Meet my best friend: coffee. Oh wine, I’m so sorry to have slighted you. Yes, yes, you may share the honor. Meet my best friend: wine.

In the morning, I can’t wait for the hit of caffeine. She is so divine. So necessary. Like a shot of feminine invincibility. In the evening, the slow down and fuzziness only wine can bring. Sometimes he shows up before nightfall. I’ll only admit to 4:00 visits.

I noticed many online women’s groups gathered around Ms. Caffeine long before I met her. Back then, I didn’t understand her power, her promise. Now I know all I need to do is grab her hand and she will lead me out of the fog, up any mountain that awaits: a pile of papers, tubes of paint, baskets of laundry. She gives me the clarity and confidence to conquer. I choose her. She serves me.

Wine, on the other hand, is a smooth seducer. He whispers, “Try me. Come closer.” I sip. “Again?” he beckons. He pulls me out of the world and into my body, my mind adrift. Such a slow lover. Lets me set the pace. Tingly. Warm.

Shameful, these liquid friends. What of the real people in my day? My husband: always absent. Today Brazil. Tomorrow London. My teenage son: silent and alien. My people world is too small, too lonely, too frustrating to describe.

Meantime, my liquid relationships flow freely. Each a mirrored river that reflects me back to me. Strong, determined, capable in the morning. Vulnerable and wanting at night.

My hunter-gatherer husband met his match in Instacart. The elusive electronic beast appears, engages, and then disappears without a trace. Suffice to say, the process does not bring out his kinder, gentler side.

“Damn it! WTF?” is my new 6:30am wakeup call resounding from the home office down the hall from our bedroom.

When we purchased our 250-year-old farm house 23 years ago, the previous owner used that room as a walk-in closet. Raising two boys in a two-bedroom one-bath house transformed the tiny space many times from play room to toy storage to junk pile. And now, voila, a pandemic home office and headquarters for online shopping in the middle of suburban Philadelphia.

“It happened again! Our order just disappeared,” whines my tech-savvy husband.

He was teased by easy success in the early days of CDC warnings. He chose items, he chose a delivery time, bags showed up at our doorstep. The head-of-household puffed his chest, called himself an excellent provider, kept his family fed and generously tipped delivery warriors.

Then the rest of the world locks down and catches on. Competition takes over. Instacart turns into a clock-less casino. A craps table on the dark web with chips that change brand and are mercilessly swept away by an invisible dealer.

My husband turns into a gambler, addicted and determined. Assuming each previous order is lost, he re-enters items at different times on different days from different stores to beat the odds. Then a virtual blackout. No notifications or confirmations, no Instacart messages.

“It could be weeks before we get an order to go through,” he warns me. Starvation looms.

Like a junky, he doubles down on essentials: two white breads, two wheat, two gallons of milk, three boxes of spaghetti, steaks, chicken breasts and thighs. Screw the low-carb non-dairy vegetarian diet. This is war. He orders and reorders compulsively.

I only dare poke my head into command central to remind the ordering CEO that our son’s teenage girlfriend needs tampons. She is living with us in lock down after her college closed while she sat at our son’s hospital bedside for three weeks prior to COVID-19 crippling the United States.

In February our 18-year-old suffered from acute tonsillitis while a bacterial infection ate away at the back of his throat. He lost 75% of his epiglottis, the flap that keeps liquids from going down the wrong way into lungs. Emergency surgery required a tracheostomy, which left a gaping hole in the outside of his throat just in time for the crisis onset of the deadly respiratory virus.

Given our son’s life-threatening vulnerability to pneumonia from aspiration and infection of his throat wound — on top of the coronavirus threat — our family is in extreme quarantine. Online shopping is our only option, our only life line.

“Try to get Playtex Sport Tampons, the combo pack with regular and super size,” I gently remind my husband.

“I know. I’m trying,” he replies again, and again, again. “It’s beyond my control now.” His shoulders slump in defeat.

Privately I succumb to my own online consumer mania. Yes, I clicked “reorder” on an $8.49 party-size bag of peanut butter M&Ms with a current price of $38.02 on Amazon Prime. Or was it eBay? Maybe virtual bidding was involved.

But in the real world we have much to celebrate. Our son is alive and healing, even attending classes online. The spring sun and rain nurture blossoms in every shade of hope.

And then it happens. The first grocery delivery, followed by another. And the next. It seems Instacart has restructured to a queue format. All of our virtually identical orders are put through. Ding, ding, ding… We hit the Instacart Jackpot!

Which translates to a lot of bread. And milk. And chicken. Many, many tasty M&Ms. All wiped off and stored in our very small house, where every day, we count our blessings. And our 432 super-sized tampons.

Click, squeak. Ding. Click, click, squeak. Ding.

This familiar rhythm of sounds means my parents are sitting at the green linoleum kitchen table preparing for my mother’s next work day. I like seeing them together. She takes a taxi to Spiller Spring every morning before the sun comes up. It is a fabricating plant for the metal coils that go inside mattresses and furniture. The tail ends that get snipped off the coils flood the floor of the factory and grind into mom’s sneakers like cork screws.

When they sit at the kitchen table at night, mom holds a wire-nose pliers in her left hand. It has yellow plastic handles. She squeezes one of her navy shoes with white-stripes between her knees, bottom side up. As she steadies the shoe with her right hand, she grabs one metal coil with the pliers in her left hand — click. She twists and yanks the metal out of the thick rubber sole — squeak. Drops the coil in a metal bowl on the floor — ding. She goes in for the next coil with gusto. I can see a bulge appear on her upper arm.

“Those damn kids think they know everything,” begins mother’s familiar rant. “They are no more than boys, but they think they are too good to take orders.” One of the many indignities she’s suffered in her late forties is working alongside 18-year-old smart asses.

My dad listens politely. He focuses on rolling the thin paper around the tobacco dispensed in a line by the little brown and gray plastic contraption. He puts the small white cylinder in his mouth and pulls it through his lips to seal it with saliva. It looks odd to see him even handle a cigarette, much less put it near his mouth. He never smoked since I was born. He rolls them for my mom to take to the factory the next day.

My parents say store-bought cigarettes are too expensive. Especially since we had to invest in “good shoes” — Adidas sneakers that cost nearly $8. They last longer and protect mom’s feet better from the sharp metal edges. When mom gets home at 4:35 every afternoon, it sounds like she is wearing cleats as she carefully climbs the three cement steps to our back door. The metal spikes must be slippery because she holds tight to the wobbly iron railing. Clack, clack, clack.

At night after dinner, usually by 6:15, my parents settle at the kitchen table to start twisting coils and rolling cigarettes. She with her brandy and coke over ice in a tall glass, he with his Kingsbury Beer foaming in a dark brown bottle. The Kingsbury Brewery is just a few blocks from our house. Sometimes when the wind blows not over Lake Michigan but towards it, we can smell the hops brewing. Very different from our house cooking smells like a juicy pot roast, baked potatoes with cheddar cheese, and green beans with orange carrot circles heated from a can. I don’t remember ever seeing a real raw vegetable in our refrigerator.

“You won’t have to work at that damn factory for long,” my dad reassures his wife almost every night. “Just until I can go back on the force full-time.” I may be only ten years old, but I know shame when I hear it.

My dad is a police officer, a 1960’s beat cop who walks the neighborhoods of Sheboygan, Wisconsin (population: 36,364 — which includes all the surrounding towns in the county). He says it is his duty to talk to everyone and keep everything safe. Since his diagnosis of colon cancer, the operations and treatments leave him too weak to do his normal job.

Luckily a family friend they call “Old Man Meisfeld” lets dad work at his butcher shop at night when it is closed. I don’t really understand what “moonlighting” means, but it must be illegal because we are not supposed to talk about it.

I imagine my dad is a strong butcher who knows exactly how to use big, sharp knives without cutting himself, even though he works in partial darkness because most of the store lights in the store are off at night. I wonder if he cuts up cow and pig parts in the freezer because he always wears his blue sweat shirt over his green plaid flannel shirt with a jacket and a knit hat when he leaves for work, even in the summer. Mom uses special soap to wash the animal blood stains from his white apron every morning. The best part is we get to eat great food that comes with almost every meal, like steak and eggs for Sunday brunch at the green linoleum kitchen table.

In second grade I got a three-story Barbie house for my birthday. It was inside a blue plastic suitcase that would open all the way, and then stand up on end at an angle. I really had no interest in Barbie, per se, or the life I could give her with Ken or her Barbie friends. The house, however, fascinated me, even though there was far too much pink for my taste and too many little pieces like Barbie-sized hair brushes and purses.

I loved dumping all the Barbie house furniture out of the suitcase into a pile and starting over. I put the stove, refrigerator, sink and kitchen table in the attic just to imagine what it would feel like to look out the window and see the tops of the trees while doing dishes. The brown living room recliner seemed more useful in the bedroom for times when Barbie wanted to read. I also switched her bed with the dining room set just to keep things interesting.

Barbie’s house dwarfed my family’s real house. We lived in a distinctly blue-collar two-story rental on a corner lot surrounded by chestnut trees that were always dropping something that needed to be raked. We lived in the ground floor of the flat that had green siding on the top half, and brown siding on the bottom. We had a kitchen where the sun rose, a living room where the sun set, and two bedrooms with barely enough room for beds.

By seventh grade my Barbie suitcase was long forgotten, and I began moving furniture around our real house. It drove my mother crazy. She would leave for work at the factory in the morning with the couch under the windows, then come home in the afternoon and find it against the wall facing the door. I’d try the bookcase on the left side, then in the center of the room as a divider against the back of the love seat. The TV had to be plugged into a special outlet, so it never moved more than three feet to one side or the other of the corner.

Except for the TV, all the furniture was lightweight and easy to move. Even though the pieces were cheaply made, the tan and green plaid couch and end tables with drawers were an upgrade for my mom and me. I had just turned 13 when we went to Prange’s Department Store on a Saturday with money left over from my dad’s life-insurance after we paid for his funeral. I stayed home from school to accept delivery from the huge red and gray moving truck on a Tuesday.

We got a modern washer and dryer that year, too. We put the old-fashioned silver and wood wringer that sat on top of the big white ceramic barrel at the curb for the garbage men. My mom still preferred to string a plastic-coated rope between the chestnut trees than to use the new dryer next to the old stove in the basement. That stove came in handy during the holidays for cooking extra casseroles and keeping the mashed potatoes hot. Sometimes our basement smelled better than a restaurant.

At Christmas and Easter, too much food and too many people had to be stuffed into our tiny kitchen. There was always my red-headed sister, her Italian husband, and their three growing boys. Sometimes my uncle Lester (who was not really my uncle), would come from a place people called “the farm” (that was really a mental hospital). My aunt Anne and uncle Connie would often join us, along with aunt Louise who lived with them. Louise never married, but raising dogs in a kennel in her backyard kept her busy.

Louise chose to die with her dogs on Mother’s Day. She jumped into the river that ran behind their property. She left a note to say goodbye; everyone knew Louise never learned how to swim.

One day my mom and dad went to the doctor and then to the hospital. My dad had a thing called a hernia that made an extra piece of skin poke out of his stomach. It looked a little like a baby gerbil, only bigger.

Then another day my mom and dad came home from the hospital. There is a photo of them coming through the kitchen door with winter coats. My dad was wearing his black fuzzy hat and gray gloves. They told me my dad had a thing called cancer. I wondered if he got it because of the hernia. I was eleven. He was 55. It was 1972.

As the Wisconsin weather got warmer that year, my mom said it was time for spring cleaning. She told me I needed to wash the kitchen walls. The yellow paint looked brown because my mother smoked a pack a day of Benson and Hedges filtered cigarettes. She handed me a can of Big Wally and told me to start as close to the ceiling as possible and wash my way down to the floor.

My mother shoved one of our metal kitchen chairs next to the wall so I could reach higher. My feet squished into the plastic padded seat. The Big Wally smelled bad and made my eyes water. It dripped from my hand over my head down to my blue t-shirt sleeve.

Another day my mom and dad came home from another trip to the hospital. I don’t remember ever visiting my dad there, only seeing my parents return home. They came through the same kitchen door, but this time with no coats. It was summer. I could see a bump under my dad’s white t-shirt. It was not the gerbil hernia.

This time the bump was called a colostomy. It was a clear plastic half-bubble taped around my dad’s stomach with a yellow strap. It had a clear plastic bag hanging from the bottom of the plastic bubble. My dad got embarrassed when it made loud gurgling noises and yellow goop shot against the side of the plastic bubble from a hole in his stomach. Then the yellow goop would drip down into the plastic bag.

Because my mom had to go to work at her factory job, I had to learn how to clean the colostomy bubble and bag. It would fill up often during the day and smell bad. Someone had to be there to help my dad because he was too weak to change it himself. I could not leave the house or invite my friends over the whole summer.

When it was time to clean the colostomy, I would hold my dad’s elbow and help him walk to the bathroom next to the kitchen. We had to take along his tall metal pole that had a bag of medicine hanging from it. Sometimes it would start swinging and almost tip over. The bathroom was really small, so there wasn’t much room to move.

I had to take off the plastic bubble and rinse it out, and then replace the full bag with an empty one. Sometimes the goop would spill. I would pretend like it didn’t matter, finish cleaning up my dad, walk him back to bed, and then go back into the bathroom and clean it up. It seemed grosser when my dad wasn’t there.

One Sunday morning, when my mom was cooking bacon on the stove, my dad walked into the kitchen without help, with his colostomy sticking out of his t-shirt and his metal pole swaying. He put his face really close to the sizzling bacon in the hot pan. My mom yelled at him. Then my dad started singing and climbed onto a kitchen chair. He seemed strong but tippy. It was scary.

I stared at my dad’s bare feet on the plastic chair seat. They covered a lot more of the orange and yellow flowers than my sneakers did when I stood on the chair to spray the Big Wally. My mom yelled at me to help her get my dad down from the kitchen chair. She said the medicine was making him act crazy. I liked that he was singing.

Crystal Pool. What a name. Maybe I never saw the obvious imagery because Crystal always hated her name in the way teenagers complain about everything, especially pimples.

Crystal was my only and constant babysitter until I turned six years old. Because she lived in our house, her services were convenient and free — which worked well for my parents, but not so well for Crystal.

Family lore has it that my parents took a toddler-age Crystal into their home after they repeatedly found her wandering the neighborhood in bare feet, unbathed with matted hair. At some point before I was born, they made it official and Crystal became their foster child. Maybe everyone else in town knew the implied shadow story that Crystal’s real parents were negligent alcoholics, but I never heard that angle. My mom made it sound like Crystal’s lack of cleanliness was the real crime.

When Crystal turned twelve, I rather shockingly appeared on the scene when my parents were in their ancient forties, after a decade of failed pregnancies. As I grew, so did Crystal’s care-taking responsibilities. The age gap between us made her a natural teacher for me, and likely made me a pain-in-the-ass for her. But, we got along well. We both laughed a lot.

Crystal and I spent a lot of time together because my mom and dad spent a lot of time at taverns. The joke that there is a bar or church on every other corner in Sheboygan is true. When my parents weren’t at Florence’s Bar across the street from our front door, they were at Kohl’s Tavern that shared a parking lot with the train station.

Sometimes Crystal and I would go with my parents to Kohl’s Tavern and play outside on the red brick passenger platform or carefully position a shiny copper penny on the track to see if it would get squished by the train. The loud local trains did not zoom past often. Crystal said the station was a good place to take photographs of me because the tracks were hard, straight steel and my hair was soft and wavy.

Crystal loved beading, so I made 60s-stretchy headbands and bracelets with square flower patterns on a little metal loom. Crystal loved macrame, so I worked tirelessly on natural jute wall hangings. I also knit several simple scarves with multi-colored yarn. We would walk together six blocks to Woolworth’s or seven blocks to Prange’s department store to get supplies. I loved the walk and all the choices and learning how to make things.

Crystal also drew beautiful portraits of cats with regular pencils, and portraits of herself with colored pencils because she had red hair and green eyes. She wrote poetry with red ink in a blank book with crinkly pages and real maple leaves decorating the cover. Although I did not always understand the words, I liked the way she wrote lines stacked on top of each other on the left side of the page, and doodled on the right half. Crystal got me a diary with a gold lock and gold key before I knew how to read or write.

My mom hated all the crafts and the mess and the spending money that Crystal did. She hated that Crystal said “shit” and other swear words, and smoked Marlboros and drank brandy at age 16. My mom and Crystal screamed at each other at the top of their lungs over dishes and vacuuming and making the beds. Mom called Crystal lazy and disrespectful. Crystal called my mom a bitch who wasn’t her mother.

Then one Sunday when Crystal was 18, she went to teach Sunday school but did not come home for lunch. Our phone rang at 1:30. Crystal told my mom she was sending her brother to our house to get her things and then hung up. My mother said, “Good riddance, ungrateful bitch” over and over as she stuffed Crystal’s sweaters, underwear, shoes and pajamas into paper grocery bags we usually used for garbage.

Crystal’s brother picked up her things from our porch without ringing the doorbell or turning off his car. I heard it all happen from my bedroom under my soft purple bedspread with slightly scratchy white polka dots. I wanted to ask my mother if Crystal would ever come home, but I was too scared to make her more mad.

Instead I pulled out my diary from the wooden nightstand drawer and opened the lock with the shiny key. I wished I knew how to write more words than my name.