Quinn feels queasy. Her skin itches. This isn’t the first time Maddie’s asked about her family, but she’s gotten more unrelenting this past year. “You know we lived with my mom when you were little.”

Quinn has not spoken to her mother in three years. She looks at her Facebook almost daily—she had to block her from her own account, but she can log in to her mother’s account. The password is Maddie’s name and birthday.

Quinn’s mother caught Quinn using, while she and Maddie were living with her in the northern Michigan town where Quinn grew up. She said she would have Maddie taken from Quinn if she didn’t stop. Quinn wanted to stop. She thought maybe if she moved away she could start over. She thought, also, if she ended up needing to use again, she couldn’t risk her mother finding out. She drove up through Canada and back down into New York, Maddie crying, getting carsick. She couldn’t afford the city but liked the idea of being close to it. She’d had two grand in savings and took another three grand from her mother. Eventually, she’d sold the car for cash. She liked the quiet and the blankness of the town she found, hoped that there, maybe—separate, different, with none of the people she knew to call for drugs—she might be anything at all.

Of course, she’d eventually found ways to use here, but she’s clean now. Lonely but clean; the only friends she’d made these years were the friends that she’d used with.

“But she doesn’t even call,” says Maddie, still talking about Quinn’s mother. “Did she not like me?”

“How could anyone not like you?”

“Then why doesn’t she come now?”

Quinn looks at Maddie, picks up both their dishes. She thinks of every awful thing she’d do to protect Maddie, to get to keep her, thinks of her mother’s face, all the shitty, angry things she said the day she caught her, thinks of using her mom’s phone while she went into another room with Maddie to transfer her mom’s savings to herself: “Because she’s not nice,” Quinn says, sharper than she meant it.

Maddie looks down at her feet.

3

“What can I do?” Alice says to Henry, fresh from the cold and her two cigarettes: emboldened.

“Quit smoking,” he says.

“Besides that.”

“Wash your hands and cut the pork in thin slices for the tacos.”

“You made tacos?”

“For the kids.”

She walks up to him and stands on tiptoe, kisses his cheek.

“You like tacos, huh?” he says.