And then there was life—Michelle. Slumped in an aluminum lawn chair, she sat with her legs sprawled as if sunbathing, though she was covered in the same getup she’d worn every day back at inpatient: a hoodie zipped up to her clavicle, tattered blue jeans seemingly held together by an orthodontic arrangement of safety pins, and the same pair of Doc Martens, only now with laces running slack from their eyeholes. She’d since dyed her hair a peroxide blond, and a stripe of black roots ran like a flattened Mohawk down the part of her hair. She looked so resplendent that for the first time ever he wished he was creative, or artistic. Not for the sake of capturing this image in a painting or photograph for longevity, but to sing her praises. An ode, a tribute, a war cry, no—he wanted to write her a symphony.

He had to get his shit together.

When he beeped the horn, she stirred and shot him a grin full of that cool restraint he couldn’t muster himself. Then again, she’d probably spent more time training her lips to remain pursed over her gray teeth. She folded the lawn chair flat, shoved it past the wood lattice brimming the underside of the trailer, took a bong rip, then set that behind the lattice, too. Pewter smoke oozed a hazy aura over her. As she approached, her loose-boot trot thumped with all the clunky defiance he remembered. The only flicker of timidity escaped when she tugged her sleeves past her fingernails, gnawed stubby and raw.

As soon as the passenger door shut behind her, he was slapped by her tart scent, now laced with weed. The sleeves drooping past her wrists reminded him of a praying mantis. In the bathroom mirror, he’d practiced saying Hey, aloof and unmoved, for a solid fifteen minutes. But now his throat was a knot, and so she spoke first:

“The fuck happen to you?”

“Huh?”

She rubbed his shaved head. “Kamikaze boy.”

And that was when things went fuzzy, melty, even before they’d started drinking. She suggested they go to a place she knew just a mile down the road. Nothing special, a spot that catered to the weekend rush of out-of-towners killing time with lite beer, SportsCenter, and lap dances, while their wives and kids braved the crowds and hunted for bargains up the street. Since Michelle’s older sister worked there, they could both get in and get served without getting carded. It sounded like a splendid idea, which Henry now said—sounds splendid—in total earnest and regretted immediately.