“I’m fed up! Up to here!” she saluted her hair-line.

Before my mother asked for particulars, Ursula added, “With Harry.”

That was how adults referred to Mr. Tatta, her bald-headed husband. My mother was relieved to see the bird on my plate as yet uneaten, and retreated with Ursula to the living room, a showroom of crystal ashtrays she would never consider offering anyone to use and carvings of more wounded men on crosses.

I pressed my ear to the door. From what I could understand, Ursula had not had dinner, Harry was drinking, and not at home, for she’d found matchboxes in his pockets when she did the laundry. There was a long silence before she admitted that she had smelt, “Harry’s underwear.”

I cracked the door open to see my mother holding Ursula in her arms, patting her back. I was ashamed that Harry had hurt her so. Had he neglected to wipe when he did a number two? I had sat sideways with my sister to share the toilet once and we began shoving for space then missed. My mother yelled but she didn’t cry about it. I assumed it more forgivable with children.

That is when I learned the unspeakable circumstances of my own father’s death. I had known that he was killed in a car crash when my sister was a baby and I, four. It had happened in Rhode Island, US21, when he was selling insurance policies for The Mutual Insurance Company of Freyburg, the tragedy rendering my sister and I fatherless, and my mother anaemic, or so I’d overheard.

“Paul,” my mother began, Paul Lester was our father, “wasn’ ’lone in de car.”

Ursula stopped crying and stared at my mother in disbelief. “A woman?”

My mother played with one of the ashtrays, and for some time, there was no change in her expression. “All men are jus’ animals,” she finally responded, “dey think wit’ wha’s b’tween deir two legs.”

“But how can you be sure that they were …” Ursula could not come up with a suitable verb.

“B’cause whe’ de firemen, dey go through de chassis an’ find ’em, it was in her mouth,” my mother spoke wryly.

Here, Ursula gasped and covered her own, as if she feared intrusion of a similar sort. What was in the woman’s mouth?

“It was bitten right off. He die on de spot. She chok-ed on it, Peggy Summer, only a youn’ girl, she was jus’ sixteen,” added my mother with no regret, but rather as if the Old Testament God had given the incident special consideration. My mother believed in a personalized God that punished those who trespassed against her, including any salesman who didn’t give her a reduction when she found a defect in his merchandise, be it a blouse, a sofa, or a loaf of bread, yet never seemed to fear Him herself; her personalized God realized she lived in a hard world. What could the girl have possibly been eating? An adjutant brain? An inner leg? We were, I remembered, not allowed to eat in my father’s nauseatingly new-smelling car.