The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund

their eyes partially concealed by the steam fogging their glasses—that they turn their attention to more interesting topics, namely her father.
    “How is he?” one of them generally asks her mother at this point, as though they believe that a pronoun in place of his name will keep Annabel from knowing that it is her father to whom they are referring.
    “He’s fine,” her mother always replies sharply, inclining her head toward Annabel, who pretends not to be listening, hoping, futilely, that they might be persuaded to say more. Instead, they all sip their Russian tea and gaze at the photograph of her father that hangs on the wall near the television, a picture in which her father, wearing a green bolo tie, looks cheerful and handsome and not a bit like the twitchy, shirtless man they have come to know.
    Today, however, there is no mention of her father, and Annabel wonders whether they have forgotten to ask or whether this omission is something intentional, something that they planned beforehand. She actually hopes that it is the latter because the idea that her father has simply been forgotten, particularly in the midst of such tedium, is too much for her to bear. She turns toward her father’s photograph, but it is gone, which means that the entire time that she and her mother have been sitting here, listening to her grandparents talk about the barber and his mowing, it was already gone—gone, and she had not even noticed.
    Most Saturday nights after Annabel and her mother return from her grandparents’ house, she and her father follow the same routine: her father helps her get ready for bed, and once she is settled beneath her Raggedy Ann quilt, he asks her to describe the visit to his parents. He listens quietly to her report, and when she finishes, he says, “Just remember, Annabel, that these are the people who made your father sleep on the cot.”
    “Yes,” she always replies. “I remember.”
    “Good girl,” he says as though they are finished with the matter, but then he tells her the story of the cot again anyway because he likes to remind himself of it, particularly as she is snuggled against him in her very own comfortable bed in her very own room.
    “Your grandparents,” he always begins, “had produced seven children by the time I made my appearance. Imagine, Annabel, fourboys, three girls, and the two of them living in a tiny, three-bedroom house.” During the introduction, his tone is always noncommittal, as though the story might just unfold in a way that allows for sympathy toward these nine people, his family, crammed together like peas even before his arrival.
    “Well,” he continues, “I was put in your grandparents’ room to sleep, in a crib wobbly from overuse.” And there it is, the hardening in his voice at the words “wobbly from overuse.”
    At the age of two, her father had gone from sleeping in this crib to sleeping in the hallway outside his parents’ bedroom, on a cot that was folded up and rolled behind the door of his sisters’ bedroom each morning. The hallway, he told her so that she could picture it because her grandparents had long ago left that house, was like the backbone of a capital E , and the three bedrooms, which jutted out to the left, were its arms.
    “It’s not even that I minded the cot,” he always told Annabel at this point, after he had impressed upon her the image of this small boy, him, isolated from every other member of his family. “It was comfortable enough.” No, what he had minded, he said, was the fact that when his parents unfolded the cot and set it up for him each night, they always placed it as far to the right as possible so that it stood just at the edge of the staircase that connected the upstairs sleeping area with the main floor—despite the fact that there was no railing separating the upstairs, and thus him, from the empty space of the stairwell.
    Sometimes, he told her, his arm hung down off the cot in his sleep so that