Winnie is the one who needs me most. She’s six months pregnant and today she came back in pretty bad shape. She told me she hit a man’s car with hers and she doesn’t have to tell me that she doesn’t have insurance. I bet she barely has a couple hundred in her bank account on a good day, and now she’s got this baby on the way. She was crying like a baby herself. “I backed right into him,” she said. “And then I sped off.”

She was afraid he’d seen her plates. Maybe he would track her down? She was talking so fast, I could barely understand what she was saying.

Becca walked in from the TV room. “Jesus Christ!” she said. “Shut your cry hole!”

I gave her a look. I didn’t need her interfering. I made Winnie sit down and drink a glass of water. “I’m fucking hungry too,” she said. “Is that weird?”

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.