Marya made no attempt to distinguish the men from one another. It was enough to think of her uncle Everard and remember that he wasn’t her father; that someone else had been her father.

As for Lee, about whom Marya was condemned to think for most of her life, long after he’d married a girl from Shaheen Falls and fathered three or four children . . . Lee was perhaps a brother, after all: closer to Marya temperamentally than either Davy or Joey, her “real” brothers. She hated him, she was terrified of him, in her long passionate daydreams (forgotten for years, recalled suddenly at a later crisis in her life) she plotted against him; but she never forgot him, or looked through him, as she did with other members of Everard Knauer’s household.

Sometimes Lee liked Marya well enough—liked her better, in fact, than he did Alice. (Alice was slow-speaking and slow-moving, burdened by the age of eleven with a precocious womanly flesh; Marya, angular and boyish, was at least capable of holding her own around the house. She didn’t cry.) Sometimes, however, Lee recoiled from her as if he saw something ugly where she stood: Joe Knauer’s bad luck, perhaps.

The Bulldog, Lee sometimes called her. Snot-nose. Fuck-face. Shithead. And sometimes, with a killing simplicity that commingled pity and contempt and a mild threat, you. (“Hey, I’m talking to you, you.” “What kind of a face is that you’re making, you—?”)

He grew taller, bigger, heavier; hard little pimples blossomed on his forehead and chin; his dark hair fell into his eyes in quills; his manner was abrupt, never entirely predictable. He did odd jobs for his father and was said to do them well, when he made the effort. He worked for a while at Cappy’s, a general store that also sold coal, on the other side of the canal; he surprised everyone in the family by buying them Christmas presents with money he’d saved—everything from Grant’s, in Innisfail, only perfunctorily wrapped, but very nice things indeed. (A pink lamb’s-wool sweater for Marya, a little too big for her, with mother-of-pearl buttons. . . .)

After his fourteenth birthday Lee gradually lost interest in forcing Marya to accompany him out into the lot, and in going through the motions of something neither of them would have known what to call. But this was mainly because he lost interest in the family in general—he got around more on his bicycle, acquired a friend with a car, had better things to do than hang out at home. Wilma complained angrily that he didn’t give a damn for her, missing meals, coming in late at night; next thing she knew, he’d sign up for the navy. (This turned out to be true, but not for several years.)