veered to the side, and I nearly took out a display of cereal boxes, then a tattooed stock boy pricing cottage cheese, before ramming into an open freezer resting in the middle of the aisle, scattering its stacks of fish sticks out across the linoleum. Mothers shook their heads and turned away while a pair of college students, drunk or stoned, burst into giddy fits. My daughter, circling in an orbit that kept her far from me, focused her attention elsewhere, leisurely brushing her fingertips along a row of soup cans before sashaying around the corner and down another aisle.
If you live in a place long enough, it begins to occupy two spaces in time at once, or sometimes even more. A row of neat, multicolored condos now, but formerly a high vacancy office plaza. A multiplex movie house that once had been a mini-golf arcade, which had been built over an old mom and pop grocery. Once, a field of tall thin pines, where impatient teens would throw caution and clothes and themselves to the knobby ground—now, a deluxe supermarket with pharmacy, sushi bar and three-level parking. They’re all here. Pasts encroaching upon the present, reasserting themselves in a swell of memories.
Once an independent, childless thirty-something. Now—
They tell me I am Hero’s father, confirmed by tests that go all the way down to our shared DNA. Less than a year ago, I’d received the subpoena, lawyers requesting that I donate “material” for a paternity test in a divorce proceeding—for a woman I could only vaguely remember. Oddly, I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, hadn’t seen a reason to refuse or protest. I’d believed the whole thing impossible, absurd. A mere lark, a simple mistake from which the wonders of modern science would surely absolve me. Then the results had come back positive.
I was apprehensive about parenthood, my relationship with my own parents consisting mostly of a rocky and unsettled series of misunderstandings and doused hopes. I’d moved in with my grandfather when I’d turned 18, into the very house where I now lived. We had resolved most of our disagreements, though, by the time my parents died in an accident several years ago, on their first cross-country trip in the new RV after retirement, never knowing they had a granddaughter upon whom to dote.
Watching now as Hero lifted grocery bags into the truck with me, always reaching first for the heaviest, I found myself still wary, doubtful, perplexed by her stout form, muscular through her neck and shoulders, her dark freckled complexion, her flowing brown hair, her bruising wit. These traits came from somewhere, but likely not from me. Perhaps from Hero’s mother, Val, though she was only an obscure, possibly invented, memory to me, an impression of a gloriously drunken evening of debauchery thirteen years before. When I asked if she had a picture of her mother, Hero had noted that if I couldn’t remember the mother of my child, she certainly wasn’t going to help. Still, whomever it comes from, you could see that strength everywhere in Hero herself, her arms, her calves, her face. Sweat ran in streams across her forehead. She’d wrapped her long hair atop her head in a whirl and secured it with a pencil. She’d tied her long-sleeve cover-up around her waist. A rolled-up new copy of The New Yorker was stuffed into her back pocket. I could not bring myself to ask her if she’d paid for it.
I must be in there. Somewhere.
We drove along the Augustus Parkway, the capital’s main artery connecting east and west, grown rough now with age and randomly patched with black gravel squares and ovals. Cracks and potholes littered the highway. People were jerked along in their cars beside us, bouncing awkwardly in their seats. Inside the cab of my deluxe 4x4, we could barely feel a ripple.
“If you could be any person from the 19th century, who would it be?” she asked.
“Another study, is it?”
“And it can’t be a political figure.”
I unwrapped a piece of gum while we sat at the light, offering a piece to Hero. She turned it down. A blue Chevette came up close behind and nearly rammed our bumper.
“Which century is that?” I asked through my chewing.
“Eighteen-hundreds.”
“Nonpolitical?”
“Politicians are too easy,” she said.
“You’re telling me.”
Ever since her arrival, she’d deluged me with what she called her “studies”: short exercises in empathy, guessing games, tests of logic—the works. You never knew what was coming. She flew through them rapidly, never staying with one for more than a day or so, and never revealing their results. I don’t know where she found them all. Mined, I suppose, from the depths of her imagination.
“Eighteenth century, huh?”
“Eighteen-hundreds,” she corrected. “Nineteenth century.”
“Right.”
She liked to keep the purpose behind these projects a mystery, but that didn’t keep me from pressing. Somehow, I felt she wanted me to ask.
“What’s this one for?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that. It would spoil the surprise.”
“Just a hint. I’m very slow.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“At least tell me why it has to be the eighteenth century.”
“Eighteen-hundreds. Nineteenth century.”
“I’m not cut out for this,” I said. “I need help.”
She leaned forward in her seat, her hands clasped together in front of her, forearms twisted. “You’re looking for someone who is more like an idea than a person. Someone you can’t just pick out of the blue. And it can’t be a politician. If you could pick a president, say, you’d just choose someone like Lincoln. This takes a little more thought.”
I slowed at a stop sign, then rolled through it.
“You sure you’re only twelve?”
“That’s what they tell me,” she said, leaning back, folding her legs underneath herself. “But how would I know, really?”
We passed a clearing filled with busted and rusting automobiles. Buicks and Hondas and Chryslers and Plymouths, each smashed haphazardly upon the next until only a smear of blue green orange. You could almost feel the vines and tall grasses stretching up through the floorboards, before they came up under and through the hoods, running out through broken windows and crooked frames. The clearing bordered a nearly completed strip mall, newly tarred and painted parking lot, crisp and glistening in the sun. Then another mall. Then a gas station. The pace of the construction was frantic, eating up the open spaces and the plots of wild growth. Stores were going up and out of business faster than people could shop.
Saddled between a fast food joint and the foundation of some new building, I spied a farmer’s field, rows of shaggy crops and a wooden shack with a sign erected by the curbside. I pulled the Toyota off the road in front of it, coming to a sudden stop.
“Why’re we parking?”
“I always used to do this with my family. It’s a sort of tradition round here.”
“So was slavery,” she said.
“It’s my heritage.”
“That doesn’t make it mine, you know.”
Placards announced U-PICK corn strawberries peas tomatoes whatever’s-in-season. Dollar-a-pound. The man inside the shack handed us two wooden baskets without uttering a word. His face was creased and leathered, caught in a perpetual grimace.
“You want anything in particular?” I asked, handing her a basket.
“How about cotton.”
“I’m partial to corn.”
“Didn’t we just buy food? It’ll probably go bad in the hot car, you know?”
“This is good,” I said. “This’ll be good for us.”
“I don’t have to