That van with the film crew drove by up the road, and I wanted to yell to them to call the police but they passed by too fast and didn’t see me. It was a dead-end road, and so they’d have to come back.

I grabbed my shoe by the front door and threw it at Frick, and he turned around and pushed the fridge over and stepped over all the sprawled foodstuff and shattered condiment jars and he came for me. He took only one or two steps before Paige hit him over the head with the woodstove’s ashy fire poker. She screamed and shook and swung and screamed and shook and swung and screamed and shook and swung, and when I stepped over to her bashing his head she stopped and then swung once at me but then lowered the thick metal stick and said, “Don’t tell her,” and I grabbed the metal and took it from her hands and dropped it with a bang onto the linoleum.

A car honked, and Paige looked to the window. She pushed me aside and went out the back door. I followed her—I didn’t look at him lying there—and standing on the steps I watched Mom’s trunk pop open. Mom got out of the car, and she said to me, “Get some bags, gwus,” and to Paige—who walked down the driveway toward the car—she said, “I got your favorite, doosis. It’s already de-shelled. Wasn’t cheap.”

I walked toward the car but stopped and stayed on the steps. Plastic bags were crinkling as Mom grabbed some from the trunk.

“Don’t go inside, mumma,” Paige said.

The plastic bags stopped crinkling.

“Don’t go inside.”

“What’s the matter?” Mom said, and Paige started sobbing and tried to hang off Mom like a child, but Mom could not hold her up.

“What’s all over your face?” Mom said.

I didn’t realize it until then—and I didn’t know how long I’d been doing it—but I had my hand over my mouth and I was biting my palm. I was bleeding, and I wiped my palm on my jeans.

I walked down the steps but did not go to them. “She didn’t mean to do it,” I said. “She didn’t mean it.”

“Didn’t mean what?” Mom tried to escape Paige’s holding. The van with the film crew came back down. Paige was screaming, crying, saying, “Don’t go inside!” The van stopped and the window rolled down, and the driver—an old white man with a gray beard—asked if Paige was all right.

“You mind your fucking business,” Mom said to him. “You’re a little far from the sacred fire, aren’t you?”