“No, no, no.

This cannot be happening.” Because I knew, or I thought I knew, exactly what I was looking at.

Everybody knows what small bags of white powder marked with codes are supposed to be.

You do not get to adulthood without absorbing, from a thousand movies and news stories, the visual grammar of what that is meant to signify.

And my brain, faithful and terrified, reached straight for that grammar and read the row of bags under my mother-in-law’s bed as the worst thing it could possibly be.

I want to defend my brain, just a little, before I spend the rest of this story mocking it.