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?”

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.