“Thank you for the unsolicited advice. Have you seen it?”

Don shakes his head. “What do you need it for?” he says, and his voice is strange—a false attempt at levity. “Who are you trying to call?”

Elizabeth sucks her teeth and breathes slowly as if through frustration or pain. “Why does it matter?” she spits out impatiently.

His empty glass slams down on the table. “It matters if you’re trying to call a lawyer to divorce me, or the police to kick me out, as if I’m some stranger and not the father of your own son!” With one step he is directly in front of Elizabeth, and my mother has opened her mouth wide as if to call him out but does not know what to say.

Then he pulls Elizabeth’s cell phone from his pocket and smashes it on the floor, where the glass screen cracks and bits of the plastic case skitter off across the tiles. He crunches his heel into it, and the screen flashes erratically before going dark. “There! There’s your phone.”

Elizabeth’s face is a mask of fury and horror, and behind Donovan my mother has pulled the cork from a nearly used up bottle of wine and is emptying its contents into a glass. A dribble of red runs down the length of the bottle and leaves a spot on the kitchen table. I cannot believe she is pouring herself a drink right now and am almost ready to shout her down, her and Don both, to ask why she needs to retreat into her own little world when anything goes wrong, why she can’t stay out here with the rest of us, why she can’t help us, for goodness’ sake, her own daughters, and I think I might be even more angry at my mother than I am at Donovan.

But Don is pulling Elizabeth closer to him, laying a hand possessively on her belly.

“Take your hands off me,” Elizabeth growls.

He doesn’t move. “I’ll put my hands wherever I like.”

Then my mother smashes him over the head with the business end of her empty wine bottle.

Is this the rope my father used to hang himself?

It is all I can think about as I tie Don’s hands behind his back, around the back of the old wooden dining chair.

Elizabeth’s arms are wrapped around her belly, and her face is pinched and white. My mother shuffles back to the table with hands wet from washing and a sterilized needle. I bend down to secure Donovan’s ankles to the legs of the chair.

A cut bleeds sluggishly over his brow from when he went down, hitting his head against the sharp edge of the kitchen counter; there is more dark, tacky blood matting the hair on the back of his head from the wine bottle. My mother stands over him and begins stitching him up.

“What are we going to do with him?” I wonder aloud when he rouses, groaning, trying to pull his head from my mother’s needle as she gives him a sharp rebuke to hold still. When she is finished, she steps back, and though it has been many years since my mother has stitched up a wound, her work is excellent—tight, small, even little stitches that hold the gaping cut closed. He’ll hardly scar, I think.