"You two could try to look less like you're fixin' to be executed tomorrow morning, y'know, on Christmas and all."

Curly might've insisted, but this sure wasn't shaping up to be a merry fucking anything— even the sky outside was the dismal gray of a sheet that'd been washed too many times. Dani flung herself over the couch arm, hair sweeping the floor. "Well, that's kind of hard when you're grounded over Christmas." One of her toes hooked the heel of her bright pink sock, pulling it half-off. "Which I reckon qualifies as cruel and unusual, by the way."

"Have y'all tried behavin', ever, in your lives?" Mom shot back as quick as a BB gun pellet, before she slumped down at the kitchen table, taking morose sips from a plastic cup of ginger ale. She was sure nauseous a lot lately. I didn't want to believe it, or say it, but I still thought it. "Have you, personally, considered not sneakin' out of the house in my tights to go get drunk in a parking lot?"

"Uncle Darry says you ain't never behaved a day in your life," Dani muttered, not very quietly.

The sound of their bickering spiked high in my ears, then faded into the background again— I didn't bother to join in, lost in my own thoughts. After the sturm und drang and the adrenaline of the night had faded, I was forced to admit that I was pretty lucky Curly had restrained himself from running me over, all things considered. His authority over me, at this point, was an illusion we both had to buy into, but I'd taken what he'd said to heart as little as I wanted to— you cannot just go through life thinkin' the world is your own personal pot to piss in, Michael, was that really how he figured I acted? So, half-ashamed, half-trying to stick it to him, I was toeing his line. I'd dusted the baseboards and reorganized the linen closet, even, without being asked.

Still, it was only noon, and the day already stretched out interminably before me, God help me if Mom decided to start breaking out card games. Sadness hit me like a glob of spit to the face; I wanted to go home even though I was home, and I hadn't felt that way since I was a kid, bouncing between relatives. Even A Charlie Brown Christmas blaring on the TV, next to our red-and-white tinsel tree, wasn't doing much to bolster anyone's holiday spirit.

Curly set a chipped mug of hot chocolate down in front of me, snapping me out of my fog of moodiness for a second. "Here."

It was the good Mexican kind, too, with cinnamon mixed in. I was sure you could find it in New York, but it wouldn't have tasted the same. "Thanks," I said, burning my tongue on a sip, but he'd already gone to half-heartedly get in the middle of the fight.

Curly and I were still avoiding speaking to each other in more than monosyllables. I should've apologized— I owed him as much, if I was being honest with myself, I'd been so out of line— but I just couldn't, with everything between us as raw as cat piss in a cut. And if I was being even more honest, I wasn't sorry at all that I'd told him what I had, about Mom. Not when I'd been crushed by the weight of my own knowledge for years, like stones piled onto Giles Corey's chest. If he wanted to be the parent so fucking bad, hell, maybe it wouldn't kill him to take some of the burden off me for once.

That didn't change the fact that the atmosphere was awkward as hell, like back when I was around fourteen and the only thing I'd ever say to him was 'have you seen my basketball shorts?' Passing a joint back and forth might've fixed this without having to go through the motions of an apology, again, like when I was fourteen, but he'd unfortunately figured out that was bad parenting since then. I needed to get out of here, one way or another, before I exploded like a pipe bomb. "I think I should go see Aunt Gabi and Uncle Tim," I said. "For a couple hours, anyway."

I'd just seen them at midnight Mass, but our ad-hoc custody arrangement, since I'd moved back home, was both bizarre and entirely self-inflicted— you could best describe it by saying that I was trying to balance my time between two families, but wasn't really part of either. It'd get me out of this house, anyway, even if I doubted they were much more thrilled with me than my actual parents.

Mom had moved on to the pack of cigarettes she'd found in Dani's jeans last month— I honestly couldn't tell if she was more hacked off about the smoking, or that she hadn't turned out her pockets before putting them in the laundry hamper, yet again. I turned to Curly, waiting for him to stop me. Hoping, maybe. "Okay," he said flatly. "Tell Tim I want my George Foreman grill back, while you're over there. Fucker's been holdin' onto that thing since the Fourth of July."

I knew we'd get five minutes into Christmas dinner, max, before I became the main attraction. What I wasn't expecting was for my aunt to be the one to swoop down on me, right after she made sure to put the dark cuts of turkey on my plate— when I was a kid, she'd tried her best to shield me even from my uncle's mildest punishments, and was depressingly quick to believe me when I claimed that having been raised by wolves, I was struggling to grasp the concept of a house with rules. I'd never been looking for a replacement mother, but I was still her baby. "I just don't understand what you were thinking, Michael." She smiled at me without showing teeth, which was how I knew I was wading in knee-deep shit with her. Then she poured me some more gravy from the floral boat. "I wish you'd try to explain it to us. Are you considerin' a new career as a NASCAR driver? Because they at least wear helmets."

She really didn't deserve what I said next, considering that I'd heard harsher sarcasm, as part of this family, before I started kindergarten. Or considering that she'd bought me a puppy the second time Mom went to rehab. "No, Auntie, the truth is, I've got a secret death wish. I was hopin' the tree would take care of it for me, but here I still am."

Tim slammed his fork down with enough force to register on the Richter scale, which was when I started to realize how much I'd fucked up in the span of two thoughtless sentences. "I don't care how old you think you are now," he started with a slow, quiet menace. He never yelled. He didn't have to. "When you're at the table with me, you mind your mouth. Nobody here finds you half as funny as you find yourself, and I don't remember you takin' no classes in stand-up comedy, last I checked."

"I'm sorry," I said, fast enough that the words felt like they were falling out, and genuinely contrite. My aunt was still staring at me in mute horror; her reindeer sweater, complete with a red yarn nose, wasn't doing much to leaven the seriousness of the situation. "Humor just, y'know, can get real dark up north. I'm sorry," I said again, for good measure.

"But you didn't mean it, baby, did you?" Aunt Gabi pressed, her lips so thin they'd practically vanished back into her face. "Those things you said… you didn't mean that, right?"

Elena looked horrified and worried, my aunt looked terrified and worried, and my uncle looked furious and worried. I sure as shit wasn't about to take George Carlin's place, if this whole lawyer gig didn't work out. "Of course not." I gave her a toothy, false grin. "I was just bein' a brat."

Tim leveled me with an unimpressed— and unconvinced— look. It swept over me like a shadow. "Next time you feel the need to say somethin' like that, you bite your tongue, entiendes?"

He was waiting for an answer, too, and my temper flared up in me for a moment— it was funny how they were both so determined to grind an already-fragile ego into dust beneath their heels, put me back in a child's place. Lay off me, Jesus, who do you think you are, my father? Then, making my first wise decision since I'd arrived in Tulsa, I decided to maybe try shutting the fuck up for once. "Yessir," and I shoveled some sweet potato casserole into my smart mouth before I could add anything else.

Growing up, my uncle could be smothering and inflexible, favored his daughter over me, wanted to hold me responsible for the sins of my father before I'd even had the chance to make my own mistakes. But they'd raised me— at considerable expense to themselves— and in return got me being a pissy, ungrateful asshole at their dinner table. What had I been thinking, showing up here, that I might as well wreck two family Christmases for the price of one? After we'd finished going through the motions of a painfully awkward meal, I had every intention of a quick exit, but Tim's ever-watchful eyes hadn't left me for the past hour. "Mike, why don't we go in the living room?" His voice hooked me before I could reach the doorway. He wasn't asking me no question, neither.

Some of the leather on the loveseat was cracked, white stuffing peeking out from the crevice; I did my best not to pick at it, feeling like I was waiting on the bench outside the principal's office. Then I had to keep myself from picking at the edges of my cuticles, as he rummaged through the china cabinet that housed Aunt Gabi's dead mother's fern-patterned plates, and… a bottle of whiskey?

I tried to play it cool, as he decanted into surprisingly nice crystal glasses, but it was a close thing. He never drank in front of me and Elena— literally, ever, if I really pushed it, I could maybe remember a single beer at a cookout— and I had zero clue they kept liquor in the house at all. Him pushing some single malt towards me was making me wonder if this was all an elaborate hallucination my brain had cooked up. Or a test.

He rolled his eyes at my hesitation, which, I had to admit, I was playing up. Nobody was buying that I lived my life as sober as a Mormon wedding. "Don't tell me you ain't drinkin' up at that school, do I look like I was born yesterday?"

Yeah, the jig was up for me, all right— I took the glass, hesitantly, and settled back on the couch. "Let's just have a talk now, man to man." He was smiling in a way I was sure he considered inviting, but I felt like a mouse right before a trap snapped down on my neck. "So, how often do you fantasize about killin' yourself?"

I choked on a swallow that went down the wrong pipe, and when I tell you that burns like a motherfucker… great, now my entire family thought I hadn't just tried to commit suicide by truck, but by borrowed truck. "You're tryna get me drunk so I spill my guts," I said, eyes watering.

"And let that be a life lesson to you, Michael," he shot right back, not even bothering to deny it. "Now answer the question, you slippin' a kernel of truth into them little jokes, or what?"

"No!" It took me another second to piece it all together. "Did Curly put you up to this?"

"Just let me finish up my psych eval here— you been messin' around with any sharp objects lately?"

"Only the knife he gave me," I muttered, folding up like a lawn chair. "This is such bullshit. I ain't crazy."

"I think that's considered 'stigmatizing language' these days," he said drily, "we could always try 'mentally unbalanced' or 'fucking loco', Luis sure loved that one." I had the good grace to feel ashamed of myself. I'd seen little evidence of it over the years, besides the orange medication bottles lined up in the bathroom cabinet, but I didn't want to help stigmatize his condition, either. "He's got reason to be worried— you could fill a damn asylum with both sides of your family tree. Not to mention the way you tried to fling yourself out his truck door the other day."

"Is there anything I've ever done in my life that he ain't called you up about, right after the fact?"

"Don't worry, I reminded him that when he was your age, he pointed a gun at my head— unloaded," he made sure to add, noting my horrified look. "Y'all really couldn't make it one full day without goin' right back in at each other? They even managed to hold a Christmas truce during World War One."

"He says he don't like me, as usual." I sounded as whiny as shit, even to my own ears, tattling to Uncle Tim— though Curly had done it first, and in a lot more graphic detail, apparently. I was also ignoring that for once, I'd shoveled the words into his mouth myself and told him to spit them back out. "So I reckon that's kind of impossible for us, maybe, 'cause the feeling's mutual."

He didn't even pretend to feel sorry for me. "I'm sure you were bein' a real fuckin' delight, too. Was this before or after you tried to jump out of the car?"

"Come on, you ain't fair—"

"Your daddy don't like you because you remind him of himself," he said. "Namely, this time around, 'cause you can be meaner than a two-headed rattlesnake when you want to be."

It was a pretty apt metaphor, when venom from earlier still coursed through me like an untreated bite. "You scared him," and I couldn't help but sputter out a laugh. I wasn't convinced that Curly's neurons could fire that way anymore, even if he wanted them to. Tim narrowed his eyes. "Hurt his damn feelings too, if that sounds less funny to you. You was in a car crash, you don't even call him yourself, your lil' friend's parents have to— it doesn't even cross your mind that that's somethin' you'd do, in a crisis. It's fuckin' with his head."

I bit down on the corner of my lower lip. I was sure he was remembering, same as I was, that when I'd gotten arrested, it'd been him I'd used my phone call on. "I can take care of myself," I said flatly; the comeback was a tired cliché, sure, but it was also an accurate one. If Curly wanted to be depended on, he could've always tried being dependable, long enough for that to form a groove in my brain.

"You've been doin' such a great job of it lately, too." His tone was more pitying than anything. I hated it. "You got all the discipline, drive, delayed gratification, whatever, to get into Columbia on your own. Nobody in this family ever even been to college, unless you count Ponyboy, and he wasn't there long enough to figure out what color the textbooks were. And then you come home and damn near the first thing you do is drag race?" He shook his head. "What the hell is goin' on with you, some kind of self-sabotage? You can't just want to piss Curly off that bad."

I still kept it zipped like I'd been read my Miranda rights. "You ain't in trouble, mijo— hell, like I can even do nothin' to you no more. Talk to me."

I recognized a 'more flies with honey' approach when I heard one, but it was the mijo that finally softened me; he never called me that, almost like he was making a conscious effort not to. While I couldn't in a million years tell him everything— not with the virgencita on the opposite wall, right at my eye level, there to bear witness— the urge to confess still pulsed deep inside my Catholic heart. "I don't like it at school." My mouth felt syrupy, heavy from the whiskey, like I'd been drinking cough medicine instead. "I kind of hate it, actually."

It was the first time I'd admitted it, even to myself; it would've meant proving Curly right, that I was too young and wet behind the ears to strike out on my own, and letting everybody else down. Tim didn't react at all. "The other kids, a lot of them went to feeder schools." The term always made me think of Hungry Hungry Hippos, the board game Dani and I played as kids when it rained, plastic balls popped into the gaping maws where they belonged. "There's private kindergartens in the city that you have to interview for and everything, the parents hire consultants." I'd almost shat myself trying not to laugh when I first heard about that, before the weight of that really hit me, of just how far behind I'd been since birth. When I was five, my parents sure as shit were not spending their hard-earned drug cash on maximizing my Ivy League admissions chances. "I don't even know what I think I'm doin' there."

Honestly, I half-expected him to tell me to nut up and quit making excuses, maybe even hoping for it. That I'd get the catharsis of him telling me that he was as disappointed in me as I was in myself. This was the same guy who'd tossed me into the middle of the lake on our family beach trip, and told me that life was tough, so I'd better start learning how to swim real quick. "I flunked the GED, first time I took it," he said instead.

"I thought you could pass the GED blindfolded."

That sounded a lot ruder out loud than it had in my head. In my defense, he was about the smartest person I knew, and that included most of my professors. "Yeah, I thought so too," he snorted, "turns out it's a little harder when you quit goin' to school around the ninth grade. Ain't no damn IQ test, it don't test no natural brilliance, so much as American Revolution facts. Your daddy passed, though. Buckled down and studied, and I never would've guessed he had it in him, when I ain't never seen him read nothing more involved than the funny pages before."

There it came. "So I need to really buckle down, too." I got it now, this was a lesson about the value of hard work, instead of wasting time making excuses.

I expected to be praised like I was waving my hand in the air in grade school, ready with the right aesop, but I'd guessed wrong, judging by the strange, unsettled look on his face. "No, I mean, if you want to drop out, maybe you should— I am beggin' you to start swallowin' this shit a little more carefully, I do not want to take you back to no ER."

I hacked like I'd poured straight bleach down my esophagus this time. "What kind of pep talk is that?"

"You really don't need to try to figure out what valuable life lessons I'm imparting on you, I'll just tell you." His brows knit together. "I love you."

"Uh. I love you, too. I guess." The back of my neck felt hot, like it'd been branded; I ducked my head and did my best not to grimace. Our relationship chugged along as steadily as it did because both of us avoided these kinds of heart-to-hearts like the plague. I was starting to see why he'd furnished alcohol before he sat us down. "I am really not fixin' to kill myself, I promise."

"I mean, I didn't just keep you around so I could get a redo on your daddy, or 'cause you made me look good in public," he said awkwardly— but I knew he meant it, precisely because it was so damn awkward. "And I don't want you to feel like you have to stick it out 'til the bitter end at a school you hate to, I don't know. Impress me. Not seem weak. You get what I'm saying."

I did, and nodded quick, before he felt compelled to keep adding more sentence fragments. If I was being honest with myself, while there was zero chance in hell of me returning to Tulsa with my tail between my legs, it was still comforting for my eight-year-old self to hear. I'd been praised all the time for being so resilient and adjusting so well, that you never would've guessed that Mrs. Vaughn's favorite lineleader had a drug addict mama and a daddy in El Reno. I never let on that I was well-aware, even at that age, that I was living on other people's charity, or about the suspicion in the back of my mind that I could always be sent away as easily as I'd been taken in.

"I know you think I'm always ridin' your ass," he said, jostling my shoulder and my reverie, "but I'd just like to remind you that Uncle Tim once got you out of jail and tried to keep it between us."

That was actually kind of fucked up, in retrospect. But most things in this family were, and he'd done the best he could, at the time. I drained the rest of the glass.

The house was silent and dark when I got home, giving it the creepy aura of an abandoned building; I was starting to wish I'd just spent the night at my aunt and uncle's, even if my feet dangled off the edge of my childhood bed. A rim of light coming from the hall closet guiding my way to the stairs, I swung open the door to turn it off, and found my mother with her knees hugged to her chest. She looked as shocked to see me as I was to see her.

"Mom? Why are you… hidin' in here?"

It wasn't even the nicest closet we had, illuminated by a single lightbulb, like a police interrogation room in a B-movie. A carpet beetle larva was chewing Swiss cheese holes into one of Dani's old sweaters; a t-shirt with Dolores Huerta Elementary Believes Kindness Counts on it fell off a hanger as I sat down beside her. "It's, you know, nice and peaceful," she said, like she was meditating by Walden Pond and not having a mental breakdown. "Gives me some space to think."

Dust motes floated up into my nose, and I wiped it off with the back of my hand, fighting the urge to sneeze. Something about this reminded me of being a little kid again, in that fugue state after Curly had gotten arrested and before she'd tried to off herself; like eating cereal with her decked out in jewels and chainsmoking across the table, absurd, but a fond memory all the same. It'd been just us for a long time.

"You know Daddy and I love you very much," she said out of nowhere, dead serious. "And we always will, no matter what. We've made mistakes between us worse than anything you could ever come up with."

I almost choked on my own spit; the way this evening was going, I was demonstrating less ability to swallow than your average stroke patient. I hadn't called Curly 'Daddy' since I was about seven years old, and she hadn't talked to me in this kind of goopy tone since I'd learned to tie my own shoes like a big boy, either. "Mom, please don't tell me you're back on the bottle."

I hadn't meant to let that one slip out, with that exact phrasing. But she was acting weird as hell, and the only other explanation was that she'd gotten a terminal cancer diagnosis, and was now frantically trying to figure out how to keep me and Curly from killing each other after her death.

"No." Instead of getting offended, she let out a nervous laugh, and turned away from me to look up at the coathangers. "I'm pregnant, Mike."

A cold, prickly sensation washed over my scalp, like somebody had cracked an egg on it. "Wait— but— how did this even happen?"

She cut her eyes at me. "So when a man and a woman love each other very much—"

Like I wanted to think about my parents still doing that. Gross. "No, I mean, at your age?"

She batted me on the head. "I'm thirty-seven," she said drily, "turns out I ain't quite menopausal yet. Or senile." Then she exhaled hard. "Thirty-eight once it's born. Jesus. They're callin' it a 'geriatric pregnancy' over at the doctor's office, makin' me come in every week, you ain't that far off the mark."

"But how far are you along?"

"Three months—"

"Three months, and I'm just hearin' about it?"

She wasn't the only one keeping secrets, but hers managed to be even bigger than mine.

"I didn't want to distract you at school, you've had so much goin' on," she said, her old, ruthlessly practical self resurfacing, "and, well."

"Well?"

"I didn't want you all mixed up with this, when I didn't know if I was going to keep— oh, don't give me your good little Catholic boy look, Michael, that real scandalized one." She sounded more like she was begging than scolding me. "Old ladies like me who already got kids, we're the biggest customer base, believe it or not."

I couldn't help it— I might've been a quasi-homosexual with Planned Parenthood merchandise lying around somewhere, courtesy of my aunt Bonnie, but I was still that good little Catholic boy at heart. I thought the right to choose was a nice thing to have, sure, but I couldn't wrap my head around my mother being the kind of woman who'd exercise it. For about the millionth time, I had to wonder how much I liked considering myself a good person in the abstract, and how little I liked having to put it into practice. "Does Curly—"

"That ain't your daddy's decision," she said flatly, "it's mine." She kicked away a Sailboats of 1982 calendar we'd gotten for free at the dentist. "He'd understand, even if he didn't like it. But I'm keepin' it."

"Why wouldn't you want to keep it?"

That was a stupid question. I could think of twenty good reasons before I even reached the end of it. "Because—" she threw her hands in the air, letting them land facedown on her slacks. "I don't even know where to begin. You'll be eighteen once it's born, you're already out of the house, livin' in New York; you two aren't even going to be siblings, not really, you'll be… I don't want to say like strangers, but that's pretty much the right word. We raised you, and we've almost raised your sister, and now we're fixin' to start from scratch again."

The baby and I were going to be almost as far apart in age as Curly and I were, which was making me feel a little woozy to contemplate for too long, and not just from the liquor I'd had earlier. Fortunately, I was already sitting down.

"And—"

"And?"

She twisted her wedding ring around her finger and grimaced. "Because I didn't want you to think your daddy and I are havin' some make-up baby now, or a replacement for you… because we didn't do a real bang-up job with you in the first place, for that matter."

I realized, on a logical level, that that was meant as self-deprecation— but hearing that I'd turned out to be such a bad kid, my parents were seriously considering aborting their oopsie baby, wasn't making me feel all that great about myself. "You did fine," I hurried to say, both for her sake and my own. "Eventually. It was mostly pretty good." She sort of got the hang of things by the time I reached double digits, anyway.

"You can be angry with me, you know."

"What?" My gaze snapped back into focus. "I ain't."

I wasn't; even if I was, Curly would've cheerfully crucified me for expressing it, he had a far higher tolerance for me telling him to go fuck himself than he ever would've for disrespect of her. There wasn't anything to be angry about, anyway.

"I mean, I'm not fragile, I'm not going to shatter if you push too hard." Now she sounded angry with me, for some ungodly reason. "I don't need you to always try to protect me. Your daddy ain't even close to the only one who's let you down, in this family. I know that."

"What do you want me to say, Mom?" I was sick of being baited like a bear in a cage and expected not to snap my jaws. "That you're drunk in half my childhood memories, or not there at all? That I used to wonder if you'd finally washed up dead whenever the phone rang? Is that what you want to hear?" Had she been itching for that catharsis for years, waiting for the moment I'd ignite? I felt a familiar tremor coming on, deep beneath my skin, and forced myself to snap out of it. "You were sick. You got better. It doesn't matter to me anymore."

Another woman would've cried, probably; she just gave me a dead-on, incredulous look. I wasn't fooling her. "Do you even believe yourself, when you say that shit?"

"Maybe I will eventually." My knees cracked as I got up from the floor, my joints stiff like a malfunctioning robot's even as I tried to shake them out. The walls felt like they'd cave in on me if I stayed there a second longer. "I'm happy about the baby, really, I am. I'll try to come home more. Buy a lot of gifts."

I was being good and I was being unselfish and I was lying. I wasn't planning on coming home much more at all.