Soon Mom was outside, chanting, “What’s happened? What’s happened?”

“Quiet,” the Weenie told her. He wrapped the wound in a towel and led Dewy to his truck. Throughout the process, he kept calling Dewy a moron. A goddamned moron with mush for brains. Dewy, who at the age of eleven rewired the lights so that when our mother turned on the oven, the radio would tune to her favorite oldies station. He was now a moron. A goddamned moron. Part of me was thrilled to hear it.

After the hospital, we sat down for dinner as if nothing had happened. Mom was too frazzled to cook, so she put a frozen lasagna in the microwave and gave us each a cup of fruit cocktail—the good kind, with grape halves and maraschino cherries. We were silent except for the Weenie, who thought it an appropriate time to regale us with stories of his father’s heroics. His father had gotten his ear blown off in the trenches of Normandy. His father had pulled a little girl out of a house fire by the ponytail. His father had once sailed from Florida to Cuba on a boat made from old apple crates. This, he seemed to be saying, was the kind of manhood boys like us would never achieve.

Meanwhile, Dewy refused to eat. The tip of his right thumb was gone, lost somewhere in the yard. On the way back from the hospital, the Weenie had explained that if we didn’t want to continue helping with the fort then we didn’t deserve to have one in the first place. He’d use the extra wood to build our mother a garden bed, and that would be that.

Our mother had nothing to say about any of it. She ate her dinner and then carried our dirty dishes to the sink. All the while, the Weenie watched her movements, a predator tracking his prey. When the dishes were done, he led her into her bedroom. It was not even dark before Dewy and I could hear his growls, our mother’s whimpers. Like something being eaten alive.

The Fourth of July came and went, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. There was an incident involving a Roman candle and a catapult Dewy and I fashioned from the fort scraps. I wanted to forget about it—to move on—but the Weenie now had a scar above his lip, and every night we had to watch as our mother rubbed tea tree oil onto the wound.

By now the Weenie understood that Dewy and I were not normal children, and that ours was not a normal household. “You do know you’re the parent, right?” he’d tell our mother. “You own them. You made them.”

Our mother could only shrug and tell him that she’d tried. It had been hard, raising us alone. She had done her best.

“That’s fine, but I’m here now,” he told her. “Let me do my best.”

Not a day later, Dewy took the Weenie’s wallet, inside of which he discovered a picture of a woman—a pink-faced, double-chinned creature with a crown of orange hair. Who the woman was, we didn’t know, but Dewy cut out her face, which he proceeded to paste onto a picture of a piggy bank. He then taped his project to the refrigerator and waited.