I found some leftover Easter chocolate, old and white around the edges. Mostly, we keep our food to ourselves, but there are a few things that have been around so long they’re pretty much up for grabs. Chewing didn’t stop her crying, but it changed the sound a little.

“Did you hit him hard?” I asked.

“It felt hard.”

“But you’re okay?” I pointed at her belly.

“I think so,” she said. “Nothing hurts. Something would hurt, right?”

“You’d know if something was wrong.”

She looked at me, grateful. It’s funny what people need. What’s good enough. She was bawling her eyes out but all she wanted was somebody saying: You’ll be alright, based on nothing, and she’d start feeling better.

Winnie has a history full of capital-letter problems, stories you could make into movies. The first night I met her she lifted up her shirt to show her scars, thick and swollen like fingers under the skin, crossed back and forth like they’d started going one direction until they got confused somewhere and turned around again. Her husband used to snap a belt across her back.

“He wasn’t a good man,” said Winnie. “But I loved him.”

She started sentences like that: He wasn’t a good man but. They had different endings: But he made good money. But his momma raised him better. But he was a real good daddy.

Turned out Winnie had a little girl who stayed when she left. “She knew I wasn’t coming back. She wanted to stay anyway.”

She said the scars itched like hell. They itched worse when she got anxious. Her hands kept sneaking back to scratch them.

I knew something that could help, a vitamin full of yellow sauce. I would’ve given her ginger if we had it, but we didn’t. At least this would help the marks fade. The syrup oozed out like cooking oil and I rubbed it into her scars. Their raised edges guided me like roads. I told her the greasy part would help the scars dissolve entirely.

“Entirely?” she said. She sounded scared of losing them. She winced when I pressed.

“It’s only nerves,” I told her. “They’re coming back to life.”

“How does it get so goddamn cold out here, anyway?” she said. “I thought this was the desert.”

I put more wood on the fire. It came from a broken play set on the back porch that someone took apart for pieces. Most nights we’ve got plenty of junk to burn.

I felt the knots of her muscles and kneaded them back into the folds of her shoulders. She said she could feel the little baby kick whenever I worked a knot back into the flesh. “He can feel it,” she said, “how good it makes me feel.”

She didn’t know it was a boy but she had a strong suspicion. She hoped that living in her belly had taught him to be better than his father. This made me feel sick. What lessons had he learned in there? I had to ask. “He hit you while you were pregnant?”