All My Relations by Christopher McIlroy

again—the market crash, two years ago—I, that self I was, is jerked off the hook. I’m ashamed at my relief, helpless with it.
    Aside, the principal says, “Is it true Dooley has 365 separate outfits?”
    â€œI haven’t gone through her wardrobe.”
    â€œYou know she doesn’t pay a dime on that place of her mother’s.”
    But her jobs, the construction, firefighting.
    â€œOne week each, over a year ago,” the principal says.
    And yet she’s brilliant, I say, preparing to enter an elite profession in, what, her mid-twenties?
    â€œShe’ll love you for that. She’s thirty-five.” Still an undergrad, with brief stints at Eastern Montana, the University of New Mexico, and Arizona State before the University of Arizona.
    My obligation to Dooley is simple: face to face, I ensure that she give up, to me, any blame she might feel for what happened. I do all I can to heal her, whatever she asks, and say good-bye. But leaving the doublewide, I find myself wanting to touch Dooley. It’s the first desire of any kind in months. I think of my hand flat on her back, or our fingers linked, and my heart falls open.
    She is at home Thursday, after I’ve killed two days. “So you’re here,” she says. I’d written ahead. Her hair shoots over a fluorescent headband, her bare shoulders look hard and smooth.
    Arms tight at my sides, I invite her to the Hualapai Dread concert.
    Her mouth suddenly twists. “I need a minute with God, to compose myself,” she says. “Please excuse me.”
    The sun streams bright around my shadow in the open doorway. It’s more like ten minutes.
    â€œIf I don’t stare down fear,” Dooley says, “it will never go away. God will sustain me.”
    When I pick her up, her mouth is orange. A stiff ponytail lies across one shoulder. The acid-washed mini is relatively demure. Opposite her mother, the World Series warm-up replays last year’s clinching Dodger victory. Snowed under by the usual video interference, the fielders perform thickly. The camera zooms in for a close-up of Hershiser, baby face smiling seraphically, murderous right arm hidden behind his back. The Dodgers insignia crawls across his chest like a rebellious organ,or a trivial, visible portion of soul. Dread, the memory of a year ago, flexes in the pit of my stomach. I wait for it to subside.
    I’m as jittery as Dooley. Desire blows at me and I duck away. Then it comes back. I want to squeeze Dooley to my chest and just hold her. I actually become dizzy. It’s maddening. And still we manage small talk on the drive over. She likes reggae, she says. At the university she goes out dancing a lot, and she’s friends with the trumpet player in a blues band. Her mother is “steady,” she says.
    On the outskirts of Worthington Dooley begins a morbid roll call at the passing bars. “That’s Ronnie Sinyalla’s green pickup. Henry Wescogame, Alvin Burt …” The cubicles leak the occasional neon beer emblem. Vehicles are stark under streetlights, or dim shapes like holes in the landscape. Dooley reels off more names. The bars encircle the town, reminding me simultaneously of a bivouacked army and of refugee camps. “Drunks,” Dooley barks, and her fists strike her knees.
    The Elks Club is concrete block, windowless. Seated on folding chairs, the crowd of sixty or seventy appears mostly Hualapai, with a few whites, Mexicans, and one black man in a wool cap red, green, and yellow. Though I recognize faces, no one acknowledges us. Dooley and I take the back row. Security guards, flashlights and sticks dangling by their holsters, line one wall.
    Somebody has shelled out for new, big speakers. The principal steps up to the mike. “Welcome to the first stop on Hualapai Dread’s world tour,” she says. “We’re going to do Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus.’ Remember, our permit