A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Page A

summer-long crush. I was sobered, in a way. Earlier that week my parents had announced that they might be retiring. They would retire together—Tulsa Public Schools was offering an early retirement package, trying to shed staff. My wise old parents were going to take it. And come next summer they would move to Galveston. That had always been the idea: to go be with my mother’s people. And lately my grandmother had been very scattered and needed care, and my grandfather couldn’t manage. It was time to circle the wagons. “And with you going away to college so far,” my mother said. They might even move as early as March. And since we always had Christmas at Galveston, that meant that leaving for school in September might mean leaving Tulsa for good—I would never again have a parental excuse to come back here. I had to think about that. It was in this armchair where I was sitting that I had prepared Greuze and Chardin, and Delacroix, and Goya, for Adrienne. How long ago that seemed. It was as if all summer I had been staring out from the Booker hazily, and the stakes were only now coming into focus.
    I had told Adrienne how I would stop some nights before I got home and turn the Camry’s ashtray over into a neighbor’s grass, running my finger under the tray’s aluminum teeth to make sure all her ashes were gone. Sometimes if I had anything bigger—a wad of fast-food wrappers that we had failed to clean up, or beer cans—I knew a dumpster behind a McDonald’s. I even threw my entire backpack away once, because it had been soakedin spilled rum. “Why don’t you just tell them your girlfriend smokes?” she said. Which was, I think, the only time she ever referred to herself as my girlfriend. She repeated that she wanted to meet my parents. “They’re your life,” she said. “I should meet them.”
    We were at Target one Saturday. It was hot, the first Saturday of August. I had been waiting in the car. When Adrienne came back I told her I had an idea. My parents lived nearby and we could just go right now and visit them. She got back out of the car and went into Target. She came back with a new yellow sundress. She took off her T-shirt and shorts—feet on the dashboard, with people walking by—she put on the dress and reapplied her lipstick, and she was ready.
    I had pulled out of their driveway only that morning. Now, my father was mowing the front lawn. “That’s my dad,” I announced. He was wearing a straw hat and jean shorts. When we pulled in, he did not stop, perhaps not hearing us, and we had to wait for him to get to the other end and wheel around before he saw us and let the mower die. He waved, and seemed to enjoy his predicament, stopping ten feet away to brush his hands off on his shorts. His beard would probably have been completely white at that point. I remember being immoderately proud of him.
    With Adrienne he was very charming.
    I had never seen my father greet a strange young woman before. We were such a funny family. When I was little, it seemed that everyone we knew was old. And, as time went by, I had failed to bring in anyone new.
    Of course as a teacher, my father would have metnew young men and women all the time. But this was different. He nodded just slightly as he shook her hand; he was already laughing. She said to him that he looked like me—so he got to do a double take and act a little surprised. I had forgotten that he could josh like this. Adrienne smiled, and insisted. She was careful to stand on the part of the grass that had already been mowed, as if to respect his work. She had a way with grown-ups.
    He told her that I ought to be the one mowing the lawn, but that I was “too big” now to do so.
    We went around back to put away the mower and my mom came out on the deck to meet us. I wished that Adrienne were more explosively beautiful. But my mom was very nice, of course, and sat us down on the patio furniture. I sat there rigidly, and I let the women talk. My