“The other one over there, too busy draining wine bottles to finish her hippy salad. Willy Gimp not in the picture now, eh, Crow? He’s back with the Parsons one, trying to get her off the drugs for fear of Cracker. That baby be born drug-wrecked, ya think?”

“You know . . .” I say, feeling saucy and sounding just a tad slurry. “That is none of my business. None of yours either, Peggy.”

“I’d make it my business if I were you. I’d maybe lay off the booze too,” she says. Then she looks right at me, her eyes glinting with several shades of trouble-making. “Heard you went to visit Sarah Spenser’s a few weeks back.”

“What? No. Where’d you hear that?” I sputter, amazed at how fast the instinct to lie like a busted seventeen-year-old comes roaring back.

“Tell the truth, and shame the Devil,” she says.

“You calling me a liar?” I snap.

“No, but you are lying. There’s a difference. And see, me, eh? I can smell a lie a mile away.”

“Whatever. I had some time to kill so I went there. To introduce myself.”

“To who? Sarah Spenser?” Mama says flatly.

“Yeah. Right after Rosalind died.”

“There’s nothing to be gained there, Crow. Unless you are looking to start trouble with them after all these years.” Peggy cocks her head to the side so that her fleshy freckled jowls shift in an avalanche of ugly.

“Peggy’s right. You’ll get no love from the Spensers. You’d be lucky to get the time of day,” Mama says.

“I’m not after love. I just wanted some . . . perspective.”

“Any perspective those people have is warped all to hell,” Mama says. “They don’t know their heads from their holes. Never did.”

“Yeah, well I just got a little tired of only ever hearing one side of the story.” My throat is squeezing and squirming, yet failing to constrict the emerging emotion. “Is it that unreasonable to want to know that side of my family before I —”

“Don’t mistake your relations for your family,” Mama says. “There’s a difference.”

“I’m just saying, I don’t have much time so —”

“Oh, knock off the terminally ill bit.” Peggy flashes a gum-toothed smile at me. “Your mother said the biopsy wasn’t as bad as they thought, so there’s no need for the ‘Oh, I might die any minute’ nonsense. You’ll probably outlive us all.”

Uncle Mossy just sits there, carefully plowing his mashed potatoes around his plate with the edge of his fork, not a care in the world. Daktari is slumped against Peggy’s heaving, misshapen bosom, in a peaceful gravy-induced coma. But I can feel myself lighting up with some good old Christmas Eve Fortune Family Fight fury.

“Yeah, Peggy, I’m just being melodramatic, eh. What am I getting all bent out of shape for? The attention, probably.” I take another swig of fuel. “I just need to smarten up. Right?” I fix a narrowed gaze on Peggy, tenting my fingers into a steeple, elbows planted on the table, leaning in like I mean business.