by Sara Mcgrath

Created on: April 09, 2008   Last Updated: March 30, 2011

"I run down the street screaming and crying," my sister says.

"Me, too," I say, "Like a lunatic." I smile, or try to. What's wrong with running out your pain under the moon? I rather appreciate the connection between la luna and lunacy. Don't we all need that cyclic opportunity to shed the old blood, or the bad blood, or whatever else weighs us down, and begin anew?

But Ann imagines her father as she confesses this "crazy" behavior Mike (hateful syllable), a small, dark-haired harbinger of a man who hocks up and plays with his snot, who laughs when he binds little girls with duct tape, flicks chewing tobacco in their eyes, drops bricks on their toes, pushes them up against the wood stove . . . .

She imagines her father's brother, Uncle . . . what was his name? David?, imprisoned for bank robbery, his face immortalized on the cover of the newspaper, caught ducking in the backseat of a car. Not such a bad guy, as I recall. Blonde to her father's black, warm smile to her father's sneer. Brothers of different fathers.

Sisters of different fathers. Her skin dark, mine light, yet we look so alike in profile.

We sit at Ann's kitchen table, our great-grandparent's table, in the yellow house that they lived in for fifty years, before our tall grandpa died and our short grandma no longer recognized us. We look out the open glass door at our children, digging in the sandbox, giving us a rare moment to speak quietly.

The fruit trees that our grandparents planted now tower over the house. My little daughters and I rejoice in the abundance of free fruit that we enjoy during our visits apples, pears, plums, figs, and blackberries. Fruit heaven.

"I inherited crazy if anyone did," I say. "My father's mother, Ruby, dancing naked on a table in her front yard, with a bucket on her head. Top that." I tap out a little rhythm on the table. We laugh uneasily, but not crazily, not maniacally.

"I could keep going," I say, "As you know." She nods. I could retell the stories of my long lineage of crazy. Henry VIII with my father's face, Bloody Mary. One not-proud line among countless. I take a breath and keep going.

"Did my father not lose his freakin' mind?" Mid-life crisis we called it. He returned from a mysterious trip, planted himself in his big chair as before, and told us women that we carried on about nothing. Just a normal vacation by himself (from himself). But then he moved out of his little white house and hermited away in a trailer at the edge of his friend's orchard for

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