A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Page B

mother’s manner reminded me of when we used to run into her students—at the grocery store, for example, or once, when I was vulnerably twelve, into a whole gaggle of them at the fairgrounds. With teenagers my mother had an inimitable manner of noninsulting encouragement. She asked Adrienne about her upcoming gallery show—
    “It’s only a group show,” Adrienne said. “But it’s an honor to be included.”
    “You must be excited.”
    “Did you know that Adrienne’s great-grandfather was a famous wildcatter?” I thought this might interest my mother, who sometimes taught Oklahoma history.
    “Like from statehood days…” I prompted.
    “I’d love to hear stories,” she said to Adrienne.
    “What ones I know…” Adrienne looked about, rueful.
    My mother had thrown on something rather nice before she came out. And so how had Adrienne looked, from out the window? She looked so unconcealably pink, her pink throat and chin like a tall Russian teapot. Upright. I leaned back, to see if she had ripped the tag off her dress. She had. I was too young then to know how novel my parents were in the world. But I think Adrienne had divined their basic goodness already.
    Galveston came up, and Adrienne poured out information about her childhood visits there. Booker Petroleum had big interests in Galveston. My mom and her tried to talk Galveston restaurants, though neither had heard of the others’. In fact my mother looked rather defiant, shading her eyes in the sun: she began to tell Adrienne, at length, about her brothers’ and sisters’ houses, and the neighborhood there, and the schools where some of my young cousins were enrolled.
    I said that we had to get back, but my mother asked if I didn’t want to show Adrienne through the house. It was a mess, she did say. I took Adrienne in through the back door, into the TV den, and I could hear Mom and Dad, through the thin outer wall, talking now about the yardwork. My mom was going to make stew for supper. Meanwhile, Adrienne had stepped up into the dining room, where family photos were ranged on a bureau. I felt a jagged upwelling of privacy when Adrienne stopped to look. “Come on,” I said.
    “Oh my god.” She started to coo.
    “Don’t,” I said.
    Adrienne straightened up, burned. She waited for me to lead her around.
    The house was not large, and soon there was nowhere to go but into my bedroom, with Adrienne near my teenage bed—that was about the whole point, wasn’t it? But she went straight to my green notebook, the one that I never took out of that room.
    “What’s this?”
    “My diary.”
    She closed her mouth. Genuinely given pause, I think. She pivoted, and spent a few seconds admiring my bookcase. “I want to look at all your books,” she said.
    At the first intersection, with my car’s AC still blowing hot air, I turned to Adrienne. Now we could relax—she had really been so perfect with my mother—surely she had some remarks to make, now that it was over—yet her politesse was real. She had nothing but nice things to say about my parents. She really liked them. Especially my dad. But she turned on me: “You’re being so strange.”
    “What?”
    “You acted like you didn’t want us to be there. I thought you were going to be so excited.”
    She was visibly upset.
    “You acted like you were ashamed of me,” she said.

    Adrienne thought I was a great coward, sometimes. That made the difference between us. And everything else flowed from there.
    There was the time she woke me up in the middle of the night and made me come out with her onto the Booker terrace. We were twenty stories high, recessed from the funneling wind. I heard a bat flapping in the gutter above us, a not-uncommon sound after dark.
    “Watch this.” She held out a pencil in her hand. The pencil was long and yellow and vertiginously shaved: she held it point-down, arm’s-length over the rail. The wind was already nibbling it out of her fingers—between her pointer