When Annie was twelve, her mother stepped out of the salon for her lunch break and never came back. She was hit by an oncoming truck, her body thrown to the other side of the intersection. The crosswalk’s light had been red. Coworkers, neighbors, whispered. Annie’s mom was known for taking a few morning nips on the job, but she could always cut a straight line, and who wouldn’t drink, knowing the man she was married to? They murmured that maybe it wasn’t an accident at all, that she’d gone to fatal measures to escape life with her husband, with all those children.

Shortly afterward, Annie’s dad was shot, and all his physical rage channeled into verbal assaults, mostly toward Annie. But Annie could take it, had to take it, would stand with eyes glossed over as he hurled gruff, barbed words at her. She had those friendly voices inside her head to keep her company.

As she got older, these friends would, on occasion, make themselves known, would glide out of her head so she could see them, dazzling and effervescent. Cherishing her. Loving her.

One Friday she comes home early. The Kellers are going into the city with Suzy for the weekend. Annie’s hair is drying from the lake, her bathing suit in a little plastic baggy, her toes painted different colors with the polish from a kit she bought Suzy. Out front on the browned lawn, her brothers Silas and Louis, eleven and twelve, are drinking beers from a Styrofoam cooler, slurping them down like water. They aim their BB guns at Annie as she approaches. The youngest sister, Gabriella, nine, a can of Coke clutched to her forehead, looks up at Annie, wiping her nose with her hand. “AC broke.”

By the front door, the old basset hound gazes at Annie with filmy eyes, panting quickly and painfully. The water in his bowl is yellow, tinged green. Urine or beer, Annie can’t tell.

When she pushes the screen door, there’s immediate resistance, the heat a blockade, seemingly so tangible that Annie swears that she can see the air pulsating.

But it’s the smell that gets her, so putrid that she coughs, gags, her lids closing, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes as the smell sears her nostrils. She waves her arms in front of her, feeling her way into the kitchen.

Beyond the dirty dishes, the crumbs littering the ground, the fly dying belly up in day-old jam, the windows too tight in their frames to pry loose, is the room with the blaring TV and the couch, where her father sits day after day with his bad leg propped up on the ottoman, methodically moving his hand from his crotch to his beer, a dance for the ages. Annie can’t decide whether she likes him better this way or when she was younger, when even an inhaled breath from him ignited terror.