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porch and white-picket fence. Year after year, Brenda drives by in whatever dilapidated car she can afford at the time while Wanda Burnes’s late-model vehicle sits in their three-car garage.
    “It’s that bitch who’s causing all the problems.” The words slide out of Brenda’s mouth in a hiss.
    “Wanda? Why? What happened?”
    Brenda shrugs, her gaze fixed on her red nails. “Just a little blip, that’s all, no big deal.”
    “How little?”
    “Les said it’s over. Done.” She lets out a small laugh. “You know how many times he’s said that before? Huh? Dozens. More than that even.”
    Evie keeps her voice low. “Why don’t you leave? Go away to your aunt’s in Pittsburgh, start fresh. You could, you know.”
    “And then what? Transfer twenty years at Furmano’s and my weekend stint cutting hair at Peggy Lee’s Style Station to J.C. Penney’s?”
    “It would be a start.”
    “I can’t leave Betty.”
    “Your mother is fine. She’d be in better health than you if she’d give up the vodka.”
    “There’d be nobody to take her to her doctor.”
    “She knows everybody in this town. Somebody would take her. I would if she needed me to.”
    “No.” Brenda shakes her head. “She’d drive you crazy. Hell, she drives me crazy and she’s my own blood.”
    “Brenda—”
    “I can’t leave. I can’t.”
    Damn Les Burnes. Damn him straight to hell.
    “You’re lucky, you know that?” Brenda’s full lips turn up at the corners, sad, wistful. “You could’ve turned out like me, being pregnant and all, but Rupe married you, made you a Burnes. You’re one of them. You belong, don’t you see that? Don’t you see how lucky you are?”
    This time it is Evie who forces a smile, her skin stretching to near breaking. She nods once and then again before she lets the words slip out. “Yes. I’m lucky.”
     

Chapter 5
     
    Quinn wishes he could take back the last eight minutes of his life, rewind it quickly, reel by reel, to the part where he flies up the stairs and almost crashes into his parents’ bedroom door, almost witnesses their anger at one another. He’d been in such a hurry to get to the attic and grab his sketch pad that he didn’t hear their voices until he was a split second from the door. But he stopped, jerked back like a dog on a short leash the instant he recognized his father’s deep voice pouring through the walls.
    It was then that he wanted to disappear, retrace his steps one by one, careful not to hit the squeaky step on his way down. He started to back away.
    “She’s nothing but a liar, a no-good liar and a whore.” Rupe Burnes’s words shake with anger. Quinn pictures his red face turning darker, the veins in his thick neck bulging.
    “She’s my friend.” This from his mother, quiet, firm.
    “You’re done with her. Goddammit, I mean it, Evie.”
    “I believe what she said.”
    She is so calm. How can she be so calm when his father is so angry?
    “Don’t even say a thing like that. It’s blasphemy. He’s a good man; we’ve known him for years.”
    “And the Singletons? Haven’t you known Harry and Rita for years? Known Suzie since she was knee-high?”
    That seems to stump Rupe but he recovers fast. “I don’t believe a word that bitch told you. She’s been lying for years, damn whore.”
    “If she is, then your brother made her that way.”
    The slap of flesh on flesh fills the air, so loud it bursts through the walls, reverberates from ceiling to floor. Evie has never hit her children, never raised a hand to either of them, and she certainly has never touched their father that way. Physical contact between his parents is confined to the bedroom, because other than a quick peck on the cheek or Rupe’s rough hand on Evie’s shoulder, there is no contact. Quinn prefers it this way, not wanting to think of his parents as anything other than a mother and father.
    But this slap, the harshness of it, from his mother? It is hard to picture, which