Things get a little darker starting here: warning for views on homosexuality that aren't my own (I hope obviously), references to CSA (as well as an implication that it can cause homosexuality), hard drug abuse and trafficking related to that, Tim displaying poor active listening skills, Curly's shitty parenting...

I came over to Darry's house, in theory, to help fix whatever the hell's gone wrong with his sink. In practice, we both screwed around with the pipes for twenty minutes, cussed up a storm, got sprayed in the face, realized all our experience in construction was not helping with DIY plumbing, decided to call an actual plumber, then finally sat down to knock back some beers, defeated. All in all, it's been about as productive an afternoon as I expected.

"Unca Tim!" Frannie shrieks as she barrels into the kitchen and grabs me by the legs— with a surprisingly strong grip for a kid who's still coming up on three, too. She's wearing fluorescent pink shorts and a gray Minnie Mouse t-shirt, even though it's nowhere near spring yet; I give her a pat on the head. Baby girl's hair is one pigtail sticking straight up, the other one pointing straight down. I can't even tell if she did it herself or if Darry just said 'fuck it, that's good enough', for the first time in his life. "Did you bring me anything?"

I glare at Darry as I try to pry her fingers loose— the corner of his mouth turns up into the tiniest of smirks. I know she can talk better than this. "We're still workin' on her L sounds." A touch more sternly, he adds, "lil' lady, c'mon, that how we ask nice?"

Frannie heaves a wobbly sigh before yanking at the cuff of my worn-out jeans again. "Unca Tim pwease did you bring me anything—"

I pull out a mini Snickers bar I stuffed into my pocket for the occasion, I'm not a monster. "It's gonna spoil her supper," Darry half-heartedly chides as she smears chocolate all over her face and hands, but he's already picked his bottle back up. "Eh, what the hell. No matter what I do, when I drop her off at Judy's, she or her mama are gonna have a laundry list of everything I've done wrong anyway."

"She still givin' you shit?"

"Ain't she always," he says with a snort, "she's already datin' again, can you believe it?" I can; she ain't my type, but she's got that blonde, heart-shaped ass, Avra Bennett look a lot of guys find appealing. "Some senior editor's son over at the World, of all people. I have no idea who he is." He pauses for a moment, takes another sip as though bolstering himself. "Told me she thinks it's about time I moved on, too, now that the ink's dried on the divorce."

"You gonna take her advice? C'mon, star quarterback, you ain't gone to fat yet, and your hairline's still lookin' decent— I'm sure some chicks will remember your illustrious career."

"Yeah, I bet my last homecoming game is still on everyone's mind, I'm the most memorable thing about that year after the Kennedy assassination." He shakes his head, once he's done flipping me off. "It ain't nothin'. I'm overthinking it."

I raise an eyebrow at him; it doesn't take long for him to relent. "Met this chick a couple weeks ago," he mutters, rubbing the back of his neck. Sounds like more than met to me. "You remember Lydia, Lydia Huscher? She must've been in your grade…."

I couldn't identify ninety percent of the WRHS class of '65 with a gun to my head, and I tell him as much. He rolls his eyes, but continues anyway. "I was grabbin' something to eat after work at Sirloin Steakhouse, and she was waitressing there, we got to talking… I drove her home 'cause I didn't want her waitin' for the bus with all the junkies at night," ain't he a gentleman, "and, well, she invited me in." We're both too damn old for any kind of extended bull session, but he can't help but add, "legs for days. She'd look real good in a miniskirt."

"I ain't seein' the problem here— what, she don't want no second date?"

"Frannie's gotta be my priority right now, not chasin' tail," he says resolutely, tracing a wet patch on the bottom of his shirt with his fingertip, then his mouth hardens. "Besides, Jesus H. Christ, how am I supposed to explain all… this?" He waves his hand around like that's supposed to encompass 'all this'. "I'm a real family man, Lydia. Before I got a divorce under my belt, I also managed to raise up a heroin addict, a mafia princess, and a raging homosexual, and now none of them return my calls."

Darry saves 'raging homosexual' for last like that's the worst of it, though I think he's just completely given up on the first two and still has some lingering hope that he can reform Ponyboy, get him to cut his hair and go back to the registrar's office at OSU with his tail between his legs. I tried to tell that kid a few years back, just because some pervert feels you up, that doesn't mean anything, you dig? You ain't ruined for life and it happens to a lot more guys than you'd expect— hell, you know, maybe even some guys from the neighborhood that he's hung out with before. He didn't take it too hot at the time, but maybe it'll sink in for him eventually, the poor fucker.

"Bonnie was over at my place, a few days ago." When I look out Darry's kitchen window, there's a thin sheen of frost starting to form on the glass, promising a rare snowfall. "She was askin' after Soda."

"Tell her she's always asked too many questions."

I regret having brought it up at all, when his knuckles whiten around the neck of the bottle like he wants to snap it off. The still-fragile peace between us fractures like spiderweb cracks in melting spring ice. Apply too much pressure and we'll both go under. "Two-Bit found him on the side of the interstate," I still continue. "I don't know where you left him, but—"

"He's livin' on the side of the interstate because he wants to be livin' there." A cord of muscle in the side of his jaw bulges out. "They told me last time he was in rehab, he needs to hit rock bottom before he's gonna change. I'm done enablin' him," and he accompanies that with a slice of his hand through the air. "That's exactly what they said— if I give him another cent, I might as well be sticking the needle inside his vein myself."

"Don't seem to me like there's much rockier bottom than sleepin' under the overpass, man. He's gonna need a fuckin' pickaxe to keep digging."

"You want to put him up?" he asks, a hard, mocking edge entering his voice. "Make sure to bolt your TV to the floor first." My trap snaps shut. "I'm not havin' fucking heroin residue or melted heroin spoons or angry heroin dealers around my daughter, you know how fast a court would give Judy full custody and make me have to visit her at the McDonald's playground on weekends? And if you have a problem with that, hell, you ought to get your own house in order first."

I wasn't expecting him to aim that low, and rather than striking back, I'm stunned into a stormy silence. "I'm sorry," Darry mutters, shakes the last few drops out from the bottle and goes to the icebox to get another one, pulling off the cap with his teeth. "Even just mentioning him, at this point, 's like it sucks all the oxygen right out the room. That wasn't fair."

I haven't seen my sister in close to two years now— when I was in the slammer, she left her first husband and ran off to Laredo with her second, and she hasn't been back since. Our estrangement's like having a broken molar I can't afford to fix, at this point, a constant ache but one I've grown used to. Now I might as well have bitten down on something hard without warning, a bright starburst of fresh pain all over again. "It's fine," I say, though it really isn't; the beer in my hand's gone lukewarm, as I swish it around my mouth. "You're right. I ain't got no room to judge."

She sent me a Christmas card in December of her and Cristián posing outside their house, like we're second cousins or something. It's a cute picture, for sure, they've fixed up a nice Spanish colonial with a jacaranda tree out front, potted flowers on the windowsills. She's wearing a pink-and-white gingham dress, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, smiling vapidly at the camera with his arm around his waist— there's nothing to read in the smooth planes of her face, an expression so blank it has to be deliberate. Angela was always a good liar, a born actress. She can make herself into anyone she wants to be— even a suburban housewife.

"I still think there's somethin' off about this guy— maybe he's keepin' her from talking to you, monitors the line," Darry says, always ready to jump into action, find a solution. I swear he's about to make the drive down to Texas himself and start digging for answers like Columbo. "She meets him, runs off with him without telling nobody—"

I shake my head with a quick jerk, and it's not just an attempt at reassuring myself. I know my sister. After her trainwreck of a first marriage, she was looking for a mark, someone vulnerable to her charms and easy to manipulate. "Don't think it's like that, besides, she talks to Valeria pretty regular." Valeria's my half-sister, my daddy's daughter with his wife. She lives in Mexico City with her man, who runs a 'furniture store' that's a front for money laundering; she has a revolving closet of fur coats and her own chauffeur, and financed Angela's quickie Matamoros divorce. I can't stand her, but I think I might need to give her another call. "If he was givin' her any shit, she'd probably get her husband to, I dunno, take out a hit on him or something."

Besides, I know why we're estranged, and it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the night she crawled into my bed, eleven years old, her curls matted and pulling the truth out of herself like a newborn calf. Tim, something's wrong—

"It's fine," I say again; calcify my pride until it hardens all around me like a shield, and remind myself that I'm done chasing after her ungrateful ass. "Lots of siblings ain't close as adults— hell, I wish I knew a lot less about Curly than I do, half the time. We all got our own lives now," like being busy has anything to do with it. She has plenty of time to pick up the phone when Curly calls, even a half-sister she barely knows, but not for me.

"We did what we could," Darry says. "Man, we did all we could."

I walk into Curly's apartment to find him on the couch with another woman.

"Baby girl," Curly says with a thick drawl that could've come out of his Ozark stepdaddy's mouth, "you know I can't sell you nothin' more on credit. You ain't even close to payin' off what you already owe." He rests a hand on her knee and leaves it there. "I think we really need to talk about your account balance."

The other woman looks young, maybe eighteen, nineteen, with wiry, wet-looking curls spilling over her shoulders and deep hollows under her eyes, reaching down to her cheekbones. She's practically vibrating where she sits, the way my second grade class hamster did every time you took him out of his cage. "But I need more," she whines like she isn't even pretending to listen to him, or just doesn't grasp the meaning of his words. "It makes me sick, if I don't— I know I don't have any money right now, but—"

She stands up and starts pulling off her skirt, with all the eroticism of stripping an engine for parts. Curly grabs her by the arm and yanks her back into her seat, before it can get halfway down her thighs; there's a flash of disgust on his face so vivid it makes me flinch, but I can't tell whether it's meant for her or for himself. "I'm a married man," he says, warning in his tone like a strung bow. He taps his wedding band. "You better keep all your clothes on now."

"She don't have to know… is she pretty?"

Curly smiles like he's setting a trap. "What's your name again, darlin'?"

"Marlene."

"Marlene, you work your way through all my patience, and you're gonna have to start dealin' with my uncle Luis— and why don't I promise you, none of these tricks are about to work on him, neither. He might just start rootin' around your place for valuables instead of listenin' to you talk, okay?"

She yawns and fidgets with the hem of her skirt like the schoolgirl she's barely left behind; there's track marks all up and down the insides of her arms, ringed by purple and blue bruises, and more scattered on the pale underside of her thighs where she ran out of veins. Saliva pools in my mouth, threatening to spill over, and I wonder why I'm more afraid for her than she is for herself. "I can talk to my boyfriend, I think his grandma's social security check is supposed to come tomorrow…. she never notices if she gets all of it, she's got the dementia."

"You go do that, sweetheart, okay? Then you come straight back to me— me, not Luis, not Alberto, not Cisco— and I'll see what I can do about gettin' you a little more H to tide you over."

She gives him such a grateful look, you'd think she was getting saved; she leans forward to kiss him on the side of the neck, but he shoves her away gently but firmly, before her lips can connect. "That dumb little cooze," he mutters as the door slams shut behind her, and I realize that the disgust was meant for him all along. When he notices me in the corner of the room, though, trying to blend in with the upholstery, he puts another mask on so quick it's like it never dropped. "Hey, cuñis," he says, easy, unthreatening, "what are you doin' here?"

It unsettles me to see him in action, and I'm already regretting that I volunteered to come down here myself. It's not right or fair of me to think, but something about the seamless transition between threats and fake charm, like shadows flitting across his face— the million personas he wears, but all of them equally hollow— reminds me of Tenoch.

"I'm gettin' Mike, remember?" I gesture towards the double stroller I had to wrestle sideways into the elevator, where Neni's, mercifully, stayed asleep with her daisy-shaped pacifier in her mouth. "For the weekend. Luis's big party."

Curly couldn't look more stunned if I'd hit him over the head with a tire iron, or put a differential equation in front of him and asked him to solve it. "Shit, that's tonight?"

"That's tonight." Jasmine spills into the living room, and I can tell that she's been drinking— not drunk, exactly, but there's a glossy sheen to her eyes and an unsteadiness to her gait, that's even more obvious because she's overcorrecting trying to hide it. It's only three in the afternoon— then again, if I had to stay quiet in the other room while my man pretended to flirt with other women, I'm not sure how well I'd be able to handle that sober, either. She loops her arms around his neck, kisses his jaw. "Hey, Gabi," she says when she looks up at me, sounding a little strained. She smells like something harder than wine, herbal— vermouth, maybe? That stuff you put in martinis before you add the olive? "He's just down in his crib, I'll go get him."

"Are you okay?" I ask, though my kneejerk reaction is to ask why in the hell she's been hitting the bottle while watching him. She's not the easiest to like or get along with, and I struggle to understand what makes her tick, but she's still my sister-in-law. And even when she's in a room full of people, somehow, she always manages to look so alone.

"My aunt's a real cunt, what else is new," she says, spitting out the 't' at the end of 'cunt' like it's a popcorn kernel. "Gets on the phone with me, like I ever want to take her fuckin' calls, we go around in circles as usual, and you know what she tells me? Jasmine, you're not a good mother, because you never learned how to be a good daughter. If it wasn't attached to a cord, swear I would've chucked that receiver clear across the room."

Well, don't I know aunts who can't mind their business to save themselves— my tía Salomé took one look at my baby girl right after she was born, the shape of her nose, the way her hair was starting to grow in, and said it was a good thing she took after her daddy's people. I wanted to slap her hard enough to sprain something, not fake a smile and agree with her. Curly takes a hold of Jasmine's wrist before I can speak, though, presses his lips to the delicate skin on the underside. "You considered just not takin' her calls?"

"I ain't no coward." Jasmine recoils like a rodeo horse, bucks upwards with the insult, then her eyebrows come down heavy on her forehead and she just looks pensive. "Maybe we should keep Mike after all."

"She's just got you spooked," Curly says, a little too fast. "You really reckon he's gonna be able to sleep through a bunch of drunk cokeheads blastin' Black Magic Woman all night? He ain't old enough we can lay him down on some chairs and cover him with a jacket, neither."

Jasmine slumps down at the kitchen table the way a sack of potatoes would hit the chair, still looking unconvinced, but she doesn't say anything else. Curly gets to his feet, already heads out to the hallway. "I'll go get him, yeah?"

She rubs her temples, hard, once he's vanished into their bedroom. "I know I ain't a good mother," she says like she's daring me to contradict her, "but listen, I wasn't workin' off the best model to begin with, you dig? Auntie Rose here was usin' me as a Hail Mary to save her dying marriage, and my mama, she's been gone a long time now." She chuckles weakly. "There's this dumb thing I do… I pretend I'm talkin' to her sometimes, when I'm doin' stuff with Mike, narrate what I'm up to— Mom, he's started to crawl today, Mom, I think he's due to grow his first tooth soon, Mom, d'you reckon it's time I got him on a sleep schedule, or is he too young? Like she has some real valuable input to add."

"It doesn't sound dumb to me at all." I understand where she's coming from; my mama made being a good mother look so natural, I have no idea how she pulled that charade off, and nobody left to ask. "Listen, I'm sure if she was here right now, she'd tell you that you've got nothin' to worry about."

Jasmine gives me a crooked and pitying smile. "Hon, trust me on this one, she was not the empty platitudes type."

"Curly, don't forget his diaper bag," I point out with a grimace as he comes back into the room, which unfortunately captures all of my attention; I scoop the baby out of his arms, while he gives me a sheepish, apologetic grin and doubles back for it. Mike's real cute, with an upturned nose and a slight feline tilt to the corners of his eyes, just like his mama's. Any slight stirring of resentment in me, that I'm going to have twice the work this weekend while they pound shots, vanishes as I look into them and he clutches the back of my shirt with his fist.

I'm halfway out the door, when the words spew out of my mouth like I'm the one who's been drinking, though I'm stone-cold sober: "how can you do it?"

"Huh? What do you mean?" he asks, but I've long suspected Curly often pretends to be a lot dumber than he really is, like a cheerleader who's secretly on the honor roll— there's no way he would've lasted as long as he has, in a business like this, if he were genuinely slow or easy to trick. He's sizing me up even now, looking me up and down, and his eyes narrow a little.

"That girl's an addict," I say, and it's so obvious I didn't even have to speak the words out loud. Diego acted just like that when he was withdrawing, except in addition to yawning every twenty seconds, he also had business coming out both ends once the morphine stopped binding him up. "How can you just sell her more of the same stuff that's killin' her?"

It's such a naive question, even I cringe internally as I ask it. I'm not that same sheltered schoolgirl I used to be, and I'm well-aware of what financed this apartment's nice, matching furniture sets and the designer onesie Mike's drooling all over. But there's a difference between visiting a hot dog stand, and watching the sausage get made right before your eyes.

"You know what's fixin' to happen to Marlene, if I don't sell to her?" he asks. "She's not gonna find Jesus and get clean, she's gonna find a guy who'll take her up on her offer— if she's lucky, it'll stop there. If she ain't, she might just run into another guy, who knows you can make a lot more money off sellin' girls like her than you'll lose from shootin' her up."

I remember Joe, the way he used to play with my hair and call me guapa and hermosa, take me on long rides in his car and let me fiddle with his radio to get to the latest Beatles hit— he was the first man who ever really made me feel pretty. I remember what he was doing with Angela that entire time, while I was showing off how well I could dance the twist, the privilege of my innocence. I feel sick all over again. "So, what, you think you're the good guy in this situation? Her guardian angel?"

He laughs like he's singing a scale, going up and down an octave. "You look at my brother with them big, scared eyes, nena, you manage to guilt him out of the life that way?" He shakes his head, then seems genuinely quizzical. "You know, I've always been a religious guy—" he crosses himself, for emphasis— "but I don't think I've ever wondered whether something's good or bad. That's just not how my brain works."

I turn to get into the elevator, but Curly grasps me by the arm, and the doors slide shut without me. "Listen, I got somethin' for you," he says, rummaging around the back pocket of his jeans to pull out an unmarked, crumpled envelope. "Keep this safe, a'ight?"

I try to push it right back into his palm, at first. "Tim doesn't want any of your money—"

"I'm not givin' anything to Tim, I'm givin' it to you." He presses it into my hand again, and like he's triggered a grasp reflex, I take it this time. Then he winks. "Like I said, I'm not a big picture kind of guy. But don't let it be said Curly Shepard ain't spreadin' the wealth around, now that he's made it."

I know Gabi's in a mood when I get home and she slaps a plate down in front of me, doesn't even try to pepper me with questions about how Darry's taking his divorce and how he's redecorating his new place. My fried chicken dissolves into a greasy lump inside my mouth, though her cooking's real good, she always does this salt brine thing with the chicken to make it crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside. "You okay?" I ask, especially since she's not eating anything herself— I'm trying to think of what I might've done and coming up short, then remember where she was this afternoon. "Did somethin' happen over at Curly's?" I should've insisted he bring Mike over by his damn self, not make Gabi have to haul ass into their little den of sin—

"No," she says, though I suspect she's not telling the whole truth by the way she averts her gaze, "and Mike's been an angel so far, I think he's finally gettin' over that colicky phase of his." And thank God for that, because it's been a rough couple of months. "What happened was Diego showin' up."

"He come over here high?" My mind's already hitting on the worst all over again, my pulse tripping. "Or with the fuzz on his—"

"He came over here with a full laundry basket," she snaps, and the juxtaposition gives me so much whiplash I almost laugh out loud. "Just waltzes right in and sets it down on the floor, because this fool's twenty-eight years old and has no idea how to wash his own clothes. I guess he thinks I was put on this earth to take care of his dirty underwear, you know, like a walking, talking appliance."

"We can probably just throw it in with one of our loads," I say, unwisely. "The rate Neni spits up at—"

"I'm not worried about havin' to ration our Tide, I'm worried he's anglin' to move in here." She cradles her forehead with one hand. "I can't ever get a straight answer out of him about anything practical, and I swear he's burned another bridge with whoever he's been stayin' with— no, instead he passed on some real interesting gossip, though."

"Which is—"

"Ximena told him my daddy's got a new girlfriend, which neither one of them wanted to tell me about before now, I guess." She taps her fingers on the table so hard, you'd think she wanted to drill holes through it. "Some woman he met at Mass, can you believe it?" She says 'Mass' with the same disgusted inflection she'd use for 'curbside drug deal' or 'strip club'. "Catalina something or other, I was doin' the Christmas toy drive with her all last December, and you think she ever dropped a single hint about this either? At least they're close to the same age, how's that for a small mercy."

I try to sound sympathetic, which is more of a struggle than it should be, given that I'm a little excited for what having a steady girlfriend is going to do to sweeten her daddy's temper. "Your mama's been dead for ten years now… he's probably been pretty lonely." God knows the old man's body was barely cold before Ma decided she had to move on with her life.

"Nine— nine years. That's hardly anything. Why are you of all people defending him?"

When I'm in a hole, sometimes I just pick up a shovel and decide to keep digging. At least I've got enough sense not to say that I can understand why they were a touch reluctant to tell her about this. "I think you might be overreacting, a little bit… I mean, you don't even know this woman. Maybe she's good people."

She glares at me. "You know what's somehow never made me feel better? You tellin' me that I shouldn't have gotten upset in the first place."

I shouldn't take the bait, but my nerves are already rubbed raw like they've been sandpapered from earlier today, and I have no idea what she wants me to do about this or what I keep saying wrong. God, I need a cigarette. "You know what Darry and I were talkin' about earlier?" I put down my fork and pinch the bridge of my nose. "Soda's ragin' heroin addiction."

"Oh, excuse me." She brings her hands down on the table, then crosses her arms. "I guess I forgot it was Darry's turn to have problems. You're right, I'm not completely sure if my brother's relapsed yet."

This has the potential to get ugly, and for once, I decide to show throat and shut it down before the whole situation detonates. "I'm sorry," I say, and reach across the table for her hand. "Things got pretty rough at Darry's, once that lil' subject came up." I don't mention that they got rough because of Angela, too. I don't really want to get into it, not tonight, maybe not any night in the near future.

"No, I'm sorry," she says, her tone drenched in remorse, and takes it, "I just started bitin' your head off, the second you came home." She sighs, then steals a drumstick off my plate. I let her. "Do you ever feel like we get all the work, and everybody else gets all the fun?"

"Just about every single day," I deadpan, "even without havin' other people's chores and other people's kids dropped in our laps."

She lets out a sound that's a cross between a groan and a giggle. "Oh, God, Jasmine was havin' second thoughts about it too, before Curly swooped in real quick to make sure I got him out of there." I also shouldn't be laughing at this like I'm watching The Tonight Show— I send a silent apology little man's way. "I swear, it's like they thought they'd have the baby, get him stamped by the draft board, and just drop him off at the fire station right after. At least Curly."

I wipe a tear away from the corner of my eye, then lace our fingers together. "Listen, for Valentine's Day… I'll come up with something." I raise my eyebrows slowly while maintaining her gaze, so she gets the general idea. "Two kids can keep each other distracted, can't they?"

Later that night, getting ready for bed, I find a note tucked inside the cap of my aftershave, of all places; I almost assume it's the scrap of a receipt, and toss it into the trashcan. His handwriting's unsteady and spidery, a quick scrawl, but I still recognize it even without a name at the bottom. You looking for a new business opportunity?

He left a phone number, too, underneath. I pull my lighter out of my pocket, and I almost do what I should do, burn it to ash and forget the sequence altogether. Right before I connect the flame to the paper, though, I stop myself. I shove it into my pocket instead.