“Goff,” I said. Remembered the whole story and wished I didn’t have to hear it. But Cal was on a roll now, liquor loosening his tongue. “He was always a pain in the ass.”

Cal nodded in agreement. “He took that hat right off my head. Snatched it and dared me to do anything about it. And when we got home, Mama took one look at me and asked where the hat was. Woman never cared what the hell we got up to, could be passed out drunk ninety-nine out of a hundred times we walked through the door, but that one time she had to be paying attention.”

I remembered, too, how my stomach had sunk when she’d asked the question. There’d been a quick glance between Cal and me, followed by the inability to come up with a lie fast enough to ward her off. Her bony hand gripping Cal’s arm, whipping him around to face her while I melted away into the wall, praying for invisibility.

“God, I’ll never forget the look on her face when I told her. The total disgust and disappointment.” His voice morphed into our mama’s nastiest drawl, and my skin rippled. “‘You let somebody take what’s yours? You walk back in here still standing upright? Still breathing while that little asshole is out there wearing your hat? What’s the matter with you, boy? Nobody takes something of yours, not if you’re alive to stop them.’”

The real lesson had started after the tongue-lashing, when she’d grabbed the mittens off Cal’s tiny hands, told him to get them back, not to let her have them. What kind of weak, pathetic pussy was he to let her take his mittens? It had ended only when she’d beaten him to a pulp, thrown the mittens in his busted-up face. Crouched down in front of me where I cowered in the corner and slapped me hard. “Never let anybody take something from you. You hear me? You get it back or you die trying.” One thing you could say about our mama: Her lessons stuck. I’ve never forgotten a one.

Cal pulled his wallet and his badge from his back pocket, threw some twenties on the bar. “You know, she’s the reason I became a cop,” he said, rubbing his fingers over his badge. “Mama.”

“Because you were hoping that someday you’d get to arrest her sorry ass?”

Cal smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “You and I both know, she’d kill me with her bare hands before she let me fasten cuffs on her wrists. Nah, I did it because I wanted to go a different way. Prove to her, and myself, that she doesn’t know everything about the world. That not everything is ugly. Not everyone is bad. That I could still do some good.” He heaved himself off his stool, shrugged away from my hand when I tried to steady him. His laugh was like a cracked branch as he staggered toward the door. “Turns out it was a colossal waste of my time. Because that old bitch was right. About all of it.”