Shelley didn’t believe in making children lick soap for saying bad words or physically spanking or yanking or switching. She and Brent were different this way. He believed the previous generation sometimes knew best and that she was spoiling Jason and Harvey; she thought whipping and all that “spare the rod” shit was barbaric behavior, abominable and sadistic, and did nothing but perpetuate fear and anger and all those terrible weaknesses that feed everything bad in society, and she told him so. Brent had looked surprised, and she wasn’t sure if it was because she had stood up to him or that she had used barbaric, abominable, sadistic, and perpetuate all in one sentence. She usually just said things like “I think that’s fucked-up,” but there had been a recent trial with some people being accused of embezzlement, and she had picked up some powerful vocabulary.

“You are calling someone fucked-up? You?” he asked incredulously, which is another word popular among the lawyers. “Let’s talk about you, Shelley,” he said. “Let’s talk about the way you have lived.”

Who wouldn’t want to cuss? That’s what she said when Harvey was standing beside her bed for the third time the other night. He said he’d had a bad thought and he needed to tell her, that he was worried and he needed to tell her. He’d seen a ghost all dressed in black, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the bad things bad people do. He told her how the Glencoe Munchkins threw rocks and cussed at the people who passed by.

“Of course they did,” she said. “Like I keep telling you, people made fun of them and were mean about things they couldn’t help. They were born with problems, a lot of sad problems.” She sat up and turned on the light. He was bare-legged, his Nemo nightshirt barely reaching his briefs, and she knew she would find wet pajama pants in the sink and a towel over the wet spot in his bed.

“So that made it okay to cuss?” he said.

She turned back the covers and moved over so Harvey could get in. “It made it understandable,” she said. “I understand why they did what they did.” She knew there was probably something he still wanted to tell her and hadn’t, but before she could ask, he was fast asleep, his hand holding her arm. She had to help him get over this problem, but for the moment she allowed herself the comfort of his warm little body beside her and the rhythmic breaths. When he was younger, he liked to pretend they were bears in a cave or the three bears in their little house, and at nap time he would ask to hibernate, a word Jason taught him, and pull the blanket up over his head.