Sorry it's been forever since I posted anything— I've been really preoccupied with the invasion lately, and my uncle just defected to Turkey a couple of days ago— but I'm back now! Warning for mentions of domestic violence, past sexual abuse, and some sexual content.

I scoop some leftover conditioner out of the shell of my ear as I open the bathroom door, a rush of cold air attacking my steam-warmed skin in pinpricks, wipe it off on my towel. "I'm gonna need a little privacy," I say, half-joking, half-serious, as I draw it tighter around my torso and head down the hall, mummifying myself until no scrap of skin can be seen through any of the cracks. "No boys allowed."

Tim's got Mike cradled against his chest, bouncing him; Mike drools down his front, then claps his hands, delighted by the mess he's made. "What, gettin' dressed?" He doesn't reach for me, but he smirks slightly, bewildered, as I brush past him and start rifling through my underwear drawer for something both clean and hole-free. "I think that horse has long since fled the stable between us, just sayin'…."

He's right, I'm being more than a little silly, considering that I don't have anything he hasn't seen before— about a million times— but that still doesn't change the fact that I hate my body in the unforgiving light of day, when I already didn't have a lot to work with in the first place. I didn't gain all that much weight during my pregnancy— one of the nurses kindly pointed out that if I was trying to stay thin for my husband, it hadn't worked out so hot in the long run— but my entire torso was savaged by the birth like I was ripped apart by a wild animal and stitched back together, and I'm reminded of it all over again when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Stretch marks running up and down my stomach, a segment of chewed-up loose skin around the middle, then the incision scar itself… it's not pretty. The epidural needle strikes against the base of my spine at the memory, a phantom pain, and I need to clutch the sides of the drawer to gather myself.

"Okay, okay, I ain't lookin'," Tim says with a shrug, makes a show of turning away and grabs the paperback off my bedside table— unfortunately for me, my taste in bedtime reading isn't something sophisticated like Anna Karenina, it's Harlequin's latest, Claiming His Conquest. "You know, I'd be jealous of this guy on the cover, but I ain't even sure how he manages to fit through doorways with muscles that size."

"Don't make fun of him!" So the model they used for Lord Hathaway is obviously on some steroids they wouldn't have had during the Regency period, it's a good story, on the inside; he's struggling to learn how to love again after his wife died of scarlet fever, but now his children's plucky young governess Libby is capturing his heart (both with her commitment to coaxing a smile out of him and her perky, watermelon-sized breasts). "Do I start pickin' everything apart when you got those Star Trek reruns on?"

"Yes," he says drily, "you make fun of the plot lines on Star Trek every single time I got the audacity to turn it on instead of General Hospital or All My Children."

Okay, fine, sue me— "there was an episode where Spock gets hit by magic sex pollen, you really expected me to watch that with a straight face?"

When I wave my hand for emphasis, a corner of the towel slips; before I can gather it back up, he coaxes me to sit next to him. "C'mere," he murmurs, sweeping my damp curls off my shoulder and pressing his lips to the ridge of bone at the top. I sigh contentedly, in spite of myself, and arch my back like a cat in the sunshine as he keeps kissing on me, over to my spine and down my individual vertebrae. His touch anchors me again, brings me out of my own head, and I abandon my self-consciousness for a moment—

That is, until Mike rolls right off the bed. Fortunately, it's not far to fall and babies bounce, but he still stares up at us with wide, betrayed eyes, processing what just happened, before he opens his mouth and starts to wail. "Shit, how'd we forget little man crawls like he's been possessed?" Tim mutters as he scoops him up into his arms and tries to soothe him with a kiss to the forehead; he still snuffles loudly into his chest, refusing to let himself be hushed. "Listen," he adds, raising his voice to be heard above the din, "I gotta go see my mama today."

I can't hide my disappointment, or my slight grimace, as I fasten my bra. It's not that I don't understand why he has to work so hard, but he's barely ever home as is, and now his mother, of all people, is about to be his valentine? "Wasn't my idea," he's at least quick to reassure me, "she wanted to get me and Curly together for some announcement, and she wouldn't spill what it was for anything… do you want to come?"

He's angling for it, but I do not, and you can probably see that on my face, too. I know it's not very Christian of me, and I keep telling myself I need to show her more compassion— when she can't believe I stooped to marry her son— but I just can't stand her, or the way she's always got her hand out for money. As far as I can tell, the only thing wrong with that woman is a terminal case of laziness. "Not on a Sunday, I've got Mass," I say, grateful for the convenient excuse. "You don't want…"

I shouldn't have asked, his answer's always the same, no matter what: "I hate the clergy." He gives me a wry, apologetic smile, but once he's made up his mind, he's immovable— there's plenty of times I've been able to negotiate with him, even where others have failed, but this isn't one of them. "Even more than her, believe it or not."

I want to unspool his brains with my bare hands sometimes and pull them out like the tape from a cassette, really see what's going on inside the confines of his skull. What's made him decide to turn away from God, when his entire family, gangbangers and drunks and murderers and thieves, feel confident they live under the umbrella of His love? I don't say any of that, though. I go over to my vanity and uncap my favorite lipstick, and start getting my face ready.

The second I open the front door, I get a glass of champagne shoved into my palm, and you better believe that's not the kind of hooch usually getting opened at my mama's house. "What's all this about, then?" I venture, as I take a sip to brace myself for what's coming down the pike. Meemaw can't be dead; Ma doesn't look quite that happy.

"Your stepdaddy and I, well, we figured it's about time we stopped livin' in sin," she says with a blush that's not entirely from the bottle. She flashes her left hand in front of my face, the diamond gleaming on her index finger. Holy shit. "I guess we should've done it more proper-like, brought you and Curly around at least, but one thing just led to another at that casino in Owasso—"

I don't even know what the hell to say to her, but somehow, I doubt congratulations are in order. Instead, I take a gulp so big, it hurts to swallow. "That's great," I manage to croak like a bullfrog with strep throat, and give her a thumbs-up, too. Then I take another one.

Ed stumbles over and slaps me hard enough on the back to send the rest of the glass sloshing onto my shoes; my free fist balls up involuntarily at the blow, no matter how friendly it's meant to be. He's hammered, I can smell it coming off of him in thick waves— underneath the dry sweetness of the champagne is something stronger, the astringent rubbing alcohol scent of vodka. "Hell, what can I say. Your mama, can't live with that bitch, but I sure can't live without her, neither." He brushes past me to get at her, pulls her in for a long, sloppy kiss that leaves shiny patches of spit all over her face.

Curly's at the kitchen table, knocking one back himself, which explains where the Moët et Chandon came from; he still looks hungover, glassy-eyed and his complexion tinged with green, trying to put off the inevitable with some hair of the dog. "Wild night?" I ask drily, sliding down onto the wobbly chair next to him.

He flips me off. "Some dumbfuck snorted so much, he threw Tío Luis's new TV off the balcony when the good guitar part in Evil Ways came on," he says, laying his cheek on his propped-up palm. "Luis and Cisco been chasin' after him all morning with a piece of rusted-over pipe, they got no clue where we're gonna watch the fight of the century now."

I laugh before an unexpected knife of longing twists up through my ribcage, leaving me breathless. Couple years back, I'd be coming with them to track him down and take the price out on his hide, and there'd be no question of where I'd be when the Frasier vs. Ali showdown was on, either. Last time I saw my cousin Cisco, he threw a brick at my head. "How's my boy?" Curly asks, snapping me out of it.

I'm spared having to tell him that he's fine, bounces like a rubber ball against a garage door, when Ma and Ed wander into their half-baked reception, Ma's lips still swollen. Jesus take the wheel. "I'm gonna get y'all somethin' real nice for a wedding gift," Curly says, as much of a suck-up as ever. "A crystal set, maybe, that'd be nice—" like we've got a fucking china cabinet up in this joint to display it in, or like these fools don't smash up every piece of flatware in the house by throwing it at each other.

"Oh, baby, don't worry about it," Ma coos, slings her arms around his neck and presses a kiss to his cheek. "You shouldn't have even gotten us the sparklin' wine, look at this price tag—"

She lifts the bottle trying to read the scratched-off sticker, and I'm much too damn old to be carrying this sibling rivalry bullshit into adulthood, a father who's still busy processing being a son— and can't seem to stop myself all the same, my mind retreading the same worn-out track. Curly's graduated from small-time hood to literal kingpin, and he's still fêted as the guest of honor whenever he shows up here; I get my shit together, bust my ass every day to be a productive member of society just like she always wanted, and I might as well be a dust mote floating in the breeze for all she notices or cares. What is it, the money and gifts he can rain down on her with ease, regardless of how much blood it's soaked in? His charming personality?

I miss Angela all of a sudden, my comrade-in-arms in our family war. I doubt Ma still remembers she's alive, to be honest.

"Hope y'all ain't expectin' no crystal from me," I say, try to play it off as a joke, but I get the timing all wrong, miss my cue. Too much genuine bitterness, not enough levity. "Maybe I can spring for a family-sized pack of paper plates."

I expect Curly to start spouting off about how getting back into the family business would solve all my problems and then some, but instead, Ed tries to point at me and ends up aiming at the crucifix on the wall. "Boy, what did I fuckin' tell you, when your dumb ass came home at sixteen, all cocky as shit, sayin' you'd dropped out soon as you could? That you'd damn well soon enough regret it." He punctuates the sentence by drinking directly out of the champagne bottle. "You need to get your GED."

"You reckon?" I've never listened to a piece of my stepdad's advice in my life, but the idea makes so much sense, I'm surprised it didn't occur to me first.

"Better a convicted felon with one, than a convicted felon without one," he says, nodding his head as though impressed by his own profundity. "It's easy as shit, me and a couple buddies, we took it completely blasted on reefer an' still managed to scrape a pass first try. Hell, Curly could probably do it."

It's the champagne bubbles rushing to my head when I say, "must be like solving one of them paper mazes you give kids at the diner, then," with a snort. I can't help it, even though it pissed me off something fierce when I found out Curly dropped out of high school, halfway through senior year. It's just too easy a shot to resist.

Instead of going in for a swift sucker punch like when we were kids, though, Curly just gives me a strange, challenging side-eye before he drains the remainder of his glass. "If it's so easy, hell, maybe I should get one. Real quick now."

"You know, that's not the worst idea you've ever had," I say, with no small amount of condescending good humor— I should try to encourage him, if he wants to apply himself to anything that's not maximizing Luis's profit margins. "We can start a little study group at the library—"

There's a loud, tinkling crash, and we spin around to find Ma surrounded by a broken bottle of Jim Beam, the bourbon spreading across the floor in a sticky puddle; she must've side-swiped it straight out of the cabinet. "What a waste," she cackles, before she takes a step forward, gets a shard of glass embedded in the sole of her foot, and promptly starts shrieking her head off.

"Listen, I am glad," Ed says in a low voice as Curly rushes to her rescue, watching the carnage unfold from his seat, "that you finally got yourself straightened out." His praise always has a rapid-fire backhand attached to it, and this time is no exception. "Guess I must've knocked some sense into your skull eventually, huh?"

Not even close to enough time has gone by that I can reminisce about that shit with a fond chuckle; one good thing about him giving up on sobriety is not having to listen to him 'make amends' again, a process I'm sure involved a lot more accountability and remorse when they came up with it in AA. "We're your real family," he adds with fierce conviction, like he's won some kind of contest. "They left you with us to raise, gave you back whenever you got difficult, and then they threw you out of the clan like yesterday's garbage once you wanted out of their game. You and Curly, you was never anything but hired guns to those people." He laughs roughly. "Never would've guessed you'd be the one to make the right choice, though."

And I don't tell him about the slip of paper I have tucked away, with its careless, lead pencil scrawl. You looking for a new business opportunity? I'm not even thinking about it.

I should be paying attention to the liturgy, or at least keeping two fussy infants from disrupting it, but that's not even close to where my mind's at right now. Listless from the heat— I swear they always crank it up to eighty degrees in here, no matter what the weather's like outside— I'm a little preoccupied trying to spot the back of my daddy's girlfriend's head in one of the pews. Considering that I don't know all her hats by heart, it's not a rousing success.

What's bothering me even more than the woman replacing my mama, though, is that stupid laundry hamper still propped up next to my dryer, and not just because that thing reeks to high heaven— it's because Diego didn't even ask, just assumed that I'd do it as a matter of fact, and that I'd be fixing him up a plate of fried chicken while I was at it. I'm a background character in my own life, there to cook, clean, and take care of the kids, freeing everybody else up to get the important stuff done. I know exactly what Bonnie saw when I came into my own kitchen, the nice, boring Catholic girl Tim settled down with, once he had his fun and finished running around with her. A practical choice, even if she's not all that stimulating, but that's okay. You don't want your appliances to start doing tricks, after all.

These aren't rational thoughts, I'm feeling sorry enough for myself to start getting melodramatic— heck, I'm not even sure this is Bonnie's analysis of me, I doubt I take up close to this much real estate in her head. It's just that when you hear enough insults for a long enough time, that person's voice eventually becomes your inner monologue, picks up whenever your conscious thought leaves off. You are one dumb bitch, for such a presumida, that's for— yes, you are. If you didn't have me around to do the thinking for you, trust me, you'd dig yourself into the kind of pit you couldn't crawl out of easy.

A handful of hair straining against your scalp, your wrist twisted in someone's grasp, even the swift crack of a broken rib, knocking the breath right out of your lungs— the physical pain is over as soon as it stops, doesn't leave any ghosts behind. The panicked, pathetic babble, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, can you please just tell me what I did wrong, that lasts a lifetime, becomes a reflex so deeply ingrained you forget how to say anything else at all. It would take me years to realize that I had no way of winning, even if I could've gone back in time and done it all right— that our every interaction was always calibrated for me to lose, a rigged game.

Maybe that's why after we take communion, I dodge Eileen's insistent buzzing in my ear, reminding me of our upcoming bake sale for the starving children in Ethiopia, and go to find Rebecca Doherty as she's heading out the door. I'm tired of staring like a poleaxed cow while things just happen around me.

She's hard to pick out, blends seamlessly into a crowd as though by design. Her hair is colorless to the point of having no real shade, a sticky strand lunging across her forehead; I couldn't describe any standout feature of hers, except for the slowly-healing bruises on her face, some of her foundation crumbling away from her skin to reveal the brown and yellow mottling underneath. "I don't have any time for the bake sale," she says with a new mother's tiredness— or something much more bone-weary— as I roll up to her with all the subtlety of an oncoming train, wrenching this double stroller sideways to get it through the door. "Or money, for that matter."

"Oh, don't worry, I wasn't gonna bother you about all that," I reassure her— which is the honest truth— and peer into her own stroller to grasp at an opening. Her daughter looks just like her mama even at a few months old, her face mistrustful and watchful all at once. Judging by the way she's glowering, her chin scrunched up with the beginnings of a good cry, she wants to peel the pink polka dot bow right off her bald head and throw it onto the sidewalk. "What's your little girl's name again, now?"

"Tammy."

"That's real cute," I say, force more false cheer into my voice, "like Tammy Wynette?" Lord, I just hope she's not taking the lyrics of Stand By Your Man too literally, for her sake.

"Like it was number eight in my baby book for girls born in 1970."

She talks like she's being interrogated at a police station and one wrong move is going to land her twenty-five to life, and she's already hoisting her stroller up onto the sidewalk, turning away. In one desperate move, I lay all my cards out on the table. "Rebecca, your eye—"

For a split second, she looks at me with the panic of an animal so desperate to escape a trap, it'll gnaw its own limb off first and assess the damage later. Then she wipes it off her face so fast, I swear I must've imagined it. "I fell down the cellar steps gettin' some homemade wine, we have a broken board towards the bottom," she says smoothly. "It's healin' up okay, I reckon."

"You add too many details for it to be a believable lie."

She stops dead in her tracks, one of the wheels skidding hard enough along the pavement to send sparks flying. "What do you want from me, huh?"

"Just to try to help you—"

"I'm not an Ethiopian child, thanks. I don't need the church to sponsor me for less than a dollar a day."

And I just keep plowing straight ahead with my intervention like I'm driving a tractor trailer, anyway, maybe because I realize this is my last chance to get close to her before she moves to another parish altogether. "You don't deserve to be gettin' hit like that—" I want her to hear it at least once, at least from me.

"How would you know anything about it, exactly? Do you live in my house? Trust me, plenty of people have wanted to crack me one before."

I can't help the bleak, dry laugh I let out, and her eyes narrow into even thinner slits, because of course she's assuming I'm having a good laugh at her expense— heck, that we're all getting together behind her back to laugh at her, and that I'm mining her for more material as we speak. "If you won't leave him for your own sake, is that what you want your daughter growin' up to see, Daddy slappin' Mama around? Or for him to start hittin' her too?"

I could slap myself for that little lecture, the sheen of defensive self-righteousness that came into my tone. Like it's so easy to just pick up and leave, and like she's got anywhere to go or the money to do it with— why don't I offer to put her and the kids up on my foldout couch, while I'm at it. Don't you always do everything right, Gabi, make all the right choices, Angela said to me, voice thick with irony, when I tried to sit her down after she got pregnant. Takin' dick out of wedlock, same as me, but you'd think you was saintlier than the Virgin Mary because you've gotten luckier. That girl's mouth was downright vile, but she wasn't wrong.

She smiles at me a bit crookedly, then, waits long enough to respond that I'm tempted to tear across the street with this stroller and forget I ever tried to get into her business. "I was at Will Rogers same time as your man, just about," she says. "Think I was s'pposed to be class of '66, he was s'pposed to be class of '65."

"That's nice," I say, inanely, though I suspect the punchline to this isn't going to be very nice at all. "I was there too, freshman year, until—"

"You know what's written in one of the shower stalls 'bout him, in the girls' locker room?" What she says is too crass for me to repeat, but she can't possibly have come up with it on the spot. "Listen, you can save your condescending fuckin' pity, okay? I'm the one who feels sorry for you. My man ain't perfect, sure, but at least he didn't pump-and-dump his way through half the female population of East Tulsa before he had to settle for me."

The worst thing I've ever thought in my life, hands down, almost makes its way out from between my pursed lips— Lord, I'm startin' to understand why he— but I don't say it. I enjoy the cold comfort of being able to maintain the moral high ground more than slinging insults, and unlike her, I was raised to be a lady. "I'm sorry you're still dwellin' on that kind of filth so many years later." I channel the mother of five who used to do my hair in Greenwood, Gladys, her southern manners going down like a glass of poisoned lemonade when she was telling me all about her sister-in-law. "I will be prayin' for you," and I cross myself for good measure.

"Oh, honey," she says, "I think you ought to be savin' that prayer for yourself, and spendin' a little less time worrying about me. Guys like him always got a second family comin' out of the woodwork sooner or later."

When I look back at what led us to this point, I swear, it's got to be that goddamn calendar, and the pink heart plastered right on top of the February 14th square.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions— namely, we both realized that our sex life's been circling the drain ever since Neni came squawling into the world, and that without some serious, concentrated effort, we're going to remain as chaste as two nuns bunking together on vacation, forever. I ain't taking credit for the calendar, though, or the heart-shaped stickers that mark, with relentless, sparkly optimism, the days when we're supposed to get down to business. That was all her idea. "Doesn't this take, you know, the spontaneity out of it?" I asked at the time, raising a skeptical eyebrow. "Make it a chore we gotta tick off?" Right after 'trash day' and 'scour the sink', next comes 'fucking each other'...

"It's already not spontaneous, we got nowhere to go but up," she pointed out, attaching it to the fridge with a free magnet we got from Safeway. Then she winked at me. "It'll be a fun chore. Like washing the car in the summer."

Maybe it's that sense of grim mutual determination that's killing the mood, but I'm not here anymore, not really, lost inside my own head and too far gone to come back. I don't even know how to describe it; I'm not drunk or high, sedated in any way, but I'm watching my body from a vantage point up above like a balloon that's been let go into the sky. Numb to it all, a machine mimicking a man with something vital missing.

"Are you…?" She shifts beneath me, uncomfortably, and I realize I've slowed to a stop without meaning to; I can't see her face well enough to read her expression, and maybe that's what's fucking with me. She likes it in the dark, since she had the baby, but my limited vision's tunnelling, time flowing around me in syrupy suspended animation. I'm struggling to remember where I even am. "Tryin' not to…?"

I am nowhere close to that, unfortunately, or trying to do much of anything. Irritation surges inside of me, the strongest sensation I've felt all night; I want her to just quit touching me, to unzip my skin and walk off somewhere else, melt into the wallpaper—

"Tim?"

Well, I'll be damned. I guess there's a limit to how much you can 'mind over matter' this kind of thing, and my dick's had enough of the deliberation.

She tugs on the chain of the bedside table lamp as I pull out, give up the ghost, illuminates the room in soft light. Some of the impossibly tight pressure around my chest, like a steel cage, loosens. It's just her, and of all the people in the world, she's one of very few who have never tried to hurt me or fuck me over, and in fact likes waking me up with kisses all over my face in the morning. "What's wrong?" She cups my jaw with one hand, and I expect her to be disgusted, maybe, disappointed that her man's developed a raging case of erectile dysfunction at twenty-four— ten dollars' worth of red lace lingerie went into this— but there's nothing but love and concern there, which makes it even worse. "Are you okay?"

Nausea rises so far up my throat, my stomach cramping with the force of it, I'm afraid I'll be sick if I open my mouth right away. I'm cut open and exposed like I've just been vivisected, beneath her gaze; I slide back under the duvet, and immediately heave another sigh of relief. "It's nothin'," I say, though it's an obvious lie, and the way my voice breaks betrays it. "I'm just… I don't know. Tired, I guess. I'm sorry."

"We can just go to sleep," she says reassuringly, but she's still looking at me like she's trying very hard to keep herself from prying, because she ain't buying what I'm selling. I can't give her anything else, though, is the trouble. "Don't worry about it, okay?"

I don't normally let myself, keep it locked up so tight in the mental suitcase it never gets taken out, but as the room plunges back into darkness I think about Big Mac again. I think about why I haven't been inside a church since I was fifteen years old, and why I'm not afraid to go to hell anymore. I think about Dallas, and what he told me after five tequila shots and a hit off a meth pipe, and the secret he took to the grave. I'm not going to sleep tonight.