“Explains itself.” Then he turned around and said, “As for your porch, you might look into painting it. Before all the wood rots.” He went back in his truck. It backed out of our driveway and looped around and drove away.

Gloria slammed the door. “Who does he think he is? Talking to me like that.”

I took some big breaths. My heart slowed down. I was glad he was gone. Gloria was glad too I think, but she wasn’t smiling. She went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table and ripped the envelope. There was lots of paper inside.

“This don’t make no sense,” she said. “It don’t make no sense.”

“What, Gloria?”

“It’s from Telly.”

“He’s coming back?”

She wiped some wet off her mouth. “No, no. No. He didn’t understand me. Not one pinch. We had such a lovely dinner. Everything was figured out. Now these papers. These. He—he wants to make things official.”

“Like getting married?”

“God help me.” She threw the papers on the table. “How dense can you get? We’re already married, you idiot.” Then she crunched up the papers in her fist. “This pile of trash says he wants to get divorced.”

Gloria got up and stomped around the kitchen. Chicken was right behind her. She was mumbling. “He didn’t understand a single word I said. He wasn’t even listening.” She went back to the table. She smoothed out one of the pages in her fist. She talked slow. “Disso-what? Dissolu of marital. Dissolution of marital assets? What does that mean?”

I burped. I didn’t feel good inside.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god!” She slammed the paper on the counter.

I looked at Gloria. I opened my mouth. Clouds in my head got thick and dark. I couldn’t see through them.

“Your father. Your bastard father! He’s going to sell my house.”

MAISY

After those papers came, me and Gloria didn’t go out for a lot of days. She told me chicken pox was coming. I wasn’t itchy, but she said, “I got a sixth sense about these things.”

I stayed in my pajamas and Gloria banged around the house. She talked loud but she didn’t talk to me. She said, “I bought this. Out of my hard-earned dollars. He never had a cent, not one red cent, and now he wants to take it away?”

She rubbed her head a lot. I saw her put her hands on the wall like she wanted to know if it was cold. Sometimes she went outside by herself and walked around and around the circle. Aunt Erma and Mrs. Murtry and Mrs. Spooner came out and waved at her. She didn’t wave back. She just stopped by the red fire thing near the bus stop and didn’t move.