He sent me to give the Good News to the poor!

Tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more!

Tell blind people that they can see!

And set the downtrodden free!

What I didn’t realize the whole time we were belting out hymns that were clearly intended by their composers to be softly warbled was that my mother was dying to be in the choir. Of course she was. And, of course, she would have been if she didn’t have two little girls — one disabled and the other too young to look after the first if left alone with her in the pew. I hadn’t understood that, however. I had just assumed my mother was huddled over the hymnal with me every Sunday, yodelling songs loud enough for the choir leader to take note of her, because that was her favourite place to be. So when I was twelve or so, and Irene finally decreed that I was old enough to sit alone with Kelli in the pew while she sang up front with the choir, I experienced it as a betrayal. And that’s when, much to my mother’s dismay, I began to whine. As of that moment, I was no longer the ideal companion — Irene made that clear. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t want to be stuck in the pew, alone with Kelli. I tried to imagine belting those hymns out all by myself — a gawky twelve-year-old with a terrible voice, Kelli rocking and humming at my side — how I would look to everybody, how I would sound, and it made me never want to go to church again.

Of course, I had to keep going to church, at least for a few years longer; my mother never gave me any choice. But after that I refused to sing.

“You ladies,” said Trevor, shaking his head.

“What?” I said. Trevor was grinning and leaning forward, like my story had tickled him. He swished the rum around in his juice glass and I realized that for the last hour or so the amount of liquid in there hadn’t dwindled. Meaning not that he wasn’t drinking it, but that he had been topping himself off intermittently from the bottomless bottle of Captain Morgan without my noticing.

“You ladies,” he repeated. “Always at each other’s throats.”

“But we weren’t always at each other’s throats,” I said. “We barely spoke, in fact, for years.”

“That’s what I mean, though,” said Trevor. “You don’t settle things. You don’t get past it. You just let it all stew.”

Trevor wasn’t just talking about me and my mother, I realized. He was talking about all of us — my entire side of the human equation.

“Men settle things,” said Trevor. “Take me and my brother, with our business. I find out he’s giving creatine powder away to his buddies before we even get the storefront set up, I head on over to his apartment, he opens the door — I pop him one! Pow!” Trevor yelled this so loud it made Kelli look up, as he mimed a sudden punch. It was short and fast and his biceps bulged and contracted.