“I don’t know,” he chuckles. “Nobody ever asked me that before. Worked pretty good for me in the clink. Could have been called worse.”

“Yeah, but if you had the choice?”

He is quiet, thoughtful for a moment. I stop myself from filling the silence with smartassery, even though a dozen flippant phrases teeter on the tip of my guilt-tinged tongue.

“They’d call me Mr. Crow Fortune. That’d make me some proud.”

“G’wan ya fool. Come over here and say that to my face, why don’t you. Also, I’m naming our baby Cletus the Fetus unless you can come up with something better.” I hang up before he can say anything else. Because that’s about all the lovey-dovey talk I can handle. Besides, I’ve got other fish to fry.

I call Peggy. I need her and Char to do me a favour.

Peggy’s house is warmer and brighter than I remember, even in the scowling darkness of winter’s last hurrah. Willy came with me to watch Daktari while Peggy and Char set out on a fact-finding mission, to get a sense of just how deep Duke’s rotten streak runs. With Becky not home and no hot dinner ready at five o’clock, Duke decided to go on a bit of a rip. Duke got really drunk and went to a high school hockey game to jeer at the other team and leer at girls half his age. Duke staggered out back behind the rink after the game, looking for trouble. And he found it.

“Stargazer lilies,” Peggy says matter-of-factly as she sits down at the table to pry her boots off her feet. “That was the hum off Skroink. Crow would have been about twelve at the time. I’d catch him eyeing her up and down like an old pervert, and bam! A wall of stench. Stargazer lilies. No one believed me except Effie, and everyone said I was the bitch for divorcing such a fine fella. But I could smell it. Couldn’t even sit in the same room as him after a while. And see Mr. Duke, eh? You were right, Crow. He smelled like rotten meat and puke. Smells like sorry now, though, don’t he Charlotte?”

“Dukie boy didn’t know what hit him! And every single tree behind the rink was cheering you on, Big Mama.” Char twirls and glides across the kitchen, sleeping babe in arms, and stands next to Peggy.

“Jesus, you two, you weren’t supposed to beat him up.”

Peggy laughs. “No? What were we supposed to do? Ask him to pretty please stop smacking his wife and chasing young girls? Cross our fingers and hope he doesn’t do something worse? Or tell his cop buddies what he done and wait for the wheels of justice to start turning in the right direction? I think not. When the world is this goddamn cracked and broken, people like us have no choice. We take matters into our own hands. Speaking of hands, Charlotte, grab me an ice pack from the freezer would ya, dear? Best thing Effie ever taught me was how to throw a proper punch.”