The Circle

already asleep, she logged on to her Circle account and handled a few
     dozen queries, feeling, with every fulfilled request, that she was cleaning the Mercer
     off of herself. By midnight she felt reborn.
    On Saturday Mae woke in her old bed, and after breakfast, she sat with her father,
     the two of them watching women’s professional basketball, something he’d taken to
     doing with great enthusiasm. They wasted the rest of the day playing cards, and running
     errands, and together cooked a chicken-sauté dish her parents had learned at a cooking
     class they’d taken at the Y.
    On Sunday morning, the routine was the same: Mae slept in, feeling leaden and feeling
     good about it, and wandered into the TV room, where her father was again watching
     some WNBA game. This time he was wearing a thick white robe a friend of his had pilfered
     from a Los Angeles hotel.
    Her mother was outside, using duct tape to repair a plastic garbage can that raccoons
     had damaged while trying to extract its contents. Mae was feeling dull-witted, her
     body reluctant to do anything but recline. She had been, she realized, on constant
     alert for a full week, and hadn’t slept more than five hours on any given night. Simplysitting in her parents’ dim living room, watching this basketball game, which meant
     nothing to her, all those ponytails and braids leaping, all that squeaking of sneakers,
     was restorative and sublime.
    “You think you can help me up, Sweet Pea?” her father asked. His fists were deep in
     the couch, but he couldn’t lift himself. The cushions were too deep.
    Mae got up and reached for his hand but when she did, she heard a faint liquid sound.
    “Mother-bastard,” he said, and began to sit down again. Then he adjusted his trajectory,
     and leaned on his side, as if he’d just remembered there was something fragile he
     couldn’t sit on.
    “Can you get your mother?” he asked, his teeth clenched, his eyes closed.
    “What’s wrong?” Mae asked.
    He opened his eyes, and there was an unfamiliar fury in them. “Please just get your
     mother.”
    “I’m right here. Let me help,” she said. She reached for his hand again. He swatted
     her away.
    “Get. Your. Mother.”
    And then the smell hit her. He’d soiled himself.
    He exhaled loudly, composing himself. Now with a softer voice he said, “Please. Please
     dear. Get Mom.”
    Mae ran to the front door. She found her mother by the garage and told her what had
     happened. Mae’s mother did not rush inside. Instead, she held Mae’s hands in her own.
    “I think you better head back now,” she said. “He won’t want you to see this.”
    “I can help,” Mae said.
    “Please, honey. You have to grant him some dignity.”
    “Bonnie!” His voice boomed from inside the house.
    Mae’s mother grabbed her hand. “Mae, sweetie, just get your stuff and we’ll see you
     in a few weeks, okay?”
    Mae drove back to the coast, her body shaking with rage. They had no right to do that,
     to summon her home and then cast her out. She didn’t
want
to smell his shit! She would help, yes, any time she was asked, but not if they treated
     her that way. And Mercer! He was scolding her in her own house. Jesus Christ. The
     three of them. Mae had driven two hours there, and now was driving two back, and what
     had she gotten for all this work? Just frustration. At night, lectures from fat men,
     and during the day, shooed away by her own parents.
    By the time she got back to the coast, it was 4:14. She had time, she thought. Did
     the place close at five or six? She couldn’t remember. She swerved off the highway
     and toward the marina. When she got to the beach, the gate to the kayak-storage areas
     was open, but there was no one in sight. Mae looked around, between the rows of kayaks
     and paddles and life preservers. “Hello?” she said.
    “Hello!” a voice said. “Over here. In the trailer.”
    Behind the rows of equipment, there was a trailer, on cinderblocks, and through the
     open door, Mae could see a man’s feet on a desk, a phone cord stretching from a desk
     unit to an unseen face. She walked up the steps, and in the darkened trailer she saw
     a man, in his thirties, balding, holding his index finger up to her. Mae checked her
     phone for the time every few minutes, seeing the minutes slip away: 4:20, 4:21, 4:23.
     When he was off the phone, he smiled.
    “Thanks for your patience. How can I help?”
    “Is Marion around?”
    “No. I’m