Issue β April A four-hour drive between me and my parents is a distance that works well for everybody. After three minutes of Mom mobile-phone fumbling I received a picture taken through the kitchen window. The back lawn was completely torn up, and the yard now dominated by a mound of earth, given structure by plastic netting and chicken wire.
The uprooted sundial leaned against the wall of the garage. I got in Saturday afternoon and was finishing off some still-warm lunch leftovers when Dad came in from an emergency call. I could see it from the table, the packed dirt muddy from a morning shower. As soon as I clicked my seat belt, Dad gave me the exact same look. He leaned over as if about to impart to me one of his big secrets of being a man. They have these weird titles, symbols instead of letters.
And when I mention it to her, she acts like it never happened. Dad took a breath and started to scheme. Around five p. You can get a battery pack for an electric drill at Home Depot. They try to make it easy. But the battery pack has to be your actual goal, and for Dad it was more of a pretext. He grabbed hold of a big orange jungle gym cart and pushed it over to the outdoor gardening annex, where he took his time choosing between different types of fiberboard planks.
On the way back, the pickup loaded up with lumber and plastic sheeting and bagged bullshit, I looked through old family texts. A couple weeks earlier Dad had posted something to our WhatsApp group that seemed weird in retrospect:. Carlos, is there a site where you can draw a shape and see the emoji that looks like that shape?
Attached was a photo of a piece of paper on which Mom had drawn an alphabet of slightly different circles. Some had a protrusion sticking out at one angle or another, like a clock with only one hand. Others were circles that overlapped or enclosed in some way. My parents had always been passive-aggressive, but this took it to another level. Why had Dad used the family chat to ask me to help Mom figure out how to type in the symbols for the weird video searches he was now asking me to investigate?
