“Someone should, don’t you think?” Joan asked. “He’s a son of a bitch and she thinks she needs him.”

“She does.”

“No one needs an asshole like that.”

“The kids—”

Joan stood up, her dirty-blond hair a slick down her back.

“Would be a whole lot better off if they didn’t watch their mom get beat up.”

“That’s true, but without money, what’s Tiffany supposed to do?”

“Stop looking for excuses to stay, I guess,” Joan said. “You forgot your scarf.”

I clapped a hand to my throat. The bruises were fading. Mostly blue and green smudges now, but someone who looked hard could tell they were fingerprints.

“Look, kid,” Joan said, walking out of the water like Venus on the waves. “Forget the damn scarf—it’s like a fat kid wearing a tee shirt to the swimming pool. All it does is make the kid look fatter.”

I dug into the heart of the bruise just under my chin until it throbbed.

“All it does is make you look more beat up.”

I swallowed hard.

“That’s what you are, right? Beat up?”

No. That’s not what I am. That’s not all I am. I have a hundred more things about myself that I’m figuring out. I like skinny-dipping. I don’t like cake for breakfast. I like grinding my pussy against my hand until I come.

But what I said was, “I guess so.”

“And you ran?”

“I’m running.”

“Good for you.”

Joan walked back over to the weeds she’d stomped down to make herself a little cove along the shore.

“But I had money. Not a lot, but some. Tiffany has none.”

“I’ve offered Tiffany plenty. No strings. She knows that. She wanted to go she could go.”

“You make it seem like it should be easy for her. Like it’s really black and white.” I was getting angry on Tiffany’s behalf. On my own behalf, too, maybe. Because I’d stayed for years with no reason other than fear. Fear and habit.

With no hope that things would get better. No love I could cling to and pretend about.

Nothing but fear that life without Hoyt would be worse than life with him.

“It’s pretty black and white. Guy hits you, you leave.” She took a drag from a cigarette. “Better yet, avoid them altogether. You want a joint?” Joan asked, holding it up toward me.

I shook my head and she shrugged, sitting down on the thick blanket she had spread out. She had an iPod and a few magazines and…a gun beside her.

“Don’t worry,” Joan said, taking a drag of the weed. She slipped the gun under one of the magazines. “I just keep an eye out for Phil and some of the other shitheads who live here.”

“Are there a lot of shitheads?”

Joan laughed, a plume of smoke sliding out of her mouth. “Enough.”

“You don’t seem so bad,” I said, sort of joking, and Joan laughed again.

“That’s because you don’t know me. And there are plenty more around here worse than me.”

I had no intention of finding out. I was minding my own business. Well, I guess my business and Ben’s business.

“What’s the story with Ben?” I asked, and Joan jerked back.

“Why?”

“He seems nice.”

Joan laughed. “The really crazy ones always do. The guy’s like Phil—they’re thugs. Just thugs. One-dimensional—what you see is what you get.”

“You’re saying behind Ben’s garden he’s a sociopath?”

“Where are you from, kid, that you don’t understand that guy’s tattoos?”

“A farm in Oklahoma.”

Again with the truth. A few more weeks of blabbing like this and I wouldn’t be hiding at all.

Joan smiled. “That explains it. Trust me. Just give him a wide berth.”

“What about his tattoos?”

“That big black square on his back, that’s a biker gang tattoo that’s been blacked over. He got booted. And you gotta do some bad shit to get booted.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know, and I’m not eager to sit down and have a chat with the guy. You shouldn’t be either.”

I looked away from Joan, out at the water sparkling in the sunlight, as if diamonds had been scattered over its surface.

“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked.

“This is nice?”

“Nicer.”

“Because I’m high. Because I just saw your tits. Because…those goddamn bruises around your neck.”

Again I reached up and felt them like they were still pounding against my skin.

“You’re a stripper?” I asked and she stared at me blankly, and I wondered if I’d offended her. Or if she didn’t want people to know. “You mentioned The Velvet Touch. I don’t want to make assumptions…”

“Yes, Sherlock Holmes, I’m a stripper.”

I ran out of courage for what I had intended to ask.

“You got something else you want to ask, you should ask,” Joan said.

“That guy…in your trailer the first time I met you.” What the hell was I doing? My mom would kill me for asking these questions. For prying. She used to yank on the end of my ponytail when I started asking too many questions. “Never mind, this isn’t my business.”

“Spit it out.”

“Are…I mean…do you?”

“Fuck men for money?”

I blushed so hard my eyes hurt.

“No. I fuck them for pleasure. But some of the girls do at the club. There’s one of those old-school comfort rooms in the back.”

“Oh.” I had no clue what an old-school comfort room was. No clue. And I was suddenly on fire to know. But I wasn’t about to ask her. I didn’t have quite enough courage to reveal my total ignorance.

We sat in silence for a minute.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Too long,” Joan said.

“It seems nice.”

Joan’s silent laugh made her breasts shimmy. “Depends on context, I guess.”

“Oh,” I said, “you’re from someplace wonderful?”

“No.” Joan shook her head and then slid her sunglasses down over her eyes. “I’m not.” She stretched out on her back and didn’t say another word.

After a minute I got back on my mower and rode through the weeds, avoiding the sticks marking unseen hazards.

After locking up the mower and the rest of the tools, I followed the scent of something delicious being cooked over to Ben’s garden.

Part of me insisted that I heed both Dylan and Joan’s warnings. But a larger part of me was tired of taking other people’s warnings as rules. I was done having my mind made up for me by someone else.

Joan had an unforgiving view of the world if she could be angry at Tiffany for being a victim. I wasn’t about to take her word about Ben. And Dylan…I didn’t know enough about him to know his worldview, other than that he was both kind and controlling. I’d never known the two qualities to live in sync like that.

Perhaps Joan and Dylan weren’t looking past the tattoos. Perhaps they were caught up in some black-and-white idea that I wasn’t interested in. Maybe Ben had never given them tomatoes.

I found the old man sitting in front of a fire inside the half-built shell of his brick oven.

“You’ve made a lot of progress,” I said. Through the unfinished top of the oven I could see a cast-iron skillet over a crackling fire.

“Just about done, but I got impatient,” he said. “Thanks for what you finished the other day.”

“No problem. I didn’t want that cement to go to waste. What are you making?”

“Here,” he said, pulling out the pan. Inside, bubbling in oil, were little yellow plants. “Zucchini flowers.” He set the pan down in the grass and pulled off the mitts he’d used to protect his hands.

“My ex used to make ’em,” he said. “She was part Mexican. Fucking amazing cook.”

With a metal fork he grabbed one of the flowers and put it down on a piece of napkin he had with him, and the white paper immediately went clear with grease.