When Aimée came out of the kitchen with the insane torte she had made, like something you would see on one of those baking shows Joyce liked to binge, Heather put her own cherry on the evening by breaking out the French, which she had learned in school and polished in her own junior year abroad, as the kind of girl who could afford to learn a mostly useless and now politically suspect language. Heather, Aimée, and Chantal got going in a long aside that no one else in the room understood. Or so they thought, until Joyce dialed in, the lady who spent her Saturday mornings reading obscure works of Continental theory in the original. The way Joyce said it sounded like cranky snark, but it got Heather, Chantal, and Aimée laughing so hard that everyone wanted to know what the joke was.

“It’s a secret,” said Heather, looking right at Joyce.

Joyce nodded and smiled, and changed the subject by complimenting Helen and Lou on their parenting skills.

On the way home, Donny asked Joyce what they had talked about.

Joyce explained that they were talking about the Haitian revolution. Not the one that had happened two years earlier, inciting the US invasion and occupation, but the one that happened two centuries before, when Haiti was a French colony. The revolt in which the slaves killed their masters and took over the whole country.

So what was the joke?

Heather was asking Aimée if she could help her secure her own freedom. Freedom from her indenture.

Doesn’t sound very funny to me.

I know, but it was the way Heather said it. Funny, liberating, and a little bit sexy.

So what did you say?

Something about wanting to be free from men. Except I said it in a more vulgar and meaty way.

Teach me.

It means something like bag of dicks, but as big as the world.

7

Donny remembered the interaction a year earlier more clearly now.

“My dad?” said Heather as she stood there in the doorway of Slider’s safe house.

“He and I used to work together,” said Donny. “We met when you were a kid.”

“Donny’s my lawyer,” said Slider. “He got me out of detention, twice. Now he’s helping me with my parents’ case. He’s okay.”

Heather looked like she wasn’t persuaded.

“Sorry, I don’t remember you,” she said.

“It’s okay,” said Donny. “It was a long time ago. And a lot has happened in the intervening years. To all of us.”

She nodded, warily. “I don’t talk to my dad much anymore,” she said. “Politics kind of got in the way.”

“Sounds like my family,” said Donny, trying to make light of it. But what happened to both of their families wasn’t very funny.

“Uh-huh,” said Heather.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” said Donny.

She didn’t answer. She just gave Donny a look.