They played house together, and she enjoyed playing dress-up with Kathy when her mommy wasn’t there. They’d put on Dorothy’s clothes and shoes and hats and pretend they were singing in the nightclub. Most of all, Christene liked to draw pictures for Kathy, but she didn’t do it on the walls anymore. Dorothy got her lots of paper and crayons, and everyone said how good Billy was at making pictures.

Dorothy was worried when Johnny came home from the hospital. He seemed me when he played with the children or tried to work up new songs and routines for the show, but when her back was turned, he’d be on the phone with the bookies. She tried to stop him, but he turned on her, cursed her and hit her. He moved out to the Midget Mansions Motel, missing Christmas with the children and Kathy’s third birthday on New Year’s Eve.

On January 18, Dorothy was awakened by a call from the police department. Johnny’s body had been found in his station wagon, parked outside the motel, with a hose leading from the tailpipe into the back window. He’d left an eight-page suicide note attacking Dorothy and giving instructions to pay a few personal debts from the insurance money.

When Dorothy told the children that Johnny had gone to heaven, Jimbo and Billy went to the window and looked up at the sky.

The following week the loan sharks said she’d better pay up Johnny’s six-thousand-dollar debt or something would happen to her and the kids. She fled with the children, first to the home of her sister Jo Ann Bussy in Key Largo and then back to Circleville, Ohio. There she met her ex-husband, Dick Jonas, again. After a few dates and promises that he would change, she remarried him.

(3)

Billy was almost five when he went into the kitchen one morning and reached on tiptoe to get the dishtowel from the counter. Suddenly the cookie jar standing on it came crashing to the floor. He tried to put the pieces together, but they wouldn’t stick. Hearing someone coming, he began trembling. He didn’t want to be punished. He didn’t want to be hurt.

He knew he had done something bad, but he didn’t want to know what was going to happen, didn’t want to hear Mommy screaming at him. He closed his eyes and went to sleep …

“Shawn” opened his eyes and looked around. He saw the broken jar on the floor and stared at it. What was it? Why was it broken? Why was he here?

A pretty lady came in, glared at him and moved her mouth, but he heard no sounds. She shook him hard, again and again, and jabbed her forefinger into his chest, her face red, her mouth still moving. He had no idea why she was angry with him. She dragged him to a room, pushed him in and closed the door. He sat there in the dead silence, wondering what was going to happen next. Then he went to sleep.