By Makai Andrews   When she was in grade school the boys would make fun of her because her thumbs looked like toes. She painted them orange and dotted them with silver rhinestones to prove them wrong. No one would waste that much time on a foot.   Mother was having an affair with the pool boy when she was eleven. He was a young man from Arizona, moved here in hopes that he’d get in with some celebrity housewife who needed a pool cleaning and an actor for her next movie. He wasn’t having much luck, so far. Mother had the gardener drive in a big tree on one of those trucks that are too big to turn at normal street corners. She planted it next to the pool, where she was sure dozens of leaves would fall everyday. She shook a branch to make sure, dumping piles of leaves into the crisp water. Now the pool boy would have to come four times a week, not two. There’s just so many leaves in there, silly me for planting a tree right above it, she tells Father. Oh, but isn’t it just beautiful.   Father liked his whiskey. Liked his whiskey with ice. Liked whisky with ice that looked like little islands of glass were floating up from a pool of golden mud. Sometimes she thought if she stuck her finger in the liquid, it would harden around her finger and she’d have a gold-capped nail. She tried it once, but instead of a special finger she got broken glass in her arm and bruises from Father’s hard day at the office. She wiped up the golden mud after he was finished. Brother was born when she was thirteen. He had eyes like hers...