I didn’t remember the pain. Or the hospital.

My mother got out with a permanently damaged back. A beam had fallen on her, burned the skin and broken two of her vertebrae. We lived with my grandparents after the fire, when Park was in prison and while my mother got better. And when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Vermont to live with my uncle Jimmy, we lived there alone.

My mother never stopped taking the pills. Or she would, for a time, and then she’d flip out, sweaty and panicked, and go back on them. She was only twenty when the fire happened. She never worked after that. She’d barely worked before. She’d left high school when she had me. Then we holed up in the woods and she got disability, she got food stamps and public assistance, and she got painkillers. That was our life. Until Birdie was born.

Park wouldn’t look me in the eye. We sat a couple of feet apart at a table with thick plastic between us. I held the phone to my ear, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. Time was limited. I studied his face, his shoulders, the way he sat, the way his spine curved forward. I kept my eyes on his, waiting to catch them. We didn’t look alike. I looked like my mother. We didn’t seem alike at all, but I felt it, that fear in my gut that I was just fucking like him, which forced me into a situation I didn’t want to be in. The only way out would be death.

“What do you want,” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want anything from you.” Except, I thought, maybe for you not to have tried to kill us. For you to have been around. Maybe not, though. If it hadn’t been the fire, then what?

“Well,” he said. “Good talk.” He was about to hang up the phone. I was alarmed by the hollowness in his face, how old he looked for forty-two. He was missing a bottom tooth. His eyes were deep set and dark green. His hair, buzzed down to a silvery shadow. On his thick forearm, he had a pentagram with a deer’s head that I knew my mother had drawn in high school and that my uncle Jimmy had tattooed on him. They were all cousins.

Park put the phone back to his ear for a moment.

“Tell your mother I know everything,” he said.

“What?” I said, startled at the rasp of his voice again, at his directness.

That’s when he looked me in the eye. “You heard me,” he said. “Tell her I know every goddamn thing she does,” he said, and hung up. When he stood, the guard was right behind him, took him by the elbow, and walked him away from the visitation room.

I hung up my phone without making a sound.

That was two years ago.

Our town had misfits. There was Junior Savage, who ran the diner. His whole family was from Spring Falls or just north of it. He didn’t quite medically qualify as a midget, but he was only four foot nine. He was missing a finger on his left hand. He let me work at the diner and paid me cash every week so I didn’t have to report it against my mother’s welfare.