Summer 2023

She is hairy and fat, moves with precision, and avoids people. In the desert, La Loba collects the bones of creatures— deer, antelope, rattlesnakes.

But her specialty is the wolf.

She searches the mountains, bluffs, and arroyos—dry riverbeds—for the parts of this sacred animal. When she has them all, she lays them out and builds a fire. She sings over its brittle bones, her song floating up into the wide desert sky. The leg bones connect to the hip bones, the rib bones find each other, the arms cross over them, the skull fuses together, and the creature becomes whole— swelling with flesh and fur, its ears perk up, and its eyes reflect the flame.

I dropped, cheek to dusty floor, to peer under my high school writing desk. Opened the hollow closet to palpate the spare quilts, neatly folded. Pulled the bookshelf, heavy with boxed-up memories, away from the wall. Nothing. Palms came to rest on love handles. I nodded in admiration. When it came to hiding, I’d been outdone.

Confine the bat until nightfall . . .

All day I worried about the disoriented creature, imprisoned in a room filling with midsummer heat and humidity. Yes, I made the peanut butter sandwiches and watched my son and nephews playing in the yard. But covertly, I read about bat life cycles and behavior on my phone. Chewed my nails. Folded my arms across my chest. Unfolded them and ran sweaty palms down my thighs.

We had the same hunched shoulders. The same sunken expression. The same red, swollen eyes. Her wrinkled, crooked fingers grasped a silver walking cane and personified the brokenness I felt inside.

She had recently lost her husband of seventy years, and I, my older brother. Though our collective grief wracked our bodies and spirits, her face brightened when I arrived.

“Can we go to the grocery store today, Dearie?” she asked. “I need to pick up a few things.”

I pictured my own refrigerator—wilted vegetables, expired yogurt, barren shelves. “That’s a good idea.”

•••

Months earlier, standing at her husband’s coffin, I promised him I’d look after his widow. It was a lofty pledge considering I spent the second half of the funeral debating which cocktail I’d drink that afternoon to calm the anguish in my gut. But my aunt had no immediate family left; she needed someone. Perhaps I did, too.

Maybe they wanted to save me from, “Hi, I’m Gay.”

I grew up in Texas.

My father became the florist of choice for conventional occasions: decorating weddings, debutante balls, and barbeques at the LBJ Ranch. Daddy’s customers were the type of women who could afford to order flowers weekly, long before you could buy a six-dollar bouquet at the grocery store or a cheap aspidistra at Home Depot.

“Are we rich?” I asked him one day. He was watering in the greenhouse that stretched half an acre behind our flower shop. The damp soil aroma of recently- watered caladiums drifted over us.

The answer seemed to confuse him, a bit. I had to explain what it was. My husband seemed surprised I used to burn it. It’s nice, sometimes, to surprise the person with whom you’ve spent nearly half your life. Even when that surprise is something trivial and throw-away, like the benign burning of incense.

The smell was exact, precise, from when I would frequent the store in college. Same store, different location, and still the same smell. What a magic trick, to pull that off. I wondered if it was newly burned or left over from the nineties, so infused into the walls that it will always smell as though The Spin Doctors just released a new album.

I’m squeamish. The photo and gender on my ID don’t match how I present myself; it feels like I’m chancing being caught in a lie I didn’t consent to. I mentally flex my gender assertion muscles to see if I have any strength left over from fighting off yesterday’s microaggressions before I consider saying something to break our awkward staring contest. Fear of giving her a reason to stop me from getting to my destination saps the strength I have left. Eventually, she hands me my license and motions me to pass.