George and I sat outside on the patio waiting for Mom to come back from the kitchen. It was at the end of a long summer day and the bugs were out. We had just finished dinner. George was lumped in his chair, not wearing a shirt, and flies and gnats buzzed above and behind him and around the plates on the table which still had splotches of ketchup on them from our bun-less hamburgers, like paint on an artist’s used palette.

Mom pointed out to me once—in boasting about him, I suppose—that while George’s face and arms were wrinkled from the sun, the skin under his clothes looked young.

They had gotten married a few years ago, one day when I got home from school. He was number three. They were in the dining room and called me in, with big smiles on their faces, and I hadn’t even set my backpack down before they had a pair of shirts draped under their chins—one blue, one pink, which said, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ respectively. They wanted me to have a moment to take it in, and made a point to assure me that there would be no ceremony.

Really, nothing about the whole thing surprised me. I had to act surprised, though not because Mom’s been married before. Those had been in churches. It seemed to me, somehow, that she and George had already been married for a long time, and had only now noticed. What they were saying with those shirts is that they needed acceptance, or love, from me.

George drove an oil rig and you always knew when he was stopping in to check on the house. One day recently I was watching a video in the living room and I saw over the edge of the couch the chrome of his truck pulling into the driveway like a barge, and I flipped off the television and made for my bedroom. He came in and glared at me in his dark-stained untucked shirt with his fierce oily eyes.

“How many times has your mother told you to clean up that mess?” he said, referring to a pile of clothes in the closet. I didn’t have an answer for him. He leaned one of his hands on the door frame and watched me squirm. “I see you’ve been using the DVD player,” he said, casting a quick glance to the living room. “Did you talk to your mother about that?”

He knew the answer. I squirmed a little, and said I was sorry.

“You don’t touch your mother’s things,” he said. He was aggravated by the apology. By now, it was almost time for him to go back. He took his hand off the door. “I hate to say this,” he went on. “But you really are a terrible son. You don’t do anything all day except watch the TV and you can’t be bothered when your mother asks you to do something.”

He said he was going to tell Mom about what he found me doing with the DVD player and about the laundry pile. But he never mentioned it. The only way it came up was, a few days later, when she asked what seemed to be bothering me and I told her what George had said. She was just home from work, in a maroon pant suit sitting with me on my checkered bed, and I saw something turn over inside her.

“We’ll be having a talk tonight, all right,” she said.

“You don’t have to,” I insisted. “It’s fine. I’m okay.”

“You’re not fine and you’re not okay,” she replied, as angry with me as she was with him.

They had a big fight that night, going up and down the stairs and slamming doors. The DVD I had been watching was a recording of a rock concert, guys who seemed to have conquered the world with attitude, and it played over in my mind as I listened to Mom and George shouting over creaking floorboards.

I was there outside with shirtless George, and Mom finally came out with root beer floats. She sat down across from us and said, “the fireflies are beautiful tonight. Look at that!” And they were beautiful above the lawn as it was getting dark in the gloaming. She talked with George about getting a bigger lawn, one day. To me, though, the lawn was as big as a sea, rolling out off our shore into the dusky twilight.