most definitely didn’t need a caffeine jolt. Her hands were shaking. The cup rattled against the saucer when she put it down.

“Leilani, you can’t go on living with her.”

“With who?”

“Old Sinsemilla. Who else? She’s psychotic. As they say when they commit people to the psychiatric ward against their will she’s a danger to herself and others.”

“To herself, for sure,” Leilani agreed. “Not really to others.”

“She was a danger to me in the yard, all that screaming about hag of a witch bitch and spellcasting and not being the boss of her.”

Geneva had risen from her chair to fetch the pot from the Mr. Coffee machine. She poured a refill for Micky. “Maybe it’ll settle our nerves, dear.”

With no pie left on her plate, Leilani put down her fork. “Old Sinsemilla scared you, that’s all. She can be as scary as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and Big Bird all rolled into one, but she’s not dangerous. At least as long as my pseudofather keeps her supplied with drugs. She might be a terror if she ever went into withdrawal.”

Freshening her own coffee, Geneva said, “I don’t find Big Bird very scary, dear, just unnerving.”

“Oh, Mrs. D, I disagree. People dressing up in big weird animal suits where you can’t see their faces — that’s scarier than sleeping with a nuclear bomb under your bed. You have to figure people like that have real issues to resolve.”

“Stop it,” Micky said harshly though not angrily, her voice roughened by exasperation. “Just, please, stop it.”

Leilani pretended puzzlement. “Stop what?”

“You know very well what I mean. Stop all this avoidance. Talk to me, deal with this situation.”

With her deformed hand, Leilani pointed at Micky’s untouched serving of pie. “Are you going to eat that?”

Micky pulled the plate closer to herself. “I’ll trade pie for a serious discussion.”

“We’ve been having a serious discussion.”

“There’s half a pie left,” Geneva offered cheerily.

“I’d love a piece, thanks,” Leilani said.

“The half that’s left is off-limits,” Micky declared. “The only pie in play is my piece.”

“Nonsense, Micky,” Geneva said. “Tomorrow I can bake another apple pie all for you.”

As Geneva rose from the table, Micky said, “Aunt Gen, sit down. This isn’t about pie.”

“It is from my perspective, said Leilani.

“Listen, kid, you can’t come around here, doing your dangerous-young-mutant act, worming your way—“

Grimacing, Leilani said, “Worming?”

“Worming your way into …” Micky fell silent, surprised by what she had been about to say.

“Into your spleen?” Leilani suggested.

For longer than she could remember, Micky hadn’t allowed herself to be emotionally affected by anyone to any significant degree.

Leaning across the table as though earnestly determined to help Micky find the elusive word, Leilani said, “Into your gall bladder?”

Caring was dangerous. Caring made you vulnerable. Stay up on the high ramparts, safe behind the battlements.

Geneva said, “Kidneys?”

“Worming your way into our hearts,” Micky continued, because saying our instead of my seemed to share the risk and to leave her less exposed, “and then expect us not to care when we see the danger you’re in.”

Still armored in drollery, with a full bandolier of cheerful banter, Leilani said, “I never thought of myself as heartworm, but I guess it’s a perfectly respectable parasite. Anyway, I assure you with all seriousness — if that’s what it takes to get the pie — that my mother isn’t a danger to me. I’ve lived with her ever since she popped me out of the oven, and I’ve still got all my limbs, or at least the same odd arrangement I was born with. She’s pathetic, old Sinsemilla, not fearsome. Anyway, she is my mother, and when you’re a nine-year-old girl, even an unusually smart one with a gift for gab, you can’t just pack your bags, walk out, find a good apartment, get a high- paying job in software design, and be tooling around in your new Corvette by Thursday. I’m sort of stuck with her, if you see what I mean, and I know how to cope with that.”

“Child Protective Services—“

“Well-meaning but useless,” Leilani interrupted. She seemed to be speaking from experience. “Anyway, the last thing I want is for old Sinsemilla to be put back in the nuthouse for a refresher course in ear-to-ear electrocution, because that’ll leave me alone with my pseudofather.”

Micky shook her head. “They wouldn’t leave you in the care of your mother’s boyfriend.”

“When I call him my pseudofather, I’m indulging in wishful thinking. He’s my legal stepfather. He married old Sinsemilla four years ago, when I was five going on six. I wasn’t reading anywhere near at a college level then, but I understood the implications, anyway. It was an amazing wedding, let me tell you, though there wasn’t a carved- ice swan. Do you like carved-ice swans, Mrs. D?”

Geneva said, “I’ve never seen one, dear.”

“Neither have I. But the idea appeals to me. And so right after he married Sinsemilla, he said that even though he hadn’t actually adopted me and Lukipela, we should start using his last name, but I still use the Klonk I was born with. You’ve got to be mad to be Mad-doc — that’s what Luki and I used to say.”

Here came that unsettling shift in the girl’s eyes, like a sudden muddy tide washing through clean water, an uncharacteristic despair that even candlelight was sufficiently bright to reveal.

In spite of the news about the marriage, Micky clung to the hope that her newfound desire to act as — so to speak — her sister’s keeper could be fulfilled at least to some small extent. “Whether he’s your legal stepfather or not, the proper authorities will—“

“The proper authorities didn’t nail the guy who killed Mrs. D’s husband,” Leilani said. “She had to track Alec Baldwin to New Orleans and blow him away herself.”

“With great satisfaction,” Geneva noted, raising her coffee cup as if in a toast to the liberating power of vengeance.

For once, no sparkle of humor enlivened Leilani’s blue eyes, no thinnest paring of a wry smile curled either corner of her mouth, and no sportive note informed her voice as she met Micky’s stare with a piercing directness, and said almost in a whisper, “When you were such a pretty little girl and bad people took things from you that you never-ever wanted to give, the proper authorities weren’t there for you even once, were they, Michelina?”

Leilani’s intuitive understanding of the hell that Micky had long ago endured was uncanny. The empathy in those blue eyes rocked her and left her with the certain sense that the most closely guarded truths about herself had been exposed, ugly secrets around which she had constructed impregnable vaults of shame. And though she had never expected to speak to another human being about those years of ordeal and humiliation, although until this moment she would have angrily denied ever being anyone’s victim, she didn’t feel wounded by this exposure, as she would have expected, didn’t feel mortified or in the least diminished, but felt instead as if a painfully constricting knot had at last come loose inside her, and realized that sympathy, as this girl had shown it to her, did not have to contain any element of condescension.

“Were they ever there?” Leilani asked again.

Not trusting herself to speak, Micky shook her head, which was the first admission she had ever made of the painful past on which her life was built. She slid her guarded dessert, untouched, in front of Leilani.

Geneva was the only one to bring tears to the table, and she blew her nose noisily in a Kleenex. Of course, she might be flashing back to some tender moment she believed that she’d shared with Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart, or William Holden, but Micky sensed that her aunt was fully in the thrall of this moment and in the firm grip of the real.

Micky said, “It’s hard to make up anything as weird as what is.”

“Yeah, I heard that somewhere,” Leilani replied, picking up her fork.

“He is a murderer — isn’t he? — just as your mother turned out to be the way you said she was.”

Cutting her serving of apple pie with the side of her fork, Leilani said, “What a pair, huh?”

“But eleven people? How could he—“

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