Kyle called every few days. If not for COVID, it might’ve been every few months. The virus had established a public pretense that people cared about stashed-away parents. There was a responsibility with being there on the phone, but he found it much greater this weird responsibility to pretend he was a man who could be made to cry.

The mother he knew was not necessarily warm, but as a medical practice receptionist she was likable. She had to have suffered from being married to his father, the mean bastard that every dead-end suburban circle seemed to have at least one of. Kyle’s brothers, nine and eleven years older, were born into a time where you didn’t get saved (as Kyle assumed he himself had) by the cupping hand of neoliberal society. His brothers fought miserably with their father, went into the service at eighteen, and became nomadic “veterans,” suffering every malady that nowadays went with the term. About six years ago, Kyle learned that both were already dead.