Lit by Mary Karr

burning down the fuse toward her explosion.
    After her breakdown, we’d bobbed on unsteadily till I was in grade school, when she inherited a bundle of cotton and banking money from her supposedly middle-class mother, and she divorced Daddy, this time bringing Lecia and me to Colorado. She’d married a Mexican bartender, husband six, buying a bar to boot. Less than a year into that, having spent what may have been a million bucks, Mother had gone back to Daddy, who became the only husband to sign up twice—husband five and seven.
    During a handful of stable years, she’d reenrolled in school and wound up teaching art in junior high. But her lost kids never stopped haunting her, she said. Her own mother—my now-dead grandmother—had blamed her.
    Once the secret had poured out—the rough patches were gone over—Mother got to wondering about those children. So Lecia hired a Pinkerton detective to track down Tex and Virginia.
    My half sister turned out to be a blowsy L.A. blonde with such a taste for pills that I’d bust her eating Daddy’s back-pain meds straight from his bedside drawer. I bought her a bus ticket back to San Diego then, and I never saw her again, though she and Mother talked sometimes by phone.
    But I took to my easygoing brother, Tex, right off. He was slim and wiry with hair dark as mine. Finding Mother explained to him the artist streak his engineer father had shipped him off to military school to get rid of. After the service, Tex had gone on a tear with drugs and alcohol, but he’d been in active recovery some decades. It tantalized me to think his sobriety might spill over onto Mother, especially when he decided to relocate his photography business to Texas.
    Daddy greeted Tex like a lost army buddy, but he’d grown tired of the story long ago, so—after a few hours sitting around the living room catching up—Daddy drifted off to watch some game.
    In movie versions of traumatic secrets, the family walks arm in arm into a field of poppies while the sun paints them gold, which scenario I had faith in. With Tex there, a lot of infection drained off pretty fast. Into the night, Mother sat in the rocking chair in her studio, poking at the wood fire, reviewing the tale for some shifting configuration of Lecia and Tex and me. With each version, a new detail emerged—the snow in her hair as she came into the cleared house; the photo of Tex in a sailor suit she’d hoarded; how thick the custody papers were as she tore them—her hands were sore for days.
    For decades we’d watched her portraits start with fluid ocher streaks, marveling as each layer of paint drew from the violent slashes a particular shrimp boat, say, down to its last bolt. So for a week or so, with every retelling, Mother herself got more real. Before I left after ten days or so, she’d moved way closer to the front of her face.
    Back in the Midwest, I bounced into Tom Sawyer’s office like somebody who’d thrown down her crutches to start tap-dancing. He’d been so right. It wasn’t my fault, Mother’s madness. Cured, I declared myself.
    Not long after, the low-residency grad school in Vermont I hadn’t believed existed took me on probation, no doubt due to puffed-up references from Walt and Etheridge. I kept living in Minneapolis, teaching there. But twice per year I went to Vermont for a few weeks—poetry camp, I called it.
    Age twenty-three, I walked into a decrepit mansion on a campus approaching bankruptcy. (The college would officially fold the year I graduated.) The chintz sofas were faded. The French-pleat drapes were missing a few hooks. The white wine came from a gallon jug and left the taste of pennies in your mouth.
    To get there, I’d drawn from a grubstake I’d cobbled together trucking crawfish from Louisiana for my sister’s newly acquired farmer husband—the Rice Baron, I called him.
    Back then nobody had heard of the teachers whose red ink so bloodied the poems and essays I turned in. Bob still worked