“With Jimmy at least I’d been able to get nine credits at night, but while I was living with this man, I wasn’t able to do anything—anything. Finally I had an idea, and I put it to him: either we marry or we break off. He laughed. At last it came to me: he thought I was an idiot. We were in a bar and I started to yell at him. He threatened to hit me and I told him to go ahead, that I would have him arrested. He said something about picking up my clothes and then he walked out. I couldn’t move. I got drunk and a man tried to pick me up. Have you seen a sober man try to take advantage of a woman who is falling-down drunk? Leering and sneering and waiting, you can see the sadism written on his face. I was so furious with him and the other bum, I started to curse, you know, muttering to myself. All I wanted was someone to love me. I remember looking in the mirror and calling myself a little shit, over and over. I had to get it out of my system. The stool I was sitting on had a top that came off. I got up, pulled off the seat—it was heavy—and threw it over the bar. It barely got over the bar, and it went off like this—” with her hand she traced an arc to the right. “It hit a pyramid of bottles and glass shelves and managed to touch the bottom of the mirror, four by six feet. Glass came down in an avalanche, and there was the bare plywood underneath. We all stared at it, and the bartender looked at me as if I had pulled off his toupee. Then some man grabbed my arms and they called the police.”

She stopped for a sip of milk. They were having the roast beef. She had seen venison on the menu but he had told her to forget it. It was commercially prepared frozen deer meat brought up from Pennsylvania because people expected to see it during the season. Her milk was more doctor’s orders. She had told Leland that it was richer than the milk in Port Smith. He had forgotten.

“Women’s prison again,” she said, holding the glass. “They ran some tests and, as I learned when I faced the judge, field workers checked on me. My parents had had enough. The first time I saw them in, I don’t know, six years, was at Colin’s funeral. I see them regularly now, I guess: I went there for dinner once and they visited me once, that’s all. Hold it.”

She opened her purse and looked through it, Leland thought, for a handkerchief. Out came a bottle of red capsules. “Iron and calcium. If I don’t take them my teeth will fall out.”