Amelia was clean and the bugs came anyway, arriving with summer, unspooling from the ceiling and hiding in the burning skin of lightbulbs. What did we do to deserve this, her mother asked. If we killed the spider would the moth be here? What is a pest, and why does it deserve to die?

         She was, according to her father, seven or eight, still blond and downy, still barefoot and sticky and sweet in her eager delivery of grasshoppers to the attic to befriend the spiders, only to die on a bed of dust mites and be buried in the backyard next to a disintegrated pet snail.

         Some bugs were not meant for inside.

         Do not bring them inside, do you hear me Amelia?

         What is the difference between an ant and an aunt? Amelia asked, seated on a linoleum counter, we love our aunts. We do, said her mother, stirring a batch of cherry preserves, cat nip for pests. Her father said, you might as well make a sign, all roaches welcome here.

         We haven’t had roaches. You ever see a roach, you kill it. God will give you a pass.

         Murder and bloodshed, her father said. Her mother wasn’t going to stop making jam, and her father wasn’t going to stop driving down to Albany every other Saturday.

         Wouldn’t bloodshed come before murder? her mother asked.

         Another summer. Amelia is ten. The attic has been cleaned out, painted white. A guest room, or perhaps a room for another child. She finds a spider dancing in the air  – hello, old friend – and breaks the invisible thread with her fist. The spider is delightfully unafraid. Watch it climb onto her palm, slip between her fingers, build a delicate web from the sturdy base of her hand. The world’s lightest yo-yo. She brings it downstairs and waits for a reaction. Her mother sees it and smacks at the air, but her heart isn’t in it. A sympathetic smile from her father – there he is, the innocent bystander, newspapers stacked on his knee.

         Moths eat your clothes and ants spoil your food and cicadas shed, destroying harvests. Her mother knows all this. The bite of a seemingly innocuous spider can be fatal.

         Just close your door. Just close the blinds. There are no plagues in the nineties, she can hear them thinking. America has healed, and so have your mother and I.