I’m supposed to invite Dulcie Cooper in and make her some tea, I think. But I don’t. I stand there in the middle of the walkway with the milk and the squares and the envelope in hand, until she leaves. It’s nine o’clock at night, and I just want this dizzying, surreal day to be over. As Dulcie’s car clatters down the driveway, I drop back into my moulded seat in the snowbank.

I think about freezing to death. How easy it would be to do, right here, right now, if I just let my exhausted body fall asleep in the snow. I close my eyes, nestling a little deeper into the chill and the darkness. Until the lights of another rig come flooding up the driveway. Dammit. I’m trying to die here.

Moments later, Willy Gimp is standing in front of me, looking at me like I’m six slices short a whole roll of baloney. A blood-orange and baby-blue fuzzball is poufed out all around his pained, tired face. There’s a bottle of wine tucked under his bad arm and a gagger of a joint sandwiched between the band of his Nirvana ball cap and his right ear. I can’t decide if I want to kiss him or kick him in the balls. So I just sit in the snowbank and cry. Mama is gone. Willy is here. And I can’t drink that wine or smoke that spliff with him, and I should probably tell him why. But first, that bastard has some explaining to do.

Sure enough, Chrissy Parsons got back into the drugs, and it was all Gimp’s fault. He gave her an ounce of weed to help her get through the vicious DTs she’d been having ever since she quit drinking. She started drinking to help her quit the OxyContin. She started the OxyContin to help her quit the gambling. And she started the gambling when she quit drinking the last time. The weed scheme was her ticket to hell because instead of just smoking it alone to ease the detox like she planned, she ended up attracting the keen-nosed attention of her upstairs neighbour, Weasel Tobin. The two of them were puffing their brains out in her grimy little basement apartment down The Mines when Weasel got an idea. What if they traded some of Willy Gimp’s weed for something a little crystal meth-ier? Thus, Chrissy Parsons’s highway to hell was paved with Willy Gimp’s good intentions and Weasel Tobin’s bad ideas, and she was on the meth and out turning tricks behind the Pott’s Coffee on the highway.

Until her brother Cracker came banging on Willy Gimp’s door. Cracker Parsons owns a shady construction company, and he has the strongest, toughest, most loyal guys on the Island working for him. He has a half-dozen dirty cops in his pocket. And he is a nutbar. So when Cracker Parsons comes round to say that he noticed you left some old gas cans and oily rags out behind your garage that could catch fire, and that he heard you gave his sister Chrissy drugs even though you knew better, well, you’ll do whatever you can to get Cracker Parsons’s sister out of the trouble he figures you helped get her into. Even if that means pretending to get back together with her for a bit. And pretending you were the one who got her pregnant. And taking her to the hospital when she has a miscarriage. And splitting the cost of getting her into a two-month residential rehab centre down on the Mainland. Then you can sleep again. Your garage won’t mysteriously burn to the ground. And the cops won’t hear your name or Chrissy Parsons’s name when they bust Weasel Tobin and everybody else who didn’t help Cracker get his sister off the streets and off the drugs.