Kathleen Finneran

As Kelly grew more confident, using longer, smoother strokes on her second leg, I became frightened that she’d hurt herself. The more adept she became at shaving, the more I held my breath against the inevitable nick, the free flow of blood from her body. Watching her, I thought about Sean’s wrists, how he had tried to slit them, how he had shown the scratches to my mother, offering them up as evidence of what he had done, as if she would not otherwise believe that he had swallowed handfuls of my father’s heart medicine. And he was right. She could not believe it. It was unbelievable. She made him show her the bottle, near empty now. Was it out of consideration that he had left a few pills for my father?

Shortly after he died, my mother took out all of the cardboard backing in a picture frame and filled the space with an entire set of his school pictures, from kindergarten through ninth grade. Every so often, she changed the order of the photographs so that a new picture of Sean was displayed. One month we might see him as a second-grader, wearing his First Communion suit. The next time we looked, he was fifteen, with his hair parted in the middle and his face showing its first signs of manhood…

When she was two and just talking, Sarah would point at each new picture and ask, “Who’s that boy?” “Who’s that boy?” “Who’s that boy?” until she had grown used to the sight of her uncle from the ages of five to fifteen.

When I was a child, I’d sit on the edge of my parents’ bed and watch my father undress every day after work. He conducted his closet as if it were a second business, arranging his wingtip shoes, from brown to black, across the floor. They shone there under the darkness of his trousers, which hung by the cuff. I would watch him, standing in his shirttails, his garters and socks, while he put away one day’s pants, picked out another pair to wear the next morning, and hung them on the back of his closet door. His legs were as white as the moon when it’s full, smooth as the silk ties he wore, rich with blue lines of blood. I never understood, and still don’t, why Michael, who sprawled beside me on the bed sometimes, preferred to read from the evening paper, splaying our silence with facts, when each day he could have followed my father changing his clothes.