As soon as his footsteps thundered down the stairs, I inched out of my room to the top of the stairs to listen. One night three years ago, the keys were jingling in the lock for nearly a full minute before I heard Gus, my grandfather, rush down the hall. The first thing my mom does after going to the bathroom is head to her bedroom and call her best friend, Claire, to recap the last fifteen years of her life and all the places it’s gone wrong. If her keys jingle in the lock for more than fifteen seconds, I know it’s a night to listen for information. Whenever she’s late, it means she’s spent her extra tips at the bar on half-priced booze. But sometimes, when my mom comes home particularly late from her waitressing job, I can get lucky. The only things I know about my father are the hints I get from listening at closed doors. Henry doesn’t know much more about his father than I know about mine, and maybe that’s how we got to be such good friends, sharing our soap-opera-like dreams about who our real fathers are and how they might come back into our lives. Even if that man did exist, how could he find Sally when she never leaves the house? There is only one man who knows where Sally is, and he left fifteen years ago, two months after Henry was born. Henry always looks sad when his mom says this. Sally believes with every molecule that makes up her large pink body that somewhere out there is the perfect man for her. Her face always gets a warm glow when she talks about TV love, like it’s going to ooze into her own life any day now. Instead, we wait for the commercials and crunch during the ads while Sally fills us in on whatever we’ve missed since the last episode we watched with her. Sally says the crunching is too distracting.

She grips the edges of the bowl, her dimpled arms blocking Henry and me from reaching in to grab a chip, as if we don’t know the rule or might try to break it: No eating during Days. Her huge breasts rub over the top of the metal mixing bowl filled with Doritos she holds in her lap. I close my eyes and feel the cool air against my sweaty face as the opening scene starts. The small air conditioner duct-taped into the only window in the cramped living room hums mournfully over the tragedy about to play out on the TV, as well as the sagging couch the three of us sit on-Sally in the middle, as always. Henry and I look at each other and telepathically exchange a single, familiar phrase: We are pathetic. Sally hushes us for the opening voice-over. We’re just in time for the familiar hourglass.

Henry and I get comfortable in our usual Days of Our Non Lives positions on his mother’s scratchy plaid couch in their tiny living room.

Pearl by Jo Knowles