"You're gonna put me up in a house." She manages to pull off haughty and cutting even half-dressed, rising from the mattress with a noisy creak of the springs. The ring lies abandoned between us, the diamond smaller, adrift on the sea of the sheets, than I remember it being behind the counter. I'm going to have to pick it back up, once she leaves. "Where I'll live with the kids. And you'll come around with money and gifts, whenever you're free, buy me anything I want."

"… Yes?"

"That's not a wife, Tim." She zips her skirt with an angry tug. "The word you're lookin' for is mistress."

When I was getting my head shrunk as part of my rehabilitation into society, the good doctor scribbled down in my file that I'm prone to self-sabotage. My own worst enemy. The architect of most of my misery and a huge fan of nailing myself to the cross. To which I can only say, as my tires crunch on Buck's loose gravel driveway— yeah, no fucking shit.

Stepping past Buck's still faintly hay-scented foyer feels more like coming home than my actual one does, and vicious joy streaks through me as the first gulp of whiskey hits, a delight in my own self-destruction. Hell, if I'm already a dirty sinner, baby, if I've already been judged and found wanting, I might as well really give you something to hate me for. Ain't I so easily slotted into the role of the villain, in everybody's life stories these days? That propels me all the way through that glass and half of the next, until the adrenaline's faded and all I'm left with is hot, sticky shame spreading through my stomach like a tar pit.

I shouldn't be doing this, trying to find the solution to my problems at the bottom of a bottle— I learned young that whatever lives inside my mother lives inside of me, too, waiting to be unleashed like all of the passions I keep on a tight chain. I don't really love how I'm reminding myself of my stepdaddy, either, but Ed's psyche is as shallow as a puddle of mercury, there's nothing to even analyze there. A racist and a petty tyrant who tried to squash whatever he couldn't understand, violent when the liquor gave him enough courage to make his resentments a reality. I was afraid of him growing up, as much as I hate to admit it, but not afraid of being him.

I'm thinking about my actual father.

My mama was my daddy's mistress— you better believe he wasn't about to leave his actual wife for some half-literate farm girl who caught his eye when she was tending bar, just because he happened to knock her up. Left behind collateral damage with ILLEGITIMATE scrawled across their birth certificates. He wandered in when he was hungry for a taste of the exotic and left when he got his fill, dropping off presents like Santa Claus, completely uninterested in the day-to-day of looking after us until Curly and I were old enough to aim a gun. I didn't need her to finish the sentence she couldn't steel herself to throw at me, when I'm well-aware I come from the kind of family that made Gabi's father threaten before he signed the check, that if a single member was invited, our wedding would be 'Pentecostal dry' to avoid any meltdowns or shots fired through the ceiling. Gangbangers, murderers, drunks, and thieves, and then there's me, trying to dodge my inevitable conclusion like Oedipus and still meeting my destiny.

And it's always been my own hubris that brings me down, in the end.

I'm no cheater, sure, and my anger at being accused of it blazes through my chest like a firebrand, but that ain't hardly an accomplishment. What have I ever given her that's worth anything, my charming personality, a baby that almost killed her, a stray bullet to the thigh? If I really loved her, I'd want what's best for her and I'd leave her, let her marry some accountant or middle manager who'll come whistling home at 5:30 every day and play with the kids on the carpet; like Luis, whatever I love, I just end up breaking. But I'm too selfish to give her up— there's a hard limit to how much goodness I'm capable of— so I gesture for another drink, straight, cheap whiskey that makes me wince on every swallow but accomplishes the task at hand. At least Buck finally gave up pushing his homemade stuff.

Nausea lurches into my throat and mouth by the bottom of the third on an empty stomach, along with a riptide of saliva, and yet I keep it up— partly as a punishment, partly as a pissing contest with myself, mostly to put off the end of the night. When you're as obsessed with control as I am, there's a terrible relief in giving it up. I want to be drunk enough to shut myself up for once, like flicking off the TV dial. I want to be drunk enough to forget everything I've done and everything that's been done to me. And I want to be drunk enough to be able to come back—

"Tim..." Buck starts with obvious distaste, his voice distorting and reverberating inside of my eardrums. Wrinkles crease his forehead; he never seemed all that grown up to me, especially considering how easy Dallas pushed him around, but he must be over thirty by now. Still wearing those same tacky cowboy hats and fringed vests like he just strolled off the set of a Ronald Reagan western, though. "I'm gonna try to say this nice, all right, 'cause we go way back. Do you not have any... actual friends, who you could maybe come to with this? Someone who isn't me, and who gives a single shit about you and the old lady?"

Have I been narrating the whole time?

"I don't have any fuckin' friends." I wipe my mouth off with the back of my hand and try not to slump forward so far I topple over the other side of the bar. Besides, even if I did, the only people I can talk about it all with are complete strangers, not the ones who love me the most. Lately, I've started to realize where the appeal of the Confession booth lies. "All my friends are dead. Or tried to kill me. Or fucked my sister."

He grimaces. I'm so glad he can see where I'm coming from. "Wasn't you real close with that brother of yours, Curly, he always followed you around like a lost puppy—"

"Oh, don't even get me started on—"

I guess he decides to throw me a bone, before I really do get started. "You married that…" He snaps his fingers, trying to rack his eggcup quantity of brains. "Broad you was always haulin' upstairs into my spare bedrooms, Ginny or somethin'? The Jesus freak with the big jugs?"

"It's like you want to lose even more of your teeth."

The familiar bickering feels like 1965 again, but what we both refuse to acknowledge is the empty stool beside me— Dally's seat, where he should be flicking peanut shells at Buck as we speak. Grief grips me by the guts all of a sudden, threatens to turn me inside out. The last real friend I ever had, as pathetic as that is to say about a guy who slashed my tires more than once. I try to imagine what he'd be up to now, if he'd lived, but I'm drawing a blank. Doing time? Running out of town, heading west, or back to that precious New York he could never shut up about? Going straight— now that's the least believable option of all— and raising a gaggle of Jasmine's dirty blond kids? He was always larger than life, more of a performance piece than a person. Born to die young. There's no way he could ever exist outside the context I knew him in.

Buck shrugs, as he takes a handful of peanuts from the dish next to me and shovels it into his mouth, then licks the salt off his palm once he's done. "As a married man myself—"

"You? Is the woman blind?"

He snatches my fourth glass away from me; I make an indignant, bitchy little noise in response. "Whatever problem you got— again, cannot emphasize this enough, I do not care about the details— you ain't gonna solve it here." He clutches my shoulder and shakes hard, which, at my level of intoxication, gives me enough vertigo I swear the ceiling is the floor. Closing my eyes feels like being inside a blender. "Go the fuck home, before the locks are changed and your shit's out on the lawn. Trust me on that one."

I should already be the fuck home, groveling on my knees in front of her, but I just never learn, would rather die before I apologize or admit that I was wrong. I recoil from myself as I replay the scene in my memory, watch that sneering jackass dodge the question and score cheap points over and over again— if any other man took that tone with her, I'd beat the shit out of him, a lot worse than Curly could bring himself to do to me. But this is what I always wanted, isn't it, for the mask to meld seamlessly over my natural face? I stole this book from Mr. Syme's room right before I quit school, Mother Night, about a guy who poses as a Nazi commander and gets hanged for it at the end of the war— the intended message, that what you pretend to be, is what you become. And ain't I getting exactly what I asked for? To become someone my own mama couldn't love, much less anybody else?

In the dregs of my fourth glass, which I snatch back and chug once Buck stumbles off to take a piss, I find the truth: I can't fuck because in order to do that, you have to let yourself feel something. And in order for the locks to come undone on that emotional suitcase of mine, I need to be really, really fucked up, first.

You goddamned sociopath. Your daddy's boy. Cold as a fucking snake. Swear Jesus himself wouldn't want to save you. She'd come find me and hang in my doorway after she'd had a few, firing insults like rifle shots, an open beer bottle clutched in her fist. And it's like you're proud of it.

I'd watch her, hair tangled in a Gordian knot from weeks without touching a brush, eyes glazed and confused as she wandered around a cage of her own making, and say, if I was more like you, I'd hope someone would just take me out back like Old Yeller.

Neni's asleep again, her fist lodged inside her mouth and a trail of drool coming down her chin; I wipe it off with the pad of my thumb. I should be worried about how being around all this fighting is going to affect her, drive her straight to a therapist's couch in adulthood, but I'm just too tired and sad to care when I can't do anything about it; her long eyelashes fanned out over her cheeks as she breathes deep, she's the most peacefully resting person in this family, anyway. I readjust her pink wool hat to fit more snugly over her ears.

What's the protocol for this kind of thing— do I wait until three in the morning, until daybreak? I know better than to call the police, but it's not like I have a lot of good options available to me, either; I can't go out looking for him myself, not with the baby in tow, and I'd rather swallow rusty nails than involve Curly in this again, now that I'm reasonably clearheaded. Besides, as much as some scared animal part of my brain feels like panic-dialing the nearest hospital or the morgue, I'm well-aware that the most likely scenario is that he's just skulking around somewhere, avoiding me again. And I hate that as incandescently angry as I am, I still want him to come home and comfort me, though he's the one who hurt me in the first place.

I don't have time to resolve the contradiction before the front door creaks open; I jump, try to remember the combination to our gun safe like I'm facing a math problem on a test, we don't live in the best neighborhood and there's been a rash of break-ins lately. But of course it's him, and if he wakes Neni up again after I just got her down, I swear he's getting strychnine served up in tomorrow morning's coffee. "Hey, baby," he says, tone jaunty and accompanied by a weak half-wave, and promptly collapses into the umbrella stand. "You miss me?"

He's… the only accurate term I can use is piss drunk, after I've considered and rejected having a stroke; pitches forward again, as he tries and fails to kick his boots off, loses his balance like he's getting seasick and laughs with his mouth wide open. I've never seen him like this, not when every other member of his gang was under the not-so-metaphorical table, not even at our wedding. He always looked down on his mother and stepfather, who I'm not sure I've ever seen sober in the same place, with disdain so thinly-veiled it could've been draped in tissue paper; we don't even have a six pack of beer in the icebox right now. "You were at a… bar?" I'm really flaunting my intellectual acumen here. "Just now?"

"You got me." He smiles at me, still on the floor, in no hurry to get back up. It's happier and more carefree than I've seen him look in a long time. "Guilty as charged."

He can't even speak straight, slurs his words so much I struggle to make out the individual ones. I want to haul him upright, the way I used to carry around rag dolls by the arm, but I'm frozen in place and wouldn't be able to move him if I tried. "You drove back here?" The other shoe drops. "Drunk— this drunk— you drove back here?"

"You ever known Buck to conf— confi— fuck it— take nobody's car keys?" He shrugs, proud of his own self-destruction like a child who built a block tower for the satisfaction of getting to kick it down. "Are you scared?" he asks as he gauges my expression, confused more than mocking. "I'm a good driver— y'know, there's that Mungo Jerry song, have a drink, have a drive— shit, how'd it go again—"

"Stealing from me again, mijo?"

I haven't heard him say that word in years; Diego must be startled too, because he wobbles backwards into the windowsill, almost careens down the rose trellis. It only takes him a few seconds to plaster a cocky expression onto his face again, though. "Know you said you'd shoot me if I came back home," he says, laugh forced, "so I brought a knife to this gun fight." He unsheathes it in one fluid motion, moonlight distorting on the blade, and a strangled gasp rips out of my lungs. "Don't be scared, Gabi, baby," he tries to soothe me, "it's for him, it's for him. You afraid of me yet, old man?"

"No," Papi says. "I am too afraid for you."

"You know te amo—"

The phrase, said after he's finished humming several bars of 'In the Summertime', snaps me out of my reverie; I might as well have had my intestines scraped out with a melon baller, the way it hits me. I mean, we're married, I do know he does… but it's different in Spanish, and especially that, not the standard-issue te quiero. I can't help the bitter scoff that slips past my lips, uncomfortable and exposed. "You have to be drunk, to say that?"

"I don't want to just say it."

He stalks over to where I hesitantly sat down on the couch, a lion on the prowl; his knee rests in the hollow between my thighs in the next second, spreading them, and I'm helpless to do anything but react as he presses me against the back cushion. "C'mon," he mutters, kissing down the column of my neck as he reaches for my breast at the same time, leading me into temptation. "I'll be so good to you, baby. So, so good, anything you want—"

But I don't want it, not on any level beyond the physical, once his lips are off my skin and I can think straight again. His eyes are bright and vacant, all momentum, like he's afraid of what'll happen if he slows down— trying to prove something, whether to me or to himself, I can't say. He's stopped making sense anymore, some sloppy mix of mi vida, I love you, I need you, a litany he'd never say sober. Is it me he even wants, or a distraction from himself? Validation for his hurt masculinity? Could I be any girl at all, just a placeholder?

I catch him by the wrists, tug my skirt back down over my thighs once I've stilled his hands, sticky with spilled liquor. Fight the ridiculous urge to lick it off his palms. "You come in here, at three in the morning—" I take a quick glance at the grandfather clock— "completely wasted— and you think you're going to get some? Believe me, you'd be better off tryin' your luck back at the roadhouse."

Forget getting some, from now on, I'm putting him up on the couch— permanently. At this rate, he's going to be a very lucky man if I ever let him catch a glimpse of me changing clothes again.

"There's nothin' wrong with me," he says, his voice cracking in the middle of the sentence like he's fourteen again, explaining the difference between mitosis and meiosis to me with short, condescending strokes of his pencil. He tries to grasp me by the shoulders, but I wrench away. "I still work."

"You always do this to me." Tears gather along my bottom lash line, but I refuse to let them fall, not when he'll react with the same dazed confusion of Mike swiping at them with chubby baby hands. "You know what, it doesn't even matter if you're here or not, it's not like you're ever here to begin with." I can practically see the meaning of that bitter, resigned sentence fly straight over his head. "What in the hell is wrong with you?" and it's as desperate a plea as I've ever given him.

In lieu of answering me, he jerks away and turns the pale green of a celery stalk, a bead of sweat coming down his left temple. "I'm gonna be sick," he says unnecessarily, "really fuckin' sick," before he bolts to the kitchen sink and starts vomiting his lights out.

I don't so much wake up as stumble into consciousness, like I'm groping around for a light switch in the dark. It takes another second to pry my gummed-over eyelids open and immediately get knocked down by a tsunami of nausea, hot and cold all at once; I have enough sense to stumble from the couch to the bathroom, sink to my knees in front of the toilet before emptying a stomach full of fluorescent-yellow bile into it. My head's squeezed between a set of pliers, pressure so tight I swear my skull's about to burst open— I haven't been this sick since my third cousin Josefina's quince, and as my stomach clenches, bracing itself for the next round, nah, that ain't even close to what this one is gearing up to be.

"Havin' fun?"

I haul my sorry fucking head out of the pot and swivel my neck around— my mouth welling up again— to find Gabi in the doorway, face wan and heavy bags hanging under her eyes, yet still as determined to condemn me as ever. Painfully sober, and sicker than a dog in the end stages of rabies, I'm not ready to take her on, as I struggle to put the pieces of my memory back together and remember what the hell I said last night. "Oh, yeah, like I'm takin' a trip to Coney Island," I mutter, resting my cheek against the cool porcelain of the toilet seat before I start to retch again.

"Is this what I get to look forward to now, every time we have a fight?" She taps her foot angrily against the tile, a rhythm that hits me like a hammer to the head every time it strikes. "You know who does that? An alcoholic. Like your mother."

She doesn't deserve it at all, but when I hear 'like your mother' something cold and sharp twists through my gut. It makes me want to put my fist through the drywall, but I could never do that to her, so I settle for taking my head out long enough again to spit, "Nena, your spoiled ass has no idea what a goddamned alcoholic comin' home looks like."

The silence after I say that pulses with a heartbeat of its own. "I know what it's like when a heroin addict comes home," she says quietly. "He stole the christening bangles our dead mama bought for me, just because they were made of silver and he could pawn them. But I guess I forgot," and now her voice runs deep with irony, "you're the only person in this world who's ever suffered. Nobody could ever even begin to understand you, least of all me."

"Gabi, I—"

"Go to hell, Tim." She turns to leave. "And you better not make me have to clean this bathroom up after you."

He's not only cleaned up his vomit by the time I get back, the whole house smells like Pine-Sol, too. A promising start, at the very least.

"Yeah, you like that?" Inside the tub, festooned by rubber ducks, Neni giggles as he pours a cup of water over her soapy head; in spite of myself, my irritation ebbs as he massages her scalp with his much-bigger hands, more tender than you'd think he's capable of being. I'm struck by the ridiculous urge to swoop in and supervise— especially when I realize he used green apple Dawn to make bigger bubbles, like our child is a baby bird caught in an oil spill— but instead I step out of the doorway and start to unmottle my scarf from around my neck.

"I definitely don't deserve my meals brought to me on a tray," he says with a grimace, as I come into our bedroom later that night with it.

"You don't," I readily agree as I set it down on the nightstand, "but you've been throwin' up something fierce." He still looks terrible as he shrugs the duvet off, complexion wan like he's just given blood, the corners of his mouth cracked. I'm worried about his electrolytes. "Drink this—"

He squints. "Ain't this bought for Neni?"

"I'm sure Pedialyte works fine for fussy grown men, too." Once he's finished grimacing at the sticky sweetness of the grape syrup— I should've diluted it— I sit down at the edge of the bed like I'm visiting him in the hospital. "I'm sorry I told you to go to hell," I say, and then cross myself for good measure— I can't believe I let that slip out of my mouth, angry or not, provoked or not. For me, that's crossing a line. "I'll be draggin' you to heaven even if I need to argue about it," whether with him or with God.

He gives me a sliver of a smile. "You can't even drag me to Mass with you, I think my immortal soul's a lost cause at this point."

"That's why I go twice a week, covers all our bases." I pull a thread out of one of the tassels on a throw pillow, a pink dove covered monstrosity my aunt got us as a wedding present. "I shouldn't have been tellin' those two anything about our… issues, either." I'm using much more delicate language now than I did at the time. "Or about your…"

"C'mon, I know you can say the word dick, I've heard it before."

A unwilling giggle bursts out of my mouth like champagne bubbling from a fountain, even when I clap my hand over it. "C'mere, baby," he says, holding out an arm; I still hesitate for a moment, before giving in and curling into him. "You really think you're the one who needs to be apologizing right now? Are we gettin' the easy stuff over with first?"

"Maybe I'm givin' you time to think of a good one," I mutter into the crook of his arm. He smells like synthetic grape flavoring and mouthwash now, which is a lot better than I expected. "I'm waiting, by the way."

"Okay, I'm sorry for never bein' around, to the point where you figured there's another woman— which, I cannot emphasis enough, there ain't— for runnin' off and gettin' completely sloshed at Buck's, and for bein' a no-account jackass in general." He pauses to take a breath, undiluted self-disgust creeping into his voice. "Jesus fuck, groping at you like that—"

"We're married, you didn't just burst in from the street with a balaclava on, I'll probably live."

He bites down on his lower lip, hard enough that he tears a piece of chapped skin away, draws blood. "Did I scare you? Last night?"

"No," I say easily, at least in the sense he means it. I'm far more afraid of his endless potential for hurting himself than what he could do to me. "But don't you ever get in a driver's seat again, after you've been drinking, or we're gonna have a lot more problems than we did before. I ain't too eager to explain to our daughter why she's got no daddy."

"I won't, I promise." He entwines his fingers with mine; I believe him, because he doesn't make empty ones. "I really been gone at work, I swear that too." He squeezes tighter, turns to me. "We ain't gonna live like this forever. I want you to have everything you gave up, marryin' me, I don't want it to all have been for nothin'—"

"I don't want any of that stuff, more than I want you." I press down on my tongue with my top teeth, to keep my old chestnut about getting a job of my own from coming out. "Just… tell me it's not because of me. Somethin' I did wrong."

I already suspect, even if he's not being all-the-way honest, that it probably isn't. I've got a bad habit of assuming somebody thinks the worst of me, and getting angry at them for it, and acting out the whole drama in the shower while they remain blissfully unaware— after being raised on a diet of steady critiques and evaulations, and a relationship full of much sharper ones, it's easier to brace myself than wait for the inevitable blow to fall. Already the heroine of my own tragedy, before I even bothered to ask him about the role he played. Why did I do that?

"It ain't you," he says on an exhale, "Christ, why would anything be wrong with you?" He looks so genuinely bewildered, too, the kind of expression you can't fake even if you tried; he runs his hand down my side, and I shiver. When we lock eyes, I give him what I keep demanding from him, the miserable truth.

"I'm a mess," I say, and tears bite the corners of my eyes; I'm already crumbling, worn out from the effort of sustaining my anger. "I'll never look the same anymore, even if I really give it my all—"

"I'm disfigured," he says, still blinking at me. "Facially. You wake up to that every morning."

"Yeah, well, my whole body's wrecked now," I say ruefully, tug my nightgown away to scrutinize myself. I'm good at that. "My breasts got all stretched out—"

He makes a small, choked noise, like a popcorn kernel went down the wrong pipe; for one horrified moment, I pray he's not about to be sick again, I'm fond of this bedspread. "When I see your tits, trust me, I don't look for room for improvement. I like them 'cause they're yours."

It's not quite she walks in beauty, like the night, but the relief of hearing it washes over me like a cup of warm milk and honey before bed— Tenoch and I never slept together, which I should be thanking God on my knees for, because I'm convinced he would've brought a red pen to start circling problem areas with. And yet I still feel the need to keep testing him. "My stomach got carved in half—"

"From carryin' my baby," he scoffs, "how shallow do you think I am?" But despite his caustic words, his touch is soft and careful as he pulls my nightgown off, and this time I let him, lift my arms above my head. I want to be looked at, judged worthy. "You're so beautiful," he adds quietly, reverently, kisses my throat and my breasts. "Too good for me. Way too fuckin' good."

It's not lost on me, once again, that the same way he always does, he's managed to get me all figured out while dodging half my questions. But I'm tired of fighting. I let him kiss further down.