“I’m in love, Mother. Life is short. I’m divorcing Susan, not Alex. I’ll always be his daddy, and he’ll spend half his time with me.” He’s talking to her on his cell phone in my apartment, and I listen to the conversation with my head lying on his bare genitals. I lick the head of his penis while he consoles his mother. “Susan will be fine. Everyone in California gets divorced. She’ll be financially secure, and Alex will still have both of his parents plus a wonderful new stepmother. Wait until you meet her,” he says, closing his eyes, his cock rigid against his belly.

After Curtis’s lawyer serves Susan divorce papers, she takes Alex to a neighbor’s house. She fills her car with gasoline and then drives into their snug, weather-stripped garage. She closes the door and drinks a pint of vodka with the motor running; a photo of Curtis, Alex, and her laughing in front of a Christmas tree is on the dash. When Curtis phones to tell me of her suicide, I’m shocked, but then it occurs to me that he won’t have to pay her alimony or divide their assets—we’ll have it all. And then it hits me that Alex will be with Curtis twenty-four/seven now. Artie is right—I’m not the maternal type. I can’t help wishing she’d taken Alex with her.

Curtis flies to Little Rock with Alex and Susan’s body to bury her there. He phones to tell me how awful and sad the scene is there, how much he misses me, and how he wants to get married as soon as decently possible, to create a stable family environment for Alex.

“I can’t take care of someone else’s brat,” I tell Artie.

“You are some piece of work, girl,” he says. “Do you have any guilt at all?”

There’s something in me that cringes to think of Susan alone in her car, breathing in carbon monoxide and gulping down vodka. And there’s another part of me that revels in it, finds a black satisfying thrill in her despair.

“The way I see it,” I tell Artie, “it’s dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest. Susan wasn’t a survivor.”

“Brrr,” Artie shivers. “I never want to get on your bad side,” he says, getting undressed.

“Too late,” I say, reaching for the box under my bed.

Curtis wants Alex and me to get to know each other slowly. We go to the zoo. We go to the beach. We rent Disney videos and watch them at Curtis’s five-thousand-square-foot home in La Canada Flintridge, an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. It’s done in a kitschy country decor that makes me want to gag. I see black granite and silk-covered walls. Chrome and nickel and sumptuous wool carpeting to hide the cliché of peg-and-groove oak.