My Audience

HEY LIVE in Texas and work supervising immigrant landscapers, live on farms with their extended families. Their patriarchs committed suicide after years of drinking so much that they disappeared for days on end. They hid their booze bottles in the barn rafters. Drinking runs in families, so they have ever-present lidded thermos coffee mugs but they’re filled with something weird you wouldn’t think of first, like brandy. Nobody talks about any of it. Not when they’re at the weddings or funerals or births of family members, and not when they’re in the garage smoking, playing that game where you try to arc a metal ring on the end of a string to a hook in the wall.