“You think they wanted you around? ‘Always hanging around,’ Mom would say. ‘She won’t stay away.’ ‘Nosing into our business.’ Calling Dad for favors—Christ, like he was your on-call plumber or some shit. Staying over on Christmas like you were a fucking baby. Who does that? None of us did that.” She looked at me. “Yeah. Didn’t you ever wonder why I never stayed overnight for Christmas? Because they didn’t feel sorry for me. I had my life together.” Her face clenched up again and she started crying. “I had my shit together, not you. And they felt sorry for you. And then you loved them so much you just stood there and watched—you let them die!”

Woodenly I turned away from her. My ears roared. Vomit edged at my throat and the lights were ripping at me, leaving tracers in my vision. The house was a nightmare I couldn’t escape. I needed to exit immediately. I wanted air like water. I headed toward the door. “You’re a bunch of shit,” I hissed at her over my shoulder. I could barely say it, my throat was so tight.

“Keep tellin’ yourself that!” she called after me, sucking back snot. Then I heard her footsteps behind me, following. “Bonnie,” she said.

Her voice had changed. Just that quick. “Bonnie. Wait.”

I reached the front door. I was breathing hard and seeing flashes like stars, an annoying number of stars, bursting red and white at the edges of my vision, a deep headache blooming. “What,” I said to her, my hand on the doorknob.

“Bonnie, wait. I’m—I’m sorry I said those things.” Using the sleeve of the housecoat now to wipe her nose. “And—I lost my job. And my apartment. They kicked me out. I need some money, just a little. If not for the house, then for something, somewhere to live. I sunk all my money into taking care of this place, can you give me, like, a couple hundred? Please?”

My voice felt like it was a long way off, quiet, flat. “Eat shit and die, Krystal.”

“Please, Bonnie.” She was weeping now, sobbing. “Please, Bonnie, I’m sorry for all those things I said, and you won’t even miss it, please just a few—”

I swung the door open. “If you come near me again, I’ll kill you,” I said.

I walked out to my truck on stick legs, but I made it, thank god. I made it. The frigid air blessed me.

And then she was screaming after me, running outside after me in her bare feet, telling me to go fuck myself, and that she hated me, too, even more than Geannie and Jim and Hernan hated me, because she had loved me. Because we were family. But I was already blasting the radio and starting the engine, peeling out of there, driving away.

In the mirror I saw Krystal’s wasted shell vibrating with rage, and Geannie and Jim’s house lit from within.

I watched both of them shrink behind me, and then they were gone. Forever, I hoped.