I talked to Dad after dinner almost every night, and he always asked the questions Mom never asked: “How was school?” “What’d you have for breakfast?” “What’d you have for lunch?” “What’d you play today?” “Get any homework?” “What’s your favorite subject there?” Sometimes he’d say he’d send me up a toy. “When this next job goes through I’ll send you up that spaceship.” He always gave me some hope about something, and when I’d forgotten about the toy and moved on, some small action figure would show up FedEx on our slanted concrete steps and then make its way into my black plastic tub with all my other men. The tub was getting full, the lid barely able to click shut.

. . .

For months, Mom mentioned the jar at least once a day. “There’s something about it,” she’d say. “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of it.” Eventually Mom stopped talking about it, because Frick told her to, but then she brought it back up again at the end of the summer when the air got sharp cold at night and Paige showed up in her tarnished Volkswagen. I’d heard the car before I saw it, heard the way the engine whistled and then thumped when she drove it in first gear. Mom and Frick were sitting at the kitchen table drinking wine from a box in hard plastic cups. I ran down the hall and into the kitchen and past Mom and Frick drinking and flung open the door.

“I told you she’d come,” Mom said. I was so happy Paige arrived that I didn’t even care that Mom lied: she hadn’t said Paige would come.

In bare feet, I ran over the sandy sharp-pebbled driveway to Paige and hugged her waist and she hugged me back, ruffled my hair, and kissed the top of my head. “You got taller, you know that, chagooksis?” Chagooksis. Her little shit.

“Well your ears still stick out,” I said. She made a face, wrinkled her nose at me, and then kissed the top of my head again.

Inside, Mom hugged Paige hard, and Frick stood, shook her hand. Paige didn’t say anything to Frick, and after he left I realized Mom hadn’t said anything to Paige about him. I was sitting on the couch, eating an Italian ice and watching The Simpsons. Mom and Paige were smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, and whenever a commercial came on I listened to them.

“Who even is that guy?” Paige said.

“Frick,” Mom told her. Since Mom was young when she’d had Paige—they shared a closeness—Paige had a way of getting Mom to open up, be something other than a mother. Sometimes, when Paige was around, I wondered if Paige wasn’t in fact my mother’s sister, given the way they spoke to each other and the way they fought and the swears they flung toward one another.

“Frick?” Paige said. “What the fuck is a Frick?”

Mom laughed. “His name’s Melvin, but everyone says when he’s drunk he’s always saying, ‘fricken this, fricken that.’”