Waiting for Ennie, I make some Folgers and put a half pint of bourbon in the pot so I won’t have to mix it later. Still have a few hours before our shift. That week, he’d been working on a white Benelli Tornado’s four-stroke. Ennie brought his own El Camino LS6 in for a busted kickdown cable, and thought he’d repair it after hours, but it was shot to shit, so I bummed him the Chevy C/K from the back lot for the winter. I can hear it coming two blocks down.

As a down payment for the job, Ennie gave me a set of old fashioned glasses his grandfather, Zoltán Zubrick, had given him the day he graduated high school. Cut crystal glasses. I put the one in my hand up to a light and play with the designs while the joe finishes. On the floor, the color of a champagne I had once, a blade of light sharp enough to slit a throat.

That Zoli—he was a legend in Emeric Park, even throughout Orchid Ridge, up until years back. A true hustler. Instead of card games like the hülye ginzos held, this tall, old hike hosted ceremonies in his home. “Religious observances,” he called ‘em, or some weird gypsy word I can never remember. Fucking brilliant. Wrinkle-dicked old Uncle Sam couldn’t touch nothing of what he earned. Zoli’s guests’d slip white envelopes filled with cash and then sit around Árpád. Árpád Andrassy, the healer. Real dumb bohunk shit, those names. But they’d ask Árpád for miracles. Some brought photographs and said the names of the dead they wanted to speak to.

Others brought their infirmities and asked for healing. Like faith healings, but swap out faith for money. No set price, no buy-ins. Just donations. Come just as you are sorta bullshit but without the guilt.

From what I heard, though, Zoli’s boy, Ferkó, went and ruined what they had.

I pour myself a cup o’ joe and lean against the self-cleaning oven I bought my ma. I hear Ennie’s C/K’s tires plop up on the tree lawn and a minute later he knocks and a scratch follows. Brought his vizsla bitch with him. Turpentine. She stays right by his side. As always, Ennie smells like diesel, axle grease.

“She a problem?” he asks, a bit too loudly.

 “Nah. Just surprised,” I put a finger to my lips. “Ma’s still sleeping. Get some brew,” I gesture with the glass.

“You know those are for whiskey,” he says, pouring. “Oh, they ain't goin’ to waste.”

He raises the glass. Sniffs.

  “Shit, Donny. It’s four in the morning.”

  “Yeah, but my heart’s in Tokyo, and it’s five o’clock there.”

“Your stomach’s still in Cleveland, though, isn’t it?”

Like Ennie, I was dragged to Sunday Masses. We’d both been baptized into the Hungarian Byzantine Catholic Church because our great-grandfathers had helped build St. Emeric’s in the first decade of the twentieth century. Our nagyapák—granddads—were both brick masons. Me and Ennie, we don’t much care for fathers and vowed never to become one ourselves, but I’ve already failed twice in that promise. He can get moody now and then, moody and lonely, and when he worries about making enough money, I try to comfort him with something true and funny and dumb.

“Oh, you’ll probably always be poor,” I say. “The trick is picking a woman you won’t feel guilty about giving a shitty life to.”

Me and Ennie will pick up chicks now and then after work along some blade. Cheap kurvanő, lot lizards, with skin just as rough and scaly, just to make sure we get what we want. How come it is I never known a whore to cut her kid out of her, I ask, but Ennie doesn’t ever think to answer. On bar napkins we’d write the girls things clever and religious, advertisements they could use, hoping they’d laugh, like THE LORD COMETH SOON AND SO CAN YOU, but mostly they’d just compliment Ennie’s cursive, imitating it against his arm.

We wrote things we’d never say in front of our mothers. Hana Zubrick and Alicia Molchan were best friends at one time, but my ma’s happiest times was when she was prosphirny, just about the only church-word I remember she said it so goddamn much. That’s the bread-baker. The one to put Christ in the oven. She’d go on and on about it, the kneading, the stamping, the piercing of the loaves, how the whole liturgical life rested on her. That’s why I bought her the self-cleaning oven. An older model, but still she was only the second person to own it.

“Turn the knob here,” I showed her. “Gets so hot inside it bakes all the shit right off. No more cleaning, Ma. Save your knees for praying for your boy.”

I knew she liked it when I caught her sitting in front of the oven, chair scooched so close her knees grew hot. She said her sins became clearer as she watched the prosphora bake, the body of Christ, broken for her. The Blood that covers a multitude of sins. She’d actually do that, sit in front of the oven and watch it bake and pray and pray, she said, for the people who’d eat it, but these days she can barely chew a Ritz without getting half of it on her chin. Guess that’s where we’ll all be soon enough.

Ennie and I are in his C/K when he asks me if I brought the gun.

  I shake my head. Teddy had warned me his brother’s a sapling when it came to harm. “Too messy. Too noisy.”

“It’s what I want.”

  “Teddy thinks it’s a bad idea.”

Mention his brother’s name and he goes stiff as a constipated whore. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“You gotta ask? Teddy’s getting out in a few days and wouldn’t want to see his öcs hauled off to Lucasville. He says you should use a belt. Hang him somehow and pull his pants down. Like he’s some pervert who did it to himself.”

“Öcs.”

“What?”

“Öcs. He calls me öcs. Means ‘little brother.’”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a strange gift to give a brother. Murder.”

“What else would he want?”

After a while, he asks, “You got a belt big enough to fit around his fat neck?”

It’s a good question. I unlatch my belt and fold it in half, bunching it and giving it a good slap.

“This oughta work,” I say, but really, we should’ve thought of that before we left.

*

Ennie pulls a half-smoked cigarette from his pack, lights up, and offers me a fresh one. Keeps his window cracked and leans forward to warm his hands and presses his leg against the wheel to steer. He’s always been a smart one. Always reading in the library. Books fatter than my upright dick and not a single picture in ‘em. Chemistry, philosophy, history. Brainy shit. But even I think it’s pretty fucking dumb what he wants to do, what he’s been fixin’ to do ever since he was a kid, he says. He’s angry about it. Anger, I think, as much as joy, will show us our incapacities. Show us just what we can’t get done in life, try as we might.

Failure’s something I wish those of us in the EPNCA would accept. Back some years, Ferkó’s buddy, Frank Bunda, headed up the Emeric Park Nationalities Community Association and got a few cops he knew to moonlight with him, keeping Emeric Park as Hungarian as it can be. Not everyone’s on board with ‘em, but Ferkó got a few charges against me dropped, so I owe the Zubricks I think and reckon this’ll be a good start to squaring us. Ferkó’s always asking after my mother, too.

The evening before we met two gals up at Major’s. The tits of one of ‘em’s like a spiritual gift. I thought we should try the napkin trick on 'em and nudged Ennie into it. I wrote the same thing I always wrote and one said she didn’t think it was funny, that she was a Christian.

“Guess we got a lot to learn about forgiveness,” Ennie said, taking the napkin from my hand and crinkling it. They said they’d meet us this morning, if we wanted, and we told them we’d eat at Don Rocco’s around 7. Two hours away.

Panting, Turp sits between us, her paw on Ennie’s leg and her breath curling up like a foggy sticky bun. Her tail wags, thumping out her loyalty against the seats.

“What the fuck you name her Turp for anyway?”

Still concentrated on the road, he says, “Árpád was in the labor camps, you know. Told me about one of the tortures. Mix turpentine with soap and olive oil and you’d get a purgative enema. Said it was a horrible torture the ÁVH used, flushing it through a man strapped down to a table.” When he sees my face, searching and confused, he adds, “The secret police. But, mix turpentine with a type of poultice, wrap it on a wound, it’ll heal. When I used to go to the library, I’d read anything I could get my hands on. One day, reading about chemistry, I found turpentine’s chemical formula. C10H16. Árpád said it undoes what’s been done,” his voice drops to a kind of awe. “Makes a clean break of it. Exactly what he said.”I’d had enough, so I change the subject, but Ennie just snatches it right back. “You been talking to Teddy?” He props his arm up on the sill.

“Here’n there.”

He huffs and turns to look out the window. “Haven’t heard from him in two years.”

     “Ah, he’s still around. Does some stints in rehab, some time in the tank. No more than a night, though.”

     No matter how much Ennie tries to act like he don’t want Teddy’s attention, he wants it. It’s the gap. The great, hostile emptiness between brothers. I get it. Me and Jimmy had the same thing right up until he died.

He believes that, like most fuck-ups, Teddy holds the family favor. For certain in their mother’s eyes, he is a born saint. S’ain’t, I say. The rest of us, true, there’s no end to the love we have for him. But for their ma, every goddamn thing Teddy does is a sign of some holiness missing in the rest of ‘em. She clings to him like a relic. But Ennie says she’s been slipping mentally last two years. Gets confused easily and snaps. Things that happened to her in childhood are as fresh as breakfast. And then, for weeks, she’ll be normal. Perfectly precise and cold.

“I tell ya, if she knew what we were doing—”

He cuts me off: “She doesn’t know shit. Let the whole thing go on for two years and still won’t believe him. Why Teddy never mentions it. Don’t talk to her much nowadays.”

Ferkó is meeting us at Medárd Lakatos’s. Zoli wouldn’t like it, if he ever found out, but what’s a bozgor’s word in a world full of ginzos? The mingias still have Orchid Ridge, while we here in Emeric Park are being pushed out of a neighborhood’s been ours for generations and oughta stay that way. Medárd and Joey Bunda used to be pals, and then when Medárd got sick and later heard what Joey’d done to his nephew, I’ve heard him once or twice say he’d be glad to kill Joey himself. Asked to help us, practically. Not too many guys have that sort of a friend.

Maybe he’s just happy to be useful again.

  “Sorta fucks you up some, don’t it? Killing some guy, I mean. You don’t want to be in a bad way.”

“Life’s a bad way,” he says, and I can’t argue with that.

The Zubricks: they fumble through mourning, all serious and shit, all except Ferkó. He’s found some balance to the recklessness that’s been passed on to Teddy, and even more so to Ennie, though I don’t think he’s realized it yet. And, well, except for Zoli. His magnetism’s a sinkhole that draws others into him.

I whack Ennie’s arm. “Drive past the old place on your way.”

“That’s not on our way.”

“Go past anyways. Who knows when we’ll be able to again?”

I want to go past the old building Zoli bought. Call me sentimental, but before we off Joey, I want some reminder of what it’s all been about.

He started out in the basement of St. Emeric’s, just a cultural club for good old Hungarians to come together and reminisce. The kind of building immigrant families get so they can live and work in the same place. It’s where he says they’ll have the religious observances again. But Zoli’s reputation’s gone, even among those of us in the Association. Along with the trust others put in his ability to organize so much as a meeting.

Some of the old timers still believe in healings. We’re used to taking things apart before trying to put ‘em together again. Sometimes, like that dumb ass LS6, it’s all just shot to shit. I never seen no healings at the altar like I seen up in Zoli’s place. Maybe it is slower, but God oughta know he give us short lives. I think maybe it’s time for a clean break myself but remember we’re just as much nailed to this world as Jesus was to that cross. There’s no clean breaks here. Only mocskos ones. Filthy ones.

“C’mon, Ennie,” I say, making one last attempt to keep him from going through with something you don’t come back from. “Don’t be like this. We all know you’re Zoli’s favorite. All of us but you. Treats us all like sons, but you—he trusts you. But you’re just so ungrateful.

You’ve convinced yourself you’re unloved. How, why, I don’t understand.”

“This—it’s like a gift I can give Teddy, you know? First time he’ll be clean in God knows how many years. Comes out and he never has to see or hear of Joey again. It should be a clean break. Like Zoli used to say, grief’s like sewing a wound closed with the knife that made it.”

“It isn’t true, Ennie, but you’re coming goddamn fucking close to making it so.”

*

It’s about half-past four but Ferkó answers the door, a half-eaten corned beef in his hand. He takes another bite before moving into a crouch and stomping outside to play-wrestle with Turp. She lurches, nips at and jumps around him and comes to nuzzle between his legs when he massages the top of her head.

Medárd sits alone inside catching some extra sleep in a lounger. In St. Emeric’s he sits alone near Pilate’s Court, the first station on the Way of Sorrows. Everyone knows his cancer’s back, but no one talks about it. His spine looks brittle, like a strong fart would snap it in two.

When Ferkó comes in, he licks his fingers clean. He comes loose with patience. Never known another man to be so.

Ferkó nudges Ennie. He’s not but a handful of years older but treats us like a compassionate captain or something. “Hey. You get something to eat? No?”

“Ain't hungry.”

“You should eat something. Calm you down. Is it nerves?”

Ennie shrugs.

“Get something to eat. It’ll help. You need to think straight.”

Medárd hasn’t moved, and Ferkó joins us, sitting like some judge might. His tone is soft and disappointed and he swats Medárd’s feet to make sure he’s paying attention.

“The task before you poses a challenge. Procedural rather than moral. It’s not like Joey’s some stranger. We’ve all known him for years. Between the four of us, we’ve killed five men.

And I’m the only murderer here. Still, it isn’t like he don’t deserve to die for any number of things. This reason’s just as good as another. How do you plan to do it?”

He looks at us and Medárd adds, “Joey’s a big guy. Even with the four of us, it’ll take some doing. Not as strong as I used to be. Got to do one goddamn good thing before it’s all over.”

“This count as your good thing? Offing some fat fuck perv?”

“Who’s to say where goodness is anymore? The cancer’s come back. My girls are still dead. And until they lay me out with the others, this might be about the best thing I done. Brought some peace to those he’s harmed.”

Révülés, my mind snaps. That’s the word. Those religious observances. The three of ‘em go on planning how to jump Joey. Something maybe we should’ve nailed down last week.

“What about the dog? Where’s the dog staying?”

“Turp comes. No exception,” Ennie says.

I’m thinking of the fall of ’73. Some dark, cold mid-October afternoon. We were just turning twelve and biked to Zoli’s for the révülés. Anyone was welcome. At the time we were too young to understand: they had come to see something unbelievable. I know all this is just Ennie’s attempt at making things right. His own type of healing. But that whole ordeal lasted fewer than three minutes. Árpád, head tilted back, eyes closed, mumbled, and then lowered his sight until it met Teddy’s.

Ennie says, “I want him to have the enema. The one Árpád talks about.”

With flat objection, Ferkó says, “You mean torture him.”

“He doesn’t deserve it?” Medárd asks.

“Torture leaves evidence. Evidence leads to conviction. You ready to do 25 to life for him?”

Ennie doesn’t even allow for a pause. “Fuck Frank Bunda and his brother. Justice is a rough business. Love is rougher. Fiercer. And I think I should have some say in it.”

“Keep justice and love out of it, and keep it logical. It’s got to look like he’s done it himself. It’s too emotional for you. Emotions aren’t a help here.” Drumming his legs, Ferkó stands. “Don’t do it. I know you will, but I don’t want anything to do with it. I’ve got a business to run. Legitimate. Staple of the neighborhood.”

“You don’t get to do that my brother and get away with it. The kis buzi dies,” Ennie storms. If he spoke with that tone, that word, up in Orchid Ridge, he’d have one second chance. Maybe.

Ferkó asks us how we’re gonna do it. Step by step. We tell him five different versions, each one solid as a cheese grater. It’s like he knows everything that could go wrong, doubts the one thing that could go right. His posture goes tired and he puts up both hands like a priest but flicks us out. Christ’s body, broken for you. Before we go, though, Ferkó heads into his room and comes back with a yellow pair of his old lady’s panties from a hamper. Sniffs 'em and lurches.

“Perfect,” he says, tossing ‘em to me. “I catch you smelling these and you’ll be right there beside Joey, capisce?”

“What’re we supposed to do with these?”

“Use it as a gag. Toss ‘em in an alley after. No one’s touching those things, I promise you.”

Maybe they’ve been frauds all along. Maybe they just exploited the whole of the neighborhood, promising something they were just tricked into believing they received.

“One last thing,” Ferkó adds, mostly to Ennie. “You want him to know why he’s dying? A last rite of some kind?”

“No,” Medárd answers before Ennie can. “Let him guess at it. Like the rest of us have to.”

I didn’t make a habit of stealing icons from the little old ladies who made the prosphora bread for our parish. But once, when I was young, I took two from an old hag who thought to preach to me some months after Pa died. Suppose that’s as bad a thing as you can steal. But, if a single lie is enough to damn you, what’s one more sin?

Like Medárd is saying. Being damned might be the only thing we’re good at. So sure, Ma. Let’s give the Blood of Christ something to do.

*

     The house Joey lives in isn’t far from the one the Zubrick boys grew up in, a small turn-of-the- century foursquare some blocks down on Buckeye. Those’re the sorts of houses where only the bedrooms and bathroom have doors.

We park four houses down and it’s still dark. Will be for another hour or so. Plenty of time to choke the life out of a man, stage the house, get to the garage early and work on the LS6.

Medárd unloops his belt, folds and tucks it behind him. He nudges me to do the same. We line ourselves up shoulder to shoulder on the porch, hiding between the windows and the door view. We can’t kick in the door, so Medárd has to ring and wait. When Joey answers, we push ourselves in. Ennie and Medárd go behind him and I try to shove the balled up panties into Joey’s mouth, but Joey knows what’s happening and puts up a fight. He scrambles, turns, keeps us all moving with him and the door is wide open. Turp comes in, snarls, barks and barks and barks.

“Shut that bitch up,” Medárd groans.

It’d just be easier to stab him, shoot him, let him bleed out than this mess, but it was Ennie’s call. Ennie’s got Joey in a locked bear hold. I manage to plunge the panties into his mouth and Medárd’s there with duct tape, sealing them in.

Turp jumps for Joey.

The bitch digs her jaws into Joey’s hands, clamps down so that you even hear the crunch and crackle of bone or ligament. Her muzzle’s a ripple of cement and marble. Then the kicking starts, and Turp clenches again fresh, and Joey grips what he can of Turp’s jaw, snout, whatever and whips her around, tearing her loose with a motion that sprays blood across a wall, a lampshade. The momentum of his lurch brings the three tumbling to the floor. There’s a yip from Turp somewhere, and Ennie laces and locks his legs around Joey’s knees and then Medárd takes the belt out from his back and loops it right around Joey’s neck.

Pulls like he’s a champion wrangler.

*

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him yell before, but Medárd yells at me to make it to the sewer grate before hurling, and I do. The black coffee-and-whiskey mix steams up from the slats in the cold. We dab the carpet dry where Joey pissed in the last throttle and leave the rest of his clothes soaked around his ankles. At first, we tried hanging him from a rack in his closet, but that snapped and pulled the anchors out, so we threw him on the bed and cinched the belt to the headboard until the leather and the cheap wood both groaned. To give it a tad more legitimacy, Medárd fixed it so that Joey was clutching himself.

“Live like a pervert, die like a pervert,” he says.

“You see how one of his eyes popped out? Like a marble made of Jell-O.”

“Shit, Medárd. You’re sick in body and soul,” I say.

Neither of us think to look for Ennie. He’s downstairs with Turp. I feel bad for him, I do. Her body folds like a grain sack in his arms. Ennie, Medárd, Joey—they’d all landed right on her when the kis buzi toppled over. Ennie carries her to the car.

“She must’ve been circling when we fell,” I say, thinking maybe if we all weren’t here, he’d cry.

We clean up, straighten the chairs and put the legs back in the carpet’s impressions. We wipe off the tape glue from Joey’s face. Medárd and me’re talking about grabbing a cup at a diner not far from here. I admit even after emptying my stomach, I could eat.

Having put Turp in, Ennie’s just standing there, waiting to close the trunk. I think to say, This close. We were this close to a clean break. Ah.

But I don’t.

“When’s Teddy get out?”

“Three days,” Ennie says. His arm’s gone for the door.

Dawn’s smearing the sky now like some crusty toothpaste.

Ennie’s warming his hands when Medárd slaps his back. “Goddamn, all in all this’s a good welcome home present,” he says. And then he nudges Ennie. “How you gonna tell him?”

Ennie thinks for a spell. He slams the trunk closed and says “Let him figure it out, like the rest of us have to.”

I say, “You can get used to it, living like this.”

“Living like what?” Medárd asks. His guard’s up.

     I almost tell them what my mother used to say about the church bread she’d bake. How important it was to take it out at just the right time so as not to burn it, or keep it from breaking when you handled it. Any sort of break meant you’d just have to throw it out. No blessings for the broken bread. But I don’t.

     I say, “Maybe it’s a good thing we’re not given much time to live like this.”

     Ennie responds: “Time’s a wasting, they say.”

     “No one knows better than me,” Medárd says. He isn’t wrong, but that don’t mean he’s right.

Impatient, Medárd adds, “Ain’t every salvation like that? Drawing you into some kind of horror almost worse than the first. You’ve got to realize what you’re saved from, right? And forgiveness,” he throws a single hand up in the air. “Don’t even get me started. Like worrying over the last dime of our paychecks when we know we’re just gonna get another one come next week.”

God—I been bankrupt so long enough, I’ve forgotten how to get a loan.

*

     He’s in his moods now. No surprise. We stop by Don Rocco’s, the 24-hour diner, just the two of us, and it’s still early enough we catch some of the workers we wouldn’t see otherwise. The two chippies we met the night before in a corner booth.

“He’s a bit down today,” I say, setting a hand on Ennie’s shoulder. “If you can’t help me raise his spirits, maybe you can help raise something else for him.”

They pretend to not know what I mean. The waitress comes and takes our order and I force Ennie to get a hash brown scramble with me.

After we order, the other one, Ennie’s one, asks, “Why’s he down in the dumps?”

“My dog died,” Ennie answers. “Just this morning.”

They both turn soft and lean toward him. That’s terrible, they say, or something like it. They ask how it happened. I don’t like the attention they give him. It’s pity. After this, I’m not going into work. Something’s touched my stomach. There’s something so tasteful about being horrible. Those moments that just melt in your mouth and you let ‘em sit there, filling as a feast.

I wait until I see their curiosity strain. Their cheap jewelry rattles when they put their hands out like Well? I stare back. I can fake malevolence every bit as much as I can fake gratitude.

I look over my shoulder and whisper, “A man we were killing, he fell right on top of him.”

They don’t know whether to laugh or run. It’s possible to chuckle before you sprint. “His kid brother,” I say, nodding toward Ennie and adding just the pinch of a lie.

“The dog actually died?”

I kick Ennie beneath the table. He makes like he can’t manage a sip of coffee. “He’s out in the trunk right now. But he’s not my kid brother. I’m his. And we strangled the motherfucker who fucked him.”

They laugh ‘cause they think we’re drunk and’ve been joking, and the one with the big spiritual gifts reaches out and flicks my nose, so I add, “Gets out of rehab in a week. Wanted to give him a welcome home gift. But we fucked it up.”

Ennie startles us, pounding his fork against the plate and plowing into his hash brown scramble. He shoves his face full and brings the fork down again, his fist so hard against the table the cups and napkin bin rattle. Maybe that convinces them we ain't been lying. Bits of potato and grease smear his mouth. He just shoves the food in and barely chews. The girls’ve been staring and one nudges the other to scooch and they leave together and after they’re gone Ennie eats like a starving man until his eyes water. He shovels the food in so fast I think he might choke to death.

When they’re gone I just stare at Ennie, baffled. “Why’d you do that?” I ask him. I can’t think of a reason. He’s gone and put a crack in the plate of his peace that maybe a stiff breeze will shatter.

“Because fuck ‘em, that’s why. Fuck us too.” And he goes to finish the plate.

Ma thinks I don’t get it. But I do. I get it now. See, when it comes down to it, we don’t want clean breaks at all. No one believes you when you tell ‘em. You gotta show ‘em. How a cracked loaf is useless, can’t be blessed. It’s why the priest holds it high. So you can see it whole.

It’s good that I took the icons. I kept the St. Sebastian icon next to my bed, but the Rublev one I stashed under the corner of my mattress, where, a few weeks after Ma was kicked out of the Prosphora Gals, changing my sheets, she found the second icon.

Instead of finishing school, I started working for Ferkó, son of the butcher. On the weekends, me and Jimmy played baseball with Ferkó’s nephews until one day in October, a pickup truck, its brake pads nearly gone, tried to stop but hit and killed Jimmy. I didn’t speak much after that, except when we came home from the burial, I laced my legs through one end of the tire swing and leaned against it, arms all loose and dangling. I was holding the stolen icon Ma had found under my bed. The one of Christ all haggard and crowned with thorns. I wanted to rehearse what I would say to you before coming up, Ma said. But I have no idea what to say. I thought I could tell you that the future looks like a swamp overtaken by thorn bushes. I thought maybe I could get away with saying nothing.

For a while we got away with listening to the groan of that rope against the tree and thought of Pa and Jimmy. Ma, I said, brushing the icon so she knew who I was talking about. I’m glad he suffered. If he did make such a world, I’m glad he suffered. You hear me?

How could I tell then if she too was less grateful for his love than for his pain? Maybe they aren’t even that different. But I knew even then that I, her last living son, would come to ruin too, and that she would be alive many, many years from that moment to remember that end.

Watching Ennie eat’s no different from watching him grieve. He brought his fork down against the plate loudly and just kept eating and eating like it wasn’t hunger driving him but something else. Something I couldn’t touch. That anger. That burning focus. Turning to ash whatever he put there.

Me—I find I’m like my ma hunched in front of the self-cleaning stove. Here in the diner, hunched and watching, with joy or maybe just prayers, my knees grow hot, like I’ve shoved Christ in the oven and’ll take him out in my own damn good time. There won’t be any cracks. The bread’ll come out clean and we’ll break it when we’re good and ready. But Ennie—he glows. Like he’s the one that’s been cooked all the way through. And I think maybe someday I too could have such love. Make a clean break to damn myself for another.

Yes, I could sit here for hours.