They’d done it on the mattress in the basement of the wrecked farmhouse, and later on they’d done it in the theater, on the pokey little stage where girls in blue dresses and flammable wigs used to sing and tap-dance. Leaves everywhere. The smell of smoke, someone farther up the mountain, checking on their still, maybe, chain-smoking. Reading girly magazines. Biscuit saying, Did I hurt you? Is this okay? Do you want another beer? She’d wanted to kick him, make him stop trying to take care of her, and also to go on kissing him. She always felt that way around Biscuit. Or maybe she always felt that way and Biscuit had nothing to do with it.

He said, “So did you ever tell her?”

“No. I was afraid that she’d go after him with a ball-peen hammer and end up in jail.”

When she got home that night. Her mother looking at Bun natine like she knew everything, but she didn’t, she didn’t. She said: “I know what you’ve been up to, Bunnatine. Your body is a temple and you treat it like dirt.”

So Bunnatine said: “I don’t care.” She’d meant it, too.

“I always liked your mom.”

“She always liked you.” Liked Biscuit better than she liked Bunnatine. Well, they both liked him better. Thank God her mother had never slept with Biscuit. She imagined a parallel universe in which her mother fell in love with Biscuit. They went off together to fight crime. Invited Bunnatine up to their secret hideaway/love nest for Thanksgiving. She showed up and wrecked the place. They went on Oprah. While they were in the studio some supervillain—sure, okay, that fuckhead Robert Potter—implemented his dreadful, unstoppable, terrible plan. That parallel universe was his to loot, pillage, discard like a half-eaten grapefruit, and it was all her fault.

The thing was, there were parallel universes. She pictured poor parallel Bunnatine, sent a warning through the mystic veil that separates universes. Go on Oprah or save the world? Do whatever you have to do, baby.

The Biscuit in this universe said, “Is she at the restaurant tonight?”

“Her night off,” Bunnatine said. “She’s got a poker night with some friends. She’ll come home with more money than she makes in tips and lecture me about the evils of gambling.”

“I’m pretty pooped anyway,” he said. “All that poetry wore me out.”

“So where are you staying?”

He didn’t say anything. She hated when he did this.

She said, “You don’t trust me, baby?”

“Remember Volan Crowe?”

“What? That kid from high school?”

“Yeah. Remember his superhero comics?”

“He drew comics?”

“He made up Mann Man. A superhero with all the powers of Thomas Mann.”

“You can’t go home again.”

“That’s the other Thomas. Thomas Wolfe.”

“Thomas Wolfman. A hairy superhero who gets lost driving home whenever the moon is full.”

“Thomas Thomas Virginia Woolfman Woman.”