I followed his gaze, watched as Nelson dove on top of the Twoomey brothers and they all slid down the side of the frozen snow pile, punching each other, giggling.

I looked at Bubba. “We all have our crosses to bear,” I told him.

Nelson tossed Iggy Twoomey off the snow pile into a parked car and set off the alarm. It screamed into the night air and Nelson said, “Uh-oh,” and then he and the brothers burst out in fresh peals of laughter.

“See what I mean?” Bubba said.

I wouldn’t find out what had happened with my credit card until the next morning. The automated operator I contacted when we got back to the apartment would only tell me that my credit had been placed on hiatus. When I asked her to explain “hiatus,” she ignored me and told me in her computer drone that I could press “one” for more options.

“I don’t see that I have many options in hiatus,” I told her. Then I reminded myself that “she” was a computer. Then I remembered that I was drunk.

When I got back to the living room, Angie was already asleep. She was on her back. A copy of The Handmaid’s Tale had slipped down her rib cage and rested in the crook of her arm. I bent over her and removed it and she groaned and turned onto her side, clutched a pillow, and tucked her chin into it.

That’s the position I usually found her in when I came out into the living room every morning. She didn’t drift to sleep so much as burrow into it, her body curling up so tight and fetal that it barely took up a fourth of the bed. I reached down again and removed a strand of hair from underneath her nose, and she smiled for a moment before burrowing further into the pillow.

When we were sixteen, we made love. Once. The first time for the both of us. At the time, neither of us probably suspected that in the sixteen years that would follow we’d never make love again, but we didn’t. She went her way, as they say, and I went mine.

Her way was twelve years of a doomed and abusive marriage to Phil Dimassi. Mine was a five-minute marriage of my own to her sister, Renee, and a succession of one-nighters and quick affairs and a pathology so predictable and male that I would have laughed at it if I hadn’t been so busy practicing it.