding up his hand and violently extending his fingers, his own interrogation shield locked in place.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know—Jesus, stop with the questions,” he blustered, and then he turned to our mother who stood on the other side of the room, rocked back on her heels, arms folded, lips pressed tightly against each other.

“Ok, well, just who are they and how do you know them?” (I understand now that this was an adult translation of all of my questions, perhaps a bit more articulate, maybe a bit less invasive, but she wanted the same goods as me and she was in a better position to get them, given, of course, that she slept with the guy.)

“I met them one night while I was at the bar, everyone was toasting them, just back from their honeymoon, and I bought them both a beer.”

“A beer? As a newlywed toast?”

“Oh, it seemed appropriate, and trust me, they were grateful for the free beer.”

“Charming. And now you’ve invited them over. I can hardly wait.”

“Well, yes, I did. We got to bullshitting and he said they have a bird dog, a female, and they’re looking to breed her. I told them about Deacon and besides, hell, it’s a way for the kids to meet some other kids before school starts.”

My mother wasn’t impressed, wasn’t buying into his logic, but in one short conversation I’d heard of kids and puppy-potential so I was all in. I decided to try my luck just one more time.

“Have you met the kids then?”

“No, Ann, no. I’ve met the parents and only the parents. At a bar.”

“Well, what did they look like? I mean, is there a chance that the boy is going to be cute?”

“I don’t even know if there is a boy, didn’t I already say that? And besides, the wife, I can’t remember her name, is wide, so I would expect the same from the kids.”

I was confused. “Wide? Did you say ‘wide’? What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that if she turned sideways and sucked in her gut, she might be able to squeeze through a barn door…an open barn door…if she tried really hard…and if someone was on one side pushing, the other side pulling.”

I was still confused. As was my mother.

“Bill…,” she drawled, “what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that her personal seamstress is Omar the Tentmaker.”

I laughed and my brother did too, but Mom didn’t give her firstborn the stink-eye, only me. He got a way with a lot, my brother did, which was reason #637 that I hated him.

Having silenced me, my mother turned back to our father. “Ok, so she’s huge--but what about him?”

“Um,” my father stuttered, “he’s, uh, dainty, rather delicate in comparison. Svelte. Maybe, say, around 350?”

My mother’s eyes darted around the room, taking inventory of the furniture, her beloved Danish modern stuff. My father read her mind. “It’ll be fine, I think, but we should keep them off the chairs, I suppose.”

They were being funny, joking in that parent way, but in all honesty, I still didn’t fully comprehend what was at stake and I’m not so sure my brother did either. I mean, we’d lived in a big city for a long time, my best friend was Japanese, my brother’s Puerto Rican and our neighbors included a lesbian prostitute, a suspected Nazi, a gay Cuban body-builder, your average, run-of-the-mill pedophile postman and we both knew Bill, the homeless guy who lived in the dugout at the Little League field at the edge of the swamp. All of that said, we were well-rounded for our age, having befriended people of every race, creed, and fetish known to man, exposed to everything and everyone you could imagine, but portly folks? We just didn’t know many. I simply had no idea that people really did get big, really, really big.

Besides, my mother, she was glamorously thin, with a tall, trim figure that was the envy of all of the other chunky moms, the ones whose bodies so conspicuously confessed to having had a kid and the occasional extra donut. But because Mom could pass for a bikini model well into her forties, two childbirths behind her, my father had a tendency to judge the bodies of other women a bit harshly. Or maybe cruelly. So my Dad’s descriptions of these folks, I couldn’t use them as a gauge for who or what we’d meet that weekend. And I certainly didn’t have any personal experience to help either.

I woke up early on the day our guests were to come; in fact, I’m fairly certain I was up before noon. I’d wandered down the hall, towards the kitchen, and from the smell of peeled onions, I could tell that Mom had already started preparations for the evening meal. “I’m glad you could make it to the festivities,” she said, handing me a knife without looking up. “Now you can help by peeling some potatoes,” and she pointed to a sack of them near the sink.

I honestly didn’t mind helping because I knew the more potatoes I peeled, the more there’d be. And the more potatoes there were, the more they’d help to bury those other things, the onions, the carrots, the celery, all of that stuff about which some rather suspect claims had been made as to their nutritional importance, those things that only adults seemed to enjoy but that, for some reason, tasted like something not too distant from dirt. Moreover those were the very foodstuffs that absolutely interfered with my goal of heaping my plate with lots and lots of the good stuff, and nothing but the good stuff, when, of course, I could. So I had to plan ahead. And the way I figured it, if I played my cards just right, befriended those kids early on, nobody would say a thing if I served myself along with the guests, just chatting up a storm with folks as I got dibs on the choice food. Maybe my parents would be so happy that I was making new friends that they’d overlook the fact that I’d jumped in front of folks, guests and such, serving myself way ahead of time, piling nothing but potatoes and meat and gravy on my already dripping plate. And it was a perfect plan because, outside of getting all the potatoes I wanted, casting aside anything with a hint of nutritional value, it was my only chance, I knew, of getting a piece of roast from the pink, juicy middle and not one from the dried, hard end.

But my mother thwarted my plan.

“Jesus, it’s a family of four coming, Ann, not a clan of Irishmen. Why the hell are you peeling twenty pounds of potatoes?”

“I just thought…”

“Well stop thinking, dammit, because you’re wasting my potatoes. Besides, you need to get busy making a pie.”

I finished peeling the potato in my hand, letting the last bit of peel fly her way for dramatic effect, then threw it in the pile of the other potatoes in the sink. By then, she had the hand mixer out on the counter, the pre-made graham cracker crust beside it, and she’d already moved on to busying herself with putting the meat into the blue-flecked roasting pan with one hand, the other reaching for the salt.

I worked at one counter, her at the other behind me, and by the time I’d put the pie together, Mom had already put the roast in the oven. I walked by, turned on the oven light if for no other reason than to bring attention to what smelled so good. And I left it on, too, so we could keep walking by, looking in, checking the progress, our mouths and bellies lusting, the smells wafting from the kitchen, calling us, teasing us like a hundred dollar whore, all dolled up and standing under a streetlight.

We lingered in the kitchen a lot that day but our guests, our mother reminded us, were supposed to arrive at 4:00 that afternoon. She gave us more and more to do, in spite of the fact that we’d spent the previous few days unpacking then burning the boxes from our move. That wasn’t enough, she said, so we cleaned the ashtrays in the living room, dusted the end tables, took out the trash from the kitchen, and moved that stack of our father’s dirty magazines from the bathroom (which, by the way, somehow, mysteriously, inexplicably, were discovered in my brother’s room, under his bed, a few nights later).

And once we’d done all of that, we showered, dressed, and were as ready as we’d ever be, wet hair dripping behind our ears and onto our shoulders, seated on the couch, before 3:00. And that was a good thing because not long after, we both heard a car rumbling up the dirt road that led to our house.

“They’re here,” we screamed, as our mother rounded the corner from the kitchen, her wet hands wrestling a dishtowel.

“There’s no way,” she said as she hesitantly walked towards the front window, my brother and I already there.

But there it was, a huge, white car, decorated with dirt and dust and dents and dings, a headlight dangling from a smashed front bumper, bouncing across our front yard, slowing then jerking to a stop dead square in front of our house. The front end of the car was pointed right at the window where we stood watching but the glare from the cracked windshield blinded us from seeing inside.

My brother and I were still, silent, but after Mom breathed an “Oh my” into our ears, she screamed for our father. There was no response. So we stood there, looking out the window, our mother periodically glancing over her shoulder towards the clock as if it could offer her some explanation for the premature arrival of these strangers.

But my brother and I, our eyes were locked in position, staring out the window right at that car, that big, filthy white thing that was parked nowhere near what we considered our driveway, the one that continued to cough up grey plumes from the tailpipe even after the engine had quieted. And then the car doors started slinging open.

I held my breath when I saw that someone from the back seat, on the passenger side, was getting out, but I couldn’t see who or what or how because the person in the front seat opened their door too, blocking any chance I had of a decent view. Just then my brother gasped and pointed to a small figure, elfish like, who darted around the back door to behind the front door, a small head of brown hair barely visible. And then we could see nothing. And then it was there again. Then gone.

Mom knelt down for a better view. “Good lord, what is going on out there?”

“I think that little person is trying to help someone out of the front seat,” my brother said, and with that, we noticed that the entire car was gently rocking back and forth, up and down, the tiny head bobbing in and out of our line of vision. Suddenly the entire side of the car sprang up, the small head lost forever beneath the car door, and an enormous figure emerged from the car, clad in white pants, a floral blouse, dirty feet shod in too-small sandals. Because there was a flower, a delicate little something-or-other, pinned in the tangled nest of tangerine hair, I figured it was a woman.

“Holy….” my mother said in a breathy whisper. “That’s the new bride? I don’t know if that’s true love or true grit.” And my brother took off running.

I wanted to go too, but I knew there’d be trouble if I did. So I decided to ask the obvious: “Where are you going?”

“The Little Debbies, I’ve got to hide them.”

And as I tried to tell him to not forget the treasured Star Crunches, the little chocolate, crispy wonders with some sort of not-so-naturally-wholesome ooey gooey that stuck to your teeth even if your parents were successful and got you to brush them, my mother screamed, “Get your ass back in here NOW,” but he couldn’t hear her because, just about the time she screamed, there was a frame-rattling pounding on the door. Mom moved towards the door and, with her back turned, my brother flashed down the hallway, a long, white box of oatmeal crème pies tucked beneath his arm.

Mom stood still, her hand extended to open the door for our guests, her mind chasing her son down the hall, but before she could take the next step in either direction, the door flung open.

“Howdy,” the man said, his fingers resting on the rim of his dirty cap, polite-like as though he were contemplating tipping it in the presence of a lady. “You must be Betty? I’m Dave, this here’s my wife, that’s her there coming up the steps, and that’s my son, he’s right behind her, and my daughter, she’s there in the car. She’s mad right now so I figure it’ll be a while before she comes in.” And with that, he’d stepped through the door, walked to the center of the room, looked at the couch and both chairs, then, with a loud grunt, settled into the chair that everyone else knew to be Mom’s. The man’s body totally consumed it, filling the chair and then some, his distended stomach spilling over the arms. My brother peeked around the corner from the hallway, smiling, while my mother stood frozen.

A noise from the doorway helped to bring her back from her daze, and when I turned, I saw the woman, standing in the doorway, her nose lifted in the air, her nostrils flared, greedily sniffing up our roast beef smells. “Oooohhh, that smells so good,” she cried out as, just like my father predicted, she turned sideways and struggled through the door, “I sure can’t wait to dig in.”

“I’d thought we’d eat around five,” my mother said as she held out her hand towards the woman, “I’m Betty, by the way.”

“I’m Joyce and that’s fine, I can wait, because I brought me a snack, I never go nowheres without me a snack, my blood sugar, you know,” and as she made her way to the couch, she screamed back towards the door, “son, go back to the car and get Momma’s bag, and hurry, because I think I’m feeling a tad bit faint.”

There was a scrambling of quick, light feet across our front porch, a pattering down the steps, the sound of a car door squeaking open then slamming shut, then the scurrying up the steps, back across the porch and then, finally, we saw the elf. Or the imp. Or whatever he was. He came through the door with ease, a pointy-eared little kid with quick brown eyes and pale skin, dressed in a pair of cutoffs and nothing else, no shirt, no shoes, with a layer of dirt creased in the folds of his elbows and behind his knees, the bottoms of his feet black. His skin stretched tight across his ribs and shoulders, and as I watched him from across the room, I imagined that he wet his bed and smelled of his own urine. Or worse.

He moved quickly, his feet never fully lighting on the floor until he reached the couch and handed the woman the large basket he’d gotten from the car. He stood there, not moving, just staring at her, while she rooted around through the basket and pulled out a sandwich. “Oh thank you baby—you’ve got no idea how much it means to Momma when you save her like this,” and she lifted the sandwich to her mouth. She rammed one really good bite into her mouth before she remembered her manners. “Oh, excuse me, this here’s my son,” she said, pointing towards the little imp, “his name’s ….” and as she said his name, a piece of bologna leapt from her lips and, in a desperate attempt to catch it before it fell farther, she slung her gaping mouth and extended tongue out towards the air in front of her then snapped her mouth shut, like a dog snagging flies from the air above its haunches. I wasn’t sure, but I figured her son’s name was “Chomp.”

“What about your daughter?” It was my mother’s attempt to fill the awkwardly silent room with something, anything, besides the spectacle of watching that woman eat, her pet imp before her.

“Oh she’s in the car,” the man said as he grunted himself to his feet and came to the window where my brother and I were still standing. “She called me some bad words on the way over here so I told the fucking bitch that she had to wait in the car until we got to eat.”

“I’ll go get her,” I said, my feet already taking me to the door, my brother right behind me. Once we were outside, I turned to him and, of all the questions that were churning in my head, I asked, “what did she say that kid’s name was?”

“Peter Dick, I think.” He kept walking, slowly, towards the hulking car while I stopped to look at him, wondering if I’d heard him correctly.

“Peter Dick? Are you sure that’s what she said? Who would name their kid that? I don’t think that’s his name…” I rambled, slowly but surely coming to realize that my brother was making it up.

“Geez, Ann, I don’t know, but why don’t you scream his name right now and see who comes running out the door first? Go on, scream ‘Peter Dick’ as loud as you can and, if he comes out, then we’ll know for sure.”

If Mom came out instead, though, I’d get sent to my room until dinner was served; I’d miss out on everything, meeting the girl in the car, watching the imp stand over his Momma, seeing how long it took before Mom’s chair broke, but most importantly, I’d surely miss my shot at anything other than an end-piece of roast, so I figured it wasn’t worth the risk.

“That ain’t his name, girl, so if I was you, I wouldn’t do it.” The voice came from the back seat of the car, from a window that I saw was rolled down. The door opened as I walked towards it and there I saw the girl, her face hidden, sitting in the back seat, angry arms folded over the tops of her belly, her jeans so tight they looked spray-painted on, a thin, white tank top embattled in a heroic yet futile attempt to cover her wares, wads of fat packed tightly against the strained cotton, breasts topping her bra in giant soufflés of flesh. “And I ain’t gonna tell you his name, so don’t you even ask.”

I ducked down to introduce myself. “I’m Ann.”

She leaned her face out, a fierce fist atop her fat neck, the meat of her cheeks folded into a pucker around her nose and mouth, scrunched in such a way that gave the impression that she’d been weaned on a dill pickle. “My name’s Shawna.”

“Oh, like ‘fauna’?” She stared at me, silent, unblinking. “You know, like ‘flora’ and ‘fauna’?” I understood from her blank expression that their family dictionary didn't suffer from overuse.

“No, like ‘Shawn,’ that’s my daddy’s name, my real daddy’s name, except I’m a girl so it’s ‘Shawna’.”

“But,” I said, “I thought your daddy’s name was ‘Dave’?”

“That pussyass in there ain’t my daddy,” she said as her gaze locked on our front door. “My momma could have any man she wanted and why she married that needledick in there, I just don’t know, but I hate him, I do, and God strike me dead if I’m lying but one day soon, when I catch him asleep, and ain’t nobody else at home, I swear I’m gonna kill him.”

“Oh, um, ok, well, I think I am going to go back inside now,” I said, turning towards the house, moving quickly, looking for my brother. He’d abandoned me, I suppose, the first chance he’d gotten. He was pretty smart sometimes.

“Just let me know when dinner’s ready ‘cause I ain’t going anywhere near that motherfucker until it’s time to eat,” she screamed from behind me. I heard the car door squeak back before it slammed.

When I got back inside, my brother was sitting on the floor near the hallway, acting as a sentry at his post, guarding the Little Debbies stashed in his room somewhere. My father was in his chair, and my mother had been relegated to the floor beneath the living room window, her long legs folded neatly to her side. The guests were still in my mom’s chair and still splayed on the couch and still standing in front of the other. The awkward silence from before, however, was gone.

“So I was reading that what looks like fat on people is just where your organs have gotten out of place because they ain’t lying where the good Lord put ‘em because, you know, as you get older, gravity undoes what the good Lord done good to begin with. So I started thinking that was what was wrong with us so I went out back to wheres there was this stack of blocks, cinder blocks, and I brought me a few inside and I put them up under the footboard of our bed so that we sleep now in an uphill position, you know, with our feet higher than our heads, to help undo what gravity done and put our organs back in place. I just done it last week so we ain’t seen no good come of it yet, but the way I calculate it, we’ll both be in swimsuits by this time next year, which will be good because then I can take them blocks out from under the bed because right now, it ain’t exactly uncomfortable, but it does make, um, some certain newlywed activities a bit awkward, don’t it honey?” He smiled at his new bride, winked at her, then turned to my dad. “You know what I mean, I’m sure.”

I didn’t. I had no idea what he meant. I’d been standing at the door during his story, listening, wondering where I should go, where I should try to sit, but when everyone’s eyes started to wander the room, wondering who’d start the next story, I sat down next to my mom on the floor. When Dave drew in air to speak, I rested my head in my mother’s lap, preparing for a long afternoon, the soft tick of her wristwatch a soothing rhythm to the loud voices in the room.

My dad spoke some, a master story teller himself, and with Dave being the only other person to speak, the rest of us were simply an audience to the ball-wagging dance of two men. My father, though, was outwagged, given that he’d never shot at the neighbors, awoke in a ditch, stolen a car, or spent the night in jail after his fifth wife called the law on him for breaking out the windows of the trailer with a baseball bat. Fifth wives can be like that, I learned.

I turned my head in her lap and checked my mom’s watch. It was not quite 4:00. I looked at her and she silently mouthed, “let’s check the roast.” We stood up together and, as she excused as from the room, we walked quickly towards the kitchen. Once there, I handed her the oven mitts as she stood in front of the oven, the door creaking as Mom opened it. “I don’t care what it looks like, I’m going to declare it ready,” she said as she bent, pulling on the mitts, reaching for the handles on the roaster.

“Oh, goody, did I hear you say it was ready?” We hadn’t heard her come to the doorway and my mother looked at me, embarrassed, obviously wondering if the new bride had heard her comment, understood her motivation, for declaring that we’d eat, no matter what. “Hey y’all,” she bellowed, her voice full of excitement, “it’s time to eat!” I heard her son scurrying to her side.

I started for the living room when I heard our front door swing open. “Hey lardass, dinner’s ready. If you can stop being a bitch for long enough to eat, you should waddle in here and get you some. I really don’t give a shit what you do, so if you want, you can sweat your ass off out there in the car, but for the rest of us, it’s on.” And then I heard the door close.

I stood there, at the end of the hallway, in between the living room and the kitchen, visible to neither, and listened. Silverware was rattling in the drawers, cabinet doors were swinging open and shut, plates were scuffing against each other. Our guests were serving themselves from the stovetop. My mother rounded the corner from the kitchen, looking at me with eyes startled wide, holding a plate in one hand, gently shaking her head back and forth. “I mean to tell you, when you get in there, you better grab it and growl because I don’t know how much will be left.” She handed me the plate as my brother passed us, heading down the hallway.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re going ahead and serving themselves seconds and thirds, Ann. Even that little shit took three slices of roast.” My back crumpled against the wall as my mother’s hand worked to fluff the curls around my face. “I’m sorry. We’ll have a nice meal together tomorrow night, maybe, with no visitors, just us. For now, though, you need to go get something to eat before it’s all gone.” I smiled at her and she shook her head. “I’m not joking…hurry!”

And she wasn’t joking. When I stepped back into the kitchen, my father was standing at the stovetop, spooning vegetables onto two plates. “Help yourself to some potatoes, Anna Banana, that’s all that’s left.” I looked longingly at the dried end pieces of roast on the plates he’d served. “This is mine and this one’s for your mom. I think your brother made himself a sandwich and went to his room already, but I want you to stay out here with us, ok? Will you talk to the kids? Or, rather, don’t talk to the kids…maybe they’ll leave more quickly.”

But they didn’t. The night dragged on and on, each of us assuming the same positions in the living room, my mother and I back on the floor next to the window. Shawna had, in fact, joined the, er, festivities, filling the other half of the couch next to her mother, with Peter Dick still standing there, waiting for his mother to fall out from, um, hunger. My father and Dave were in the chairs, filling the room with stories that would’ve likely been more appropriate for a barroom, and I could say that with more certainty had I been listening. Instead, I periodically escaped by taking frequent and extensive trips to the bathroom, each trip highlighted by, halfway down the hall, knocking on my brother’s bedroom door, begging through the paneling for a Star Crunch. He responded by laughing and rattling the plastic wrap, shoving his empties under the door. He’d even licked off the ooey gooey. Fucker.

It was late, maybe 11:00 or so, when I returned from one such trip and found the living room empty, silent, still. There was a commotion in the front yard so I ran back down the hall to my brother’s room. “They're gone,” I squealed, just like it was Christmas morning and I’d been the first to wake up.

“No, that isn’t going to work, Ann, I am not going to open the door.”

“Really, they’re gone,” I said. “Listen for a second—they’re out in the yard, I promise.”

“Ok, but before I open the door, I guess I should warn you that I’ve already eaten all the Star Crunches. There’s nothing left but oatmeal crème pies.”

“But I don’t like those.”

He cracked open his bedroom door just wide enough so that I could see the smile smeared across his face, the caramel still clinging to the sides of his lips. “I know.”

I longed for the strength to kill him, thinking quickly that I could rush his room, grab a pillow from his bed, and smother him there in the hallway before my parents came back in. But it was too late—I heard my father’s heavy sigh from the living room as the front door was being closed.

“Hey kids,” he screamed, “it’s safe to come out now.” My brother raced down the hallway after, of course, pushing me into the wall on his way out the door. By the time I’d made it to the living room, though, the elation from their departure was waning and an assessment of damages was being made. Couch cushions were scrunched out of place, the throw pillows thrown, ash trays brimming, beer cans toppled here and there. My father stood, hands on his hips, spinning around and around, taking it all in.

“Bill, honey, I’m too tired and hungry to clean up now. Let’s just clean this up tomorrow,” my mother said as she made her way towards their bedroom.

“But wait, Mom,” I said, “what about the pie? I never saw them eat the pie—we can eat some pie before we go to sleep, can’t we?”

She came back towards me, smiling. “Nope, no pie. They ate it while you were in the bathroom.”

“What? There’s no way…”

She nodded her head that yes, there was a way and yes, it was so. She started laughing. “And don’t ask us if it was any good because your father and I didn’t get a piece.”

“It’s a crying shame, too,” my father added, “because right now, I’ve got a real hankering for something sweet.”

It was the perfect moment, the rare opportunity offered to me by that otherwise cruel bitch called Fate, when I could even things up for a second, expose my brother for the double-dealing, Little-Debbie-hording fraud that he was. “You should go to his room, then,” as I pointed directly at my brother’s face. “He’s got a box of oatmeal crème pies in there.”

My father looked up, obviously excited, then dropped his head. “Damn, I really had my heart set on a Star Crunch. I guess some fatass ate all of those?”

"Yep," was all that I said, staring straight at my brother.