“I’ll tell you after I shower,” he says. “Watch whatever you want now, birthday boy.”

“Thanks, Pa.”

“Hey. Want to know a secret?” He pinches Junior’s chin. “Know how much I love you?”

The pinched chin shakes no.

Henry gives another Macho Man flex. Arms outstretched, he is Atlas unburdened but ready. “This much, ooooh, yee-yuh.”

The boy’s giggle cinches into a wince. His hands jerk from the gift to his belly as if he’s just absorbed a jab. “It really hurts.”

The boy’s forehead is a kiln, pink and shining. Henry hopes the worry doesn’t crinkle his voice when telling the boy he’s got an idea. Stepping back into the unlaced boots, he promises everything will be all right, and that he’ll be right back.

$7.55

Motherfucker. The granddaddy of all curses. Henry’d always assumed the venom of the term, its knife twist, was self-evident: it dropped a floodlight on another’s oedipal urge. But now he got it, had been wrong all along. Shortsighted to believe the person at whom the word was aimed would be stung by the accusation of that sick, Freudian presumption that all any swinging dick craved was to ram itself back into the slit it’d come from. Still though, that coke-addled Austrian had gotten the second part right, the patricide bit. Hatred for the father had to be more rampant than lust for the mother. By this logic, he’d overlooked the actual root of the term. Clearly it must have been coined in reference to that most universally loathed figure, both source and rightful target of any and every son’s fury. The father, the original motherfucker.

Henry had been a fool to come home, cash in hand, and step right into Papa’s trap. He should have gone out with Al and the skinnies tonight. He wanted to swill poison and breathe fire. Bleach and sear his insides till all that remained of him was a blind, staggering husk. There was nothing left in his sock drawer to soothe or fuel him. No bottom corner of a bottle. No baggies of dry green shake or cloudy shards. Not so much as a jar of rubber cement. As tempted as he was to hijack Papa’s truck and flee into the night, the thought of Michelle spiked him in place. He didn’t have her address, not even a phone number, so the only way to reach her was the living room computer. Couldn’t risk losing her along with everything else. Instead, he was left to strip to his boxers and pace his room like some caged predator, rabid and famished and stripped of everything except his hate.