I turned back to the Weenie. “I’m sorry, sir,” I told him. I had never called him sir before, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted, more than anything, to be somebody’s favorite.

And then, Dewy’s voice. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “Not to him.”

The Weenie let go of my wrists. “And there it is. There’s the big man with the big voice. How about you use that big boy voice to say thank you? Can you say it? Say, Thank you for the birthday cake, Mom.”

Dewy glared at him through his mask of frosting. “I’ll say thank you once you stop fucking my mother.”

Everyone went silent. Mom stood above Dewy, the napkin still in hand. I could hear the Weenie breathing—the quiet tick of his wristwatch. And then he was gathering his things: keys, Thermos, the leather briefcase he was never without. He went to stand near my mother, whose chest was moving up and down, up and down. She closed her eyes and we all prepared for him to kiss her good-bye. Instead, he lifted his arms and, without even touching her skin, unclasped the pearl necklace, which he slipped easily into his breast pocket.

He cleared his throat and leaned toward Dewy. “Buddy, I wouldn’t fuck the Queen of England if it meant I had to put up with you for even one more day.”

And then he left.

Our mother took to her bedroom and stayed there through the night—there was no further mention of Dewy’s birthday. When she came out in the morning, she floated down the hallway and into the kitchen, her eyes swollen and pink. She did not say anything but simply placed food onto the table and then removed it when we were finished. She took out the trash and brought in the mail and otherwise performed all of her motherly duties, but she did not look us in the eyes and she did not speak to us. She was like a robot version of herself—Dewy dubbed her AutoMom.

I wanted to do something—hug her or tell her she looked pretty—but I worried it would have no effect. It was one thing to know I could make her miserable; it was another to know I could not make her happy. And so I simply watched as she moved through hallway after hallway of the sadness we had built for her, finding not a single door out.

During those days, the Queen of England appeared in my mind often. I was surprised to find her there, an image of white hair and gold jewelry. I began to repeat the Weenie’s words, testing out different inflections. Fuck the Queen of England. Fuck the Queen of England. I could not determine why he’d chosen her, this emblem of royalty. Did he mean her as she was in her present state—old and wrinkled and surely at the end of her power? Or as she was in her youth—a princess on the brink of authority? Did people even consider her beautiful? Among the pool of celebrities and supermodels, she seemed a bizarre choice. I’d learned about other queens in my history classes, and from what I could tell, most were not standards of beauty. They stared out from the textbook with sharp, brooding eyes and pinched little mouths. They had petite, heart-shaped heads that poked up from ridiculous outfits. Each appeared more constipated than the last. So what exactly had the Weenie been saying to us, to our mother? How exactly did he think she compared to the Queen?