He stepped back, his head shaking, looking toward the other room where Maddie sat. “Useless bitch,” he said.

Hours later, Quinn and Maddie hadn’t talked about it. He’d gone back into her room to get his shirt and keys and phone, and he’d walked out, and Maddie hadn’t looked up from her book. Quinn had folded laundry, done the dishes, reorganized the stack of books by Maddie’s bed onto her shelf. She’d let her stay on the couch all day reading, playing on her phone, instead of forcing her outside. She checked on the pills that day only once. She gave Maddie a plate of salami and sliced cheese for lunch so she could eat it still holding her book. For dinner they ate leftover takeout pizza and watched Home Alone, Maddie falling asleep on the couch next to Quinn. When Quinn took her into her room Maddie woke up and looked at her.

“No more useless men,” her daughter said.

Sometimes, on these nights when Quinn can’t breathe, she thinks of walking the two blocks to the nearby bar to have a single beer to steady herself. She’s done it twice, and no one got hurt and everything was fine. She didn’t relapse. Maddie was safe and warm in bed when she got home. There was something thrilling, even, after all those days and weeks of doing all the things she knew she was supposed to do—BEING A GOOD MOTHER—to just stop it, to sit quiet and alone and pretend that she was someone else.

Instead Quinn goes in Maddie’s room a final time to move the book in her bed to her nightstand, pull her covers over her feet. She gets in bed and pulls up a Housewives show on her phone and lets the women yell next to her face until she passes out.

4

Henry opens a beer in the kitchen, anxious. Out the window, he can see the outline of the barn and starts to think of what he’ll do once he’s free to get to work. Next to him is The Evolution of Beauty, an extraordinary book, exhilarating, about the impact and the power of female preference based on beauty, the actual restructuring of the interior of female ducks in order that they retain reproductive agency.