But loving her like this was grueling. That none of his efforts to heal her had succeeded, let alone been acknowledged, lacquered him in a tarry resin of frustration and inadequacy. Every night that she came stumbling in, too pilled-up to speak or open her eyes, another ounce of his apparently finite patience burned away. Recently, its fumes had begun steeping into something bitter and vindictive. It took all his strength to quarantine what remained of his sympathy away from this new and burgeoning scorn, festering and spreading through him like a cancer. In an attempt to replenish his affection and patience, he forced himself to review the reasons to endure, to salvage her.

Naturally, the first was Junior. Michelle remained the mother of their son, whom Henry refused to let suffer a motherless childhood.

The boy was at the kitchen counter wearing two fleece sweaters and a red flannel scarf when Henry got home from the bank. Junior sat hunched over a splash of papers with a crayon jiggering in a gloved hand, his tongue jutting out the corner of his mouth like a cartoon thermometer. Henry asked if Mom was home.

“Went out.”

“She say where to?”

“No,” the boy told the crayon. “Just out.”

A familiar, exasperating drill. Henry was furious that she’d up and left the boy alone yet again, and even more furious that she might be right—Junior was such a good boy, she’d insisted, that he didn’t need their constant surveillance. But the boy was just that—a child, a second-grader—and where the fuck else did she have to be? If she didn’t have a job, then she didn’t have an excuse not to be right here, right now. He imagined her staggering in later tonight and their ensuing inevitable skirmish. How her eyelids glossed like boiled shrimp whenever she was high. How she was reduced to curbside slush, all her movements dwindled down to an April thaw. How coolly she deflected all his pleas and recriminations with her almighty ha.

Besides Junior and the debilitating fear of failing and losing Michelle forever, Henry’s list of reasons to endure was short, restricted to memories. There were sporadic moments when a resemblance of the person she’d been would flicker over the husk of what was left. A rare, earnest slice of her shadow smile. A note of her falsetto chuckle. A stomp of her tough, clunky stride. Those occasions when she whispered sorry with such fragility that he actually believed her, even if only for a second.

Recently these glimpses didn’t reinforce but instead shattered his resolve. It was devastating to witness how the enthralling, complex spectrum of her former self—the one he’d loved, the one he now so missed—had been cleaved in half, leaving only two modes: violent or vacant.

There was no reasoning with either.