After a few shows I heard a door open and the bathroom light flick on and the whir of the fan, and I heard pee hit the water hard, splashing down, and I knew it was Frick. He flushed, came out of the bathroom and into the kitchen and plugged the coffeemaker in. He didn’t say anything; maybe he didn’t see me.

In time, everyone was up, and Mom and Paige were talking about what to make for breakfast while Frick sat at the kitchen table smoking and sipping his coffee. Paige made scrambled eggs and Mom made some sausage, the stuff in a yellow box that cooked in the microwave. She made toast, but we didn’t have a toaster so she put it in the oven, and the bread wasn’t really crunchy, just stiff and stale.

Mom turned on the dusty gray boom box, inserted her Elton John CD, and played “Tiny Dancer.” No one talked about the jar, the bite marks. Frick and I ate and listened to Mom and Paige laugh at each other and sing along, their mouths filled with eggs or a bite of toast, until we all finished eating and listened to the song three times.

“Damn,” Mom said, rising, clanking together all of our plates and bringing them to the sink. “Those were some good eggs.”

Paige turned in her chair. “You want to know the secret?”

“Love?” Mom sang.

“No, low heat and a stick of butter.”

Mom looked at Paige slow, how I imagined the eggs had cooked, and in my mind I stared at the thought I’d been thinking earlier, that this morning had seemed like we all had traveled back in time to the day Paige pulled down the driveway in her tarnished Volkswagen.

Butter! A whole stick of it! I could’ve sworn my heart fluttered, all that fat, but Mom interrupted it all when she ripped open the fridge, the door swinging and banging, glass-bottled condiments shuttering on the rack. The door swung back and nudged Mom, whose head was in the fridge, her hands pushing aside dollar-store Tupperware covered in tinfoil. “That was our last stick,” she said.

I didn’t know what was louder: Paige’s chuckling, the squeaky noise Frick’s toothpick made between his teeth, Mom’s loud stomping down the hallway to her room, or my heartbeat.

. . .

In late October, Frick started taking Mom to his camp on some skeejin land twenty miles north. They took me there once, and I didn’t have a good time. All Frick and Mom would do was play cribbage and drink wine from a box while I was stuck walking around outside all by myself with a single toy man, Han Solo, whose blaster I had lost. (I couldn’t bring my black plastic tub with me; only so much stuff fit in Frick’s utility basket.) One afternoon at camp, Frick brought me hunting. He let me use his pump .22, and I enjoyed shooting cans—I felt like Han Solo. But when he brought me out into the woods, he pointed at this small rabbit standing still, this small white creature knowing we were there or knowing it was in the presence of something dangerous, and Frick said, “Go on, before it hops away.” I readied the gun, looked down that small thin brown barrel at the white rabbit, but I couldn’t pull the trigger.