“They were in my things,” the Weenie told our mother when he saw it. “They were in my things and they violated my private property. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure they took some money, too.”

Dewy and I listened from the living room.

“I’m sorry,” our mother said. “But they’re boys. They just do these things sometimes.”

“That’s the whole point—they’re just boys. And they need a good straightening out so they don’t grow up to be bad men. This is how criminals are born.”

Our mother appeared in the living room, where Dewy and I had been etching our gangster names into her beloved coffee table. We called it the coffin table, because it was so ugly it belonged underground. Our mother had made it the summer before, during a brief but intolerable crafting phase in which the house smelled continuously of paint and we all went to bed each night with a headache. She’d painted the table a sunset orange, but the paint was now peeling, and chips of it would turn up in our bed sheets and snow boots and, once, the center of a roast beef sandwich she’d packed me for lunch. She claimed to love the table more than anything else in the house, although perhaps deep down she knew it was a failure. She had not made anything since.

“Which one of you did it?” she asked.

Dewy and I looked at each other.

“If one of you doesn’t fess up, I’ll have to assume you’re both guilty.”

Dewy looked at me. He knew I wouldn’t betray him.

“Fine,” she said. “Then you’re both grounded.”

“Grounded?” Dewy asked. “What are we, a fifties sitcom?”

“Don’t start with me,” she said, and then left to report back to the Weenie.

I glared at Dewy. “You could have told her I didn’t do it.”

“We can’t have them pitting us against one another. We’re stronger together.”

I said nothing and continued to carve my name into the table. I wanted to tell the Weenie that I hadn’t been a part of it. That this time, I was the good kid, and that I might, with the proper forces, grow up to be a good man, just like his father and his father’s father and all the other men who came before him.

And then suddenly he was there, in the living room, charging toward us. He grabbed Dewy by the underarms and, with one fluid motion, threw him onto the couch, facedown. Before Dewy could struggle, the Weenie yanked down his pants and administered exactly five sharp slaps to the pale flesh of Dewy’s behind.

“Walter, be gentle” was all our mother could say, and this in barely a whisper. She was standing in the corner, her fingernails in her mouth.

Dewy’s mouth unhinged into a silent scream. He was determined not to yell, but where his mouth could obey, his body could not. The moment the Weenie finished, Dewy let out a fart—high and long and clear as a birdsong. From the corner, our mother began to laugh. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Dewy looked at her and narrowed his eyes.