I had never told Lisbeth about the night I came home to find her asleep on the kitchen floor. She lay in a heap under the cabinets, like she had crumpled where she stood. Her skin was too white, almost purple. Drool glittered in the corners of her mouth. Her limbs looked odd, uncomfortable.

Lobo came up from the grow room, dirt on his hands.

“What did you give her?” I asked.

“Fuck,” he said. “She must have tried it.”

“Tried what?”

“Somebody brought something. I told her not to. Told her we were going to sell it.”

“Tried what?”

He shook his head, couldn’t keep the twitching smile from his lips even as she lay there, drooling on herself. “Your mama.” He got this look when she drank him under the table; when she danced for him and his friends, bottle in one hand, joint in the other. I had seen her, through the windows, her eyes closed, shaking to music only she heard. Lobo was impressed at her verve. My mama, wound up enough to fly away, a music box dancer. She didn’t belong to me, to anyone. She was barely in this world. “She’s a wild one.”

“Is she okay?” I said.

“She will be.” We bent to her, straightening her back, rearranging her arms. Lobo got a pillow from the couch for her head. I wiped the drool from her cheeks with my shirt. Lobo knew what to do. “I won’t let her do that again,” he said.

I looked up at him. “People don’t tend to try some things just once. You taught me that.”

“What do you know about it? Runt.” But then his face twitched again. He changed. “I won’t let her do that anymore. I promise you.”

That was the thing about Lobo. He was violent, cruel—and he kept his word. I could count on him like a burn: to wound, to fester, to flare up. Then to smooth over everything, like the hurt had never happened. To be a faint scar forever.

There was no plan, no discussion. Jamey put Starla to sleep, singing a country song I didn’t recognize, down on the same bed as Kaylee. The only bed, on the floor.