I had on a T-shirt and gym shorts, the elastic waistband of the shorts bulging and stretched out. I had one hot, red ear from an hour on the phone with Kiffany, who lived two blocks away, more toward downtown New Haven, and I’m running over there in my flip-flops with this gun tucked into my shorts. Don’t ask me to explain the state I had reached by the time I headed over there. Sometimes love is not what it’s cracked up to be. I had this idea of using the gun as a prop, actually to lighten the mood of our quarrel, like, “Why don’t I just kill us both? Why don’t you just shoot me, or I’ll shoot you?”

An old guy in a station wagon had his turn signal on and was pulling toward me—I realized then that I was walking across his driveway—and I hurried up a step so he could turn. The gun fell down my shorts. It hit the ground and broke. They said it was identical to the real thing except for the lighter mechanism. Obviously not. The old man looked at it and looked at me. I grabbed the three biggest pieces and ran up to Kiffany’s house and went in.

We started in on the same fight we’d been having on the phone. Kiffany said, Hold me; Kiffany said, Let me go. I let go of her, all right. I was frustrated, and we were both so tired of fighting—I let her go kind of through a doorway, like, Get away from me, so she could maybe go sit in the other room, where it was cooler. Except the door was closed—a swinging-type door with no knob. I forgot to look, and she found that out with her nose. Well, more her forehead. Afterward, we both cried and she put ice on it and I left and went home and she didn’t press charges on me. That’s when I knew it was time to take a break.

My brother called then. It had been a while. Dave’s my older brother, and I could tell him my problems. He listened. Then he said he had a reason for calling. He had something to tell me—good news. I said I didn’t think there was any good news left. He said, “Hey, Vince, Denise is pregnant.”

“Wow—shit,” I said.

“What do you think?”

“That’s a major event,” I said.

“We’re pretty happy,” he said. I asked him how long before it would pop. He said seven months.

“You got enough money for it?”

“Yeah.”