The Astronaut's Daughter

Mom went to Jupiter
Two days after I lost my virginity
To Joe Wells-Bishop
In his dead brother's room

He led me in there
To show me how you could see the air
Because it was preserved
By his father
In an attempt to hold back bits of carbon
That had once been expelled by his brother

Joe's brother Sam-Sam
Died in the Water Tower accident
Of 2011

I remember hearing about it
And hearing that only two people died

I remember thinking
Only two people?
Well, that's good

But two people is a lot
When once you know one of them

Joe laid me down on his dead brother's bed
And became the first boy
To show me how stubble on skin feels
How it tickles you in a way
That nothing else does

I went home that night
After doing it with Joe three more times
On the bedspread where his dead brother
Used to look up at glow-in-the-dark stars
Stuck to his ceiling

In the kitchen, Mom was coloring in pictures of Jupiter
From a coloring book she bought at the dollar store

'We should spend some time together,' she said
'In two days you're never going to see me again'

'Will it be like you're dead,' I asked her

She looked up from the coloring book
Blew her breath upwards to knock the hair out of her eyes
And express her anxiety
Then shrugged

'It'll be worse, I think,' she said,
'Yeah, it actually might be worse'

Two days later, she made me an astronaut's daughter

We shared an awkward hug
The morning she left

I made her coffee
While Dad stayed in the shower upstairs
Waiting for the water
To make sense to him

'Take care of yourself,' she told me
'How,' I asked
'Fuck if I know,' she said

Then came the hug
Then a runaway tear
Rubbed clean with a harsh hand

No crying
That was our deal
Whether or not
Our eyes knew it

I watched her drive away
And then I went and put on her robe
So I could start feeling like her
Like somebody who gets up in the morning
And reads the news
And makes herself breakfast
And irons her uniform
And knows what she's doing
Even when she doesn't know she knows what she's doing

I went upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door
To let Dad know it was over
His wife was gone
He could dry off now

Back downstairs, I turned on the tv
And waited for the breaking news

The rockets
The thrusters
The open sky

And a path from here to Jupiter
Marked out so clearly
It really didn't seem
That far at all