“Mom. Daphne.”

The name hangs in the break in Quincy’s narrative. A sense that Natasha has unknowingly brought a shovel to a grave, unearthed a story she had no intention of revealing. And Quincy, just as shocked to be telling it:

“One afternoon, Grandpa took me to Sandy’s alone. Grandma was getting her hair done up the street at a place called Samhattan Hair. Nobody ever accused our hometown of being creative with the names. She was talking a mile a minute the moment she sat down, and Grandpa and I looked at one another across the waiting area and he winked and I knew we were going to Sandy’s without even asking for it. We snuck out and hurried up the street and the moment we stepped inside, those bells chimed, and I bolted to the closest aisle, leaving Grandpa in my dust. Well…after enough turns, I got lost. Switchbacks come to mind, as if the register at the center of that store was at the bottom of a mountain.”

Quincy seems to be remembering as she’s speaking. There’s no humor here. No levity. It looks to Natasha like she’s weighing whether she wants to know how her own story ends.

“You okay, Mom?” Because she has to ask it. Because she’s never seen her mom look exactly this way before.

“It was the cotton-candy-blue rabbit,” Quincy says, eyes now locked on her glass of vodka. “I came racing out of a row of yellow packages and came to a skidding stop, a couple feet from Big Blue. You know how they say cats and dogs know when something’s wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, well, I could tell right away it was different.”

“What was?”

“The rabbit suit. It was…fuller. Taller. The ears were mashed up against the ceiling and they looked more like hyena ears, folded at the top. Usually the face rested about Grandpa-high. But that day…”

“Oh fuck,” Natasha says.

“What’s worse: The midsection was showing. I’d never noticed before the legs were separate from the belly; I blindly, childishly, justifiably assumed it was all one body, all one real rabbit. But under those shitty lights, there was a human belly showing, above where the legs began. There were other breaks in the suit too: Gloves not quite touching the arms. Feet not touching the legs. And the neck. Oh, the neck was the worst of it. Seeing that human neck, knowing that behind that manic mask was the face of a human being. A person big enough to touch the ceiling was inside that suit. And crazy enough to wear it.”

“Jesus.”

“Christ.”

Out front, beyond the yard’s wood fence, the police radio crackles. Natasha watches her mom closely. It’s like Quincy is literally gaining energy as she speaks. Like she’s revving up an old engine.

Why hadn’t her mom told her this before? More important: Why does it seem like she forgot to?

“I’m remembering things, Nat,” Quincy says. “As I’m telling them. It’s like…everyone told you to forget about a mean motherfucker from your past and you were just young enough to listen to them. Yet here she is…stepping out of the fog on my past. And I see her and I know this was no dream. Nat…there was just one person in town tall enough to touch the ceiling of that candy store.”