ABSTRACT
Mona calls, forty years later still hungry for me. Now she, the one who sacrificed six siblings and two parents to feed her habit (according to her mother), before disappearing to the Montana woods with a family-sized hole in her heart (according to her), returns, married to the perhaps and perhaps not boyfriend. He hulks in the doorway, novel in hand, grin shy. The two of them wake in shifts, the sky still dark, to relieve Auntie Peg from her all-night vigil. They take turns bathing and dressing and feeding Uncle Sean with gentle hands. They switch off loading up the dogs and driving home to bathe and dress and feed the three children she found in the woods, who turned out to be his anyway.
