“Fuck off,” she said. “But don’t worry, there’s a pair for you too.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” she said, tossing me a faded denim bundle and a white T-shirt. “Grandma laid out clothes for the both of us for tomorrow.” She held out a pair of men’s white briefs, cottony and faded. “Looks like you got yourself some choice BVDs here.”

“Give me those,” I said, snatching them from her. “God, I wonder how old these are.”

“They were probably our grandfather’s,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll be wearing the underwear of a dead guy.”

We went quiet then a minute. Because it was kind of clear who those sunflower overalls Murphy was wearing used to belong to.

“Shit,” said Murphy.

“Yeah,” I said. “Shit indeed.”

I went to the bathroom and put on the underwear and the T-shirt. When I got back, Murphy was already in bed. I flicked the lamp off and climbed into my bunk. I lay there for about an hour, but sleep wasn’t coming. My brain just wouldn’t stop. Because everybody knows that if you want to sleep, you absolutely can’t do it, no way. You have to not want to sleep. At the very least you have to be indifferent to sleep. It’s like a cat. The more you gesture and beg for sleep to come sit in your lap, the less likely it is to actually do it. A cat, like sleep, needs to be ignored until suddenly it’s there, and the next thing you know it’s morning. I wasn’t good at being indifferent to anything, much less sleep.

That night all I could think about was Mom and why she took up with Horace in the first place. It seemed like a bad fairy tale, except instead of a wicked stepmother calling all the shots, we had some bald-headed asshole named Horace.

Mom always had a pretty active social life, to be honest with you. My earliest memories were of Mom lugging me and my baby sister on dates. To the Iron Horse Tavern, to Bill’s Burger House, to the Blue Goose and the Diamond Slipper and just about every other restaurant in the tri-county area. Looking back on things, it kind of made sense. Brand-new woman in town, pretty and mysterious, with two kids in tow. That was prime small-town material. Most folks probably figured she was looking for a new husband, or at least someone to help her take care of those two poor fatherless kids.

And that’s the main thing all the old town gossips got wrong.

Mom wasn’t after a new husband, someone to pay her bills and help her raise her kids. In fact, she swore to Murphy and me when I was seven years old that she would never, ever get married. She made us shake on it, like it was an agreement between the three of us.

“Look at me, kids,” she said, drunk one night, a little slur to her words. “Look me in the eyes and promise me I will never get married. You got that?”