“I’m in the middle of something,” he said, shrugging her off.

She pouted at him, even though she was a couple of decades past the stage where pouting was even moderately endearing. “Awww . . . come on,” she said. “One drink.” She glanced at me and smiled with blank eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back, my gaze falling to the ring of bruises around the crook of her elbow, the scabby track marks on her skin.

“Hey, Maggie,” Matt said, rapped twice on the bar with his knuckles to get her attention. “No one’s interested in buying you a drink.” He paused, smirked. “Or sampling your dried-up old cunt.”

“Now, come on,” Sam said, but quiet, like he knew better than to contradict Matt. Had learned that lesson the hard way.

Maggie squared her jaw, pushed back her shoulders. But I could see her hands shaking where they rested on her hips. “You can’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I’m gonna tell Jimmy Ray. That’s sexual harassment. You can’t do that no more.”

Matt laughed. “Oh, shit.” He pretended to wipe tears of mirth from his eyes. “Are you serious? You gonna run out and get Me Too tattooed on those saggy tits? Goddamn, Maggie, you crack me up.” He flapped his bar rag at her. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Maggie glanced at me, something timeless and weary passing between us. The world might be changing in some places, but not here. Here it was still the same old merry-go-round of drugs and poverty and women being chewed up and spit out by men. People in other worlds could wear black evening gowns and give speeches about equality and not backing down, but out here in the trenches, we fought our war alone and we lost the battles every day.

I watched as Maggie shuffled off, limping a little in her cheap stilettos. If not for Cal, that could have been my fate, and I had a sudden urge to hug my brother, thank him for the hovering that usually drove me nuts.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” a voice said from behind me. I heard anger in the words, but curiosity, maybe even amusement, in the tone. A shiver worked its way up my spine. Jimmy Ray.

I turned on my bar stool and came face-to-face with my biggest mistake. A lot of people would have fingered Junie for that honor. Getting knocked up the summer before your senior year in high school wasn’t exactly genius-level thinking. But I’d never considered Junie a mistake, not even when I had no idea how I was going to afford her or where my next meal was coming from. Because, let’s face it, my future wasn’t exactly gold-plated before she started growing in my belly. So having her didn’t change much, other than the fact that I had an extra mouth to feed. It wasn’t like I was giving up college scholarships or trips to distant lands by having a daughter at eighteen. I’d never given much thought to what came after high school, had spent most of my time and energy just trying to survive my childhood. And truth was, Junie had saved me from the inevitable slide into my mother’s type of life. I hadn’t cared about myself enough to try and be different. But from the moment she was born, I’d cared about Junie. Loved her enough to slam on the brakes and do a one-eighty.