Fellis turned down the TV but didn’t take his eyes from it. “You quit?” he said nonchalantly.

I thought that shit was funny and I cracked up. Quit!

“I didn’t quit, dummy,” Beth said. “The whole store had to shut down for the day. Something’s wrong with the septic, and all the aisles smell like chagook. Worse than those caterpillars.”

“No way,” Fellis said, and he turned the TV back up. A new episode was starting. “Dun nun nun,” Fellis said. “Tktktktktktktktkt, dun dun dun DUN.”

I laughed.

“That show’s so stupid,” Beth said, and she left us and went into the kitchen.

While we watched The People’s Court, Beth baked chicken and made a green bean casserole, and while each cooked, she’d come into the living room and watch the show with us. Every case that came and went, Fellis would say, “Guilty!” and he’d slam his hand on the coffee table between us and the TV. “That motherfucker is guilty!” It didn’t matter if the people were innocent or not.

As the cases came and went—as Beth walked back and forth from the living room to the kitchen—Fellis and I said, Fuck Judge Milian. We’d deliver the verdicts. A young mother in a pink blouse and jeans was suing her neighbor, a tall pale man, for running over her daughter’s bike. When the judge pulled the young daughter up to the stand and questioned her, the judge discovered that the little girl had left her bike in the road on accident.

“Lock her up!” Fellis yelled.

“Give her life!”

“That young lady’s trouble!”

“Why’s the phone off the hook?” Beth said.

“Hold on, Beth,” Fellis said. “I need to hear all the facts to the case.”

The moment that phone went on the hook it rang.

I hit Fellis’s arm. “Turn that down, I want to know who it is.”

“What the fuck,” Fellis said, and he turned the TV down.

We listened, and Beth was talking but I couldn’t hear anything.

“Satisfied?” Fellis said, and then he said, “Hey, what’d your girl want anyway? She coming over?”

“Turn the show back on,” I said. Whoever Beth was talking to, it wasn’t Tabitha.

Fellis turned the show back on, and Judge Milian banged her gavel. “Verdict to the plaintiff—”

“Fellis!” Beth said.

“For fuck’s sake, Beth, what?”

Beth stood in the living room, the phone to her ear, its tan cord taut.

“You got your auntie all upset,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Fellis muted the TV.

Beth spoke into the phone. “I’ll come get you and Lily,” she said. “I’ll give you one of my Ativans so you can calm down. Yes, I’m coming right now.”

Beth brought the phone to the hook and hung it up.

Fellis was standing up. “What I do? Why does she need an Ativan?”

Beth slipped her shoes on and grabbed her keys. She opened the front door, and I smelled the dead caterpillars. “You gave her my Adderall,” she said.