“I don’t,” Lucy says. “Aunt Kay doesn’t say fuck nearly as often as I do. And while I appreciate you mixing up a batch of your bullshit collagen-producing vanishing cream for me …”

“Vanishing cream? Not hardly.” Carrie’s arrogance puffs her up like a Komodo dragon. “It’s a skin regeneration preparation.” She says it condescendingly. “Copper is essential to good health.”

“It also encourages the production of red blood cells, and that’s the last thing you need help with.”

“How touching. You care about me.”

“Right now I don’t give a shit about you. But why the fuck would you rub copper into yourself? Did you ask a physician if someone with your disorder should apply a topical lotion with copper in it? You keep using shit like that and you’ll have blood pudding sluggishly moving through your veins. You’ll drop dead of a stroke.”

“God you’re becoming just like her. Little Kay Junior. Hello Kay Junior.”

“Leave Aunt Kay out of it.”

“It’s really not possible to leave her out of anything, Lucy. Do you think if you weren’t blood kin you might be lovers? Because I could understand it. I could go for her. Definitely. I would try it.” Carrie touches her tongue to the beer bottle, inserts it into the opening. “She’d never go back. I can promise you that.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m just speaking the truth. I could make her feel so good. So alive.”

“Shut up!”

Carrie sets down the beer as she unscrews the cap from the lotion, sniffs the fragrance, swooning. “Ohhhh soooo nice. You sure? Not even a little bit in those hard-to-reach places?”

“For the record?” Lucy swipes ChapStick on her lips. “I’m sorry I ever met you.”

“All this because Miss Beauty Queen was running the Yellow Brick Road the same time we were. A coincidence. And you go nuclear.”

“The hell it was a coincidence.”

“It really was. I swear, Lucy.”

“Bullshit!”

“I swear on the Bible I didn’t tell Erin we’d be out there at three o’clock. And voilà.” Carrie snaps her fingers. “She happens to show up.”

“Running out there all by her lonesome and there we are and she joins us. Ignoring me like I wasn’t there. Focused only on you. Right. What a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Just like she’s happened to show up everywhere else the two of you have fucked each other, Carrie.”

“You want to talk a health threat?”

“You mean you?”

“Jealousy. It’s toxic.”

“How about lying, which is all you ever do. Over and over again.”