Then, a party will rage until every soul either leaves or passes out, and I’m content with my send-off. After all that, I’ll probably be tired. And hurting. And ready to go. So maybe I’ll go back to Mama’s trailer alone, and I’ll take a little something for my pain. Maybe a little too much something. I’ll make sure the living-room windows are open, so my spirit — whatever’s left of it — can escape. From the comfort of the scruffy old couch, I’ll watch the sun rise. Then I’ll just close my eyes. The end.

My eyes were, in fact, closed as I described this daydream, the vision of my own end, to Allie. Now, I glance over at her. Her eyes are ringed in smudged mascara. She’s sitting up straighter, her body frozen, her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. My sick, ornery eyes promptly rebel against the new demands of light and shape, and add their own layer of blackness and blur to the details of her face and the space around her. I blink fast, trying to wipe away the sooty smudges in my vision, suddenly fumbling for something to say. But Allie beats me to it.

“Bitch, I told you this mascara wasn’t waterproof.”

I laugh, expecting Allie to do the same but she doesn’t. She starts the car, cranks up the heat to clear the fogged windshield, and flips the wipers to hyper-speed, even though it’s not raining all that hard. Before I can apologize, Allie jacks up the stereo and begins to wail along to some brooding Emo-pop boy band I’ve never heard before. She doesn’t stop singing the whole drive. When she drops me off back at Mama’s, I lean in to give her a hug and am surprised at how swift and stilted her end of the embrace feels with the tranqs and the pot worn off, and her patience for misery and company worn out, too.

“Sorry for messing your makeup,” I say. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m fine. Go hug your mother.”

But Mama’s not home. I expect to find hot tea on the stove, a pan of her famous broc-o-glop casserole in the oven, and a note to say that she’s gone to help Murdena Squires get a bird out of her chimney, or Shirl Short get her head out of her own arse. Instead, Peggy and my uncle Mossy are planted at the kitchen table.

Mossy was born smack dab in the middle of Lucy Fortune’s brood. This was the pregnancy that Black Bernie nearly beat out of her because she was going through the coal too fast for his liking that winter. Mossy was born half deaf, blind in one eye, and roundly diagnosed by the nuns in the Catholic school and everyone in Town as “retarded.” But to hear Mama tell it, Mossy’s the closest thing the Fortune family has to a genius, a borderline criminal mastermind. With a tilt of his head and a pleasant, vacant face, Mossy Fortune could get away with pretty much anything. That face is why Mama and Peggy bore the brunt of an alder switch on their arses when Nanny didn’t believe them that Mossy was the one who tied their starchy, uncomfortable second-hand Sunday school dresses to a tree and lit a grass fire around the trunk. And why the cops would arrest Snooker Burns and Billy Sockets but just drive Mossy home when the three of them got caught stealing.