There was something wrong with her legs. She couldn’t walk right. They had all these tests done on her and had her fitted with braces and then his insurance company wouldn’t pay the bills because he wasn’t married to her mother. I wondered what she looked like. I had this picture of black hair and a frowning face for some reason. He said he was afraid to leave her. He said he didn’t love her, but he couldn’t leave the little girl. He said he didn’t know what would happen to her. I felt better about everything, about losing my head, after we talked for a while. But he was working all these jobs at night to try and pay the doctor bills. I felt like … I just don’t know what I felt like. Cheap. Stingy. For getting him to lower his price. And I felt awful for drinking too much and having those daydreams about him, and then kissing him and all. He kept talking. The more he talked, the worse I felt over feeling so sorry for myself about Harold.

I asked him what he was going to do. He said he didn’t know. He said if he left her there was no telling what would happen to them. He said the woman had never worked a day in her life and didn’t finish high school and had been brought up on welfare. He said she didn’t know what it was like to have to work for a living.

I shouldn’t have talked so much. I didn’t mean to tell her all my problems. I know everybody’s got problems, and everybody thinks theirs are worse than everybody else’s. I know she had it bad. Married to a son of a bitch that slapped her around. She felt like her whole life had been wasted. She talked some, too. She said she knew what it felt like to have to stay with somebody without love. She knew what I felt like. She was as miserable as I was.