“Daddy, let go a mama! Daddy let go!” That’s all she shouted, as she watched her mama being pulled down the stairs toward the front door, her hair in the grip of his fists. It was raining, and the girls were all crying so . . . their mother looked so tiny in her nightgown and bare feet, battered by the rain on the front porch. There were more screaming noises between the adults, along with the whimpers of the girls, the thrashings of the forsythia ’gainst the screens . . . but when it was all over, and the girls had vowed never to speak to their father again on account of his hurting their mother, all Mama had said was, “You got to leave room for the fool in everybody.”

By the time Sassafrass got back to Highland Park it was late morning. She had insisted to herself that getting caught in the early rush hour was just another debt she had to pay for being a brazen hussy, and she pulled the front door of her house vigorously because she knew more of what she wanted in this life, and Mitch was most of it . . . and he was in there waiting for her. The queer silence puzzled her; usually Mitch would be practicing, or humming to himself while he painted. Sassafrass felt a knot in her heart. She went through each room with more anxiety—in the kitchen Mitch sat nodding out, by the window. She ran to the bathroom . . . blood. Blood was on the bathroom floor again; Mitch’s junkie works were lingering on the sink. And Sassafrass let whole worlds, dreams, and kisses, fall from her eyes. Deftly, almost mechanically, she cleaned up the mess Mitch and some of his friends must have made. She fed the animals, straightened each room, and finally went to where Mitch was sitting, sleeping. She stroked his cheek with her hand; she loved him. She kissed him on temples, on cheeks—each one—and then she kissed his lips tenderly and long. He woke up a little. Sassafrass kissed him again, and one more time he responded. When he was relatively lucid, in the middle of touching his eyebrow with her full mouth, she whispered, “You’re a lousy, stinkin’ junkie, Mitch. I haveta go now.”