Just last week, the boy had been doing homework at the counter, in the same pose and place as he was right now, tongue jutting and brow furrowed. He ignored Henry, who’d already asked him to get ready for bed twice. Henry clenched fingers into a fist. Watched his knuckles go white. Thought of Papa, then exhaled.

“Junior. Don’t you make me a say it a third time.”

“Don’t make me say it a third time,” Michelle said, her voice toady and mocking. The front door smacked behind her. She made a hawkish strut across the living room, then propped herself against the hallway wall. This blocked Junior’s escape route to the bathroom, where he usually waited out his parents’ nightly showdowns.

“Or else what, huh, Hen?” She smirked, gray yet bloodthirsty. “What you gonna do about it?”

His molars were at the verge of splintering, grinding down a retort. He refused to bite.

“That’s what I thought, ha.”

She winked at Junior. She folded her wrists into her armpits, turning her elbows into bony wings, and flapped.

When she called Henry chickenshit, she lit the fuse.

When she made the predictable sound effect, he exploded.

Their opening jeers collided in the air of the living room, sending them into a tailspin of screaming. They raged on and over each other, and Henry didn’t care if Sandi came to threaten yet another 911 call or eviction—let her come. He didn’t even care that Junior was trapped between them—let him watch, let him see what his mother had become. The boy slid off the kitchen stool and made a run for cover. When he tried squeezing past Michelle’s legs, she squatted, bracketed him between her knees.

Then she hushed. A lower decibel, a new tactic. To secure victory, she used their child as a human shield. Voice wrung saccharine, she asked the boy to hug her, come hold his mommy, like.

The boy reached up, just as helpless to her call as Henry’d been what now seemed eons ago. Down on the floor, rocking their child back and forth, she leveled a weedy grin at Henry, then started cooing a lullaby into a torpedo.

“It’s okay, baby. Daddy’s just angry. Daddy’s just angry.”

Since that night, she’d spent this last week clocked into her second, vacant mode. Things were quieter but no easier. Whenever he tried speaking to her, his sentences traveled as if through saltwater, edgeless and sinking. On the rare occasion she happened to notice his jaw in motion, she would tip her head to one side, gawking at him as if he were a guppy in a fishbowl.