He. Gregory. She’d told me his name but I didn’t like using it.

“Not after he knew.”

“But yeah?”

“Yeah, maybe. Once or twice.”

“Lord,” I said.

“You didn’t guess?”

“I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“You think I’d leave a little girl behind for no good reason?”

“I knew you had a reason. I never thought—”

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “But he wasn’t all bad.”

She said he was nifty with his hands, a man who made wooden carvings so delicate you had to squint to see all their tiny parts. He was a big man with a big dick. She wasn’t afraid of that kind of talk and neither was I. I could tell this made her feel easy around me. He’d grown up in the dirty sticks of Tennessee and jumped on the first bus he could find, worked for a couple years as a lobster fisherman in Maine. He liked the water. Before that he’d only seen the center.

And he was good at telling stories. Sometimes too good. Winnie gave their little girl a stuffed rabbit one Christmas and she loved it to pieces. Literally pieces, Winnie said. She had to sew back the ears with bright red thread that made the animal look like something from a horror film. That was when her husband started making up adventures: Horror Bunny Makes Breakfast, Horror Bunny Finds China, Horror Bunny Kills the Easter Bunny and Takes Over His Game.

“I didn’t like that last one,” she said. “It had a mean spirit to it.”

“You made up stories too?”

She shook her head. “I’m no good at that stuff. One day she was showing her friends: Look at this bunny from my daddy. Like he told so many stories that it belonged to him. But I gave it to her. It was me who got it. I sewed it up when it was broken.”

I tried to picture a little girl, seven or eight, who loved things so hard she broke them. I imagined jam-sticky hands, breath that smelled like cheese crackers.

“You know,” I said, “you never told me your daughter’s name.”

Winnie paused. She said, “Rita.”

Her voice was messed up like something had gotten stuck in her throat. I could tell why she never told me before.

The wood moaned in the fireplace as the moisture smoked out, wheezing like it hurt from the heat, and the embers got so hot and brittle they sounded like broken glass when I poked them. She looked around for her jacket. This meant she had work. She knew how I felt about her job, stripping at a club south of town.

“The guys don’t mind the belly,” she explained. “Some of them even like it.”

“It’s not about them,” I told her. “It’s about you and your baby.”

Her face got hard. She was mad and she had the right. What did I know about her life? It was hers. It was theirs, really, hers and her baby’s.