Free Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale

having a child out of wedlock. It wasn’t right. It made Brian look bad.”
    “He said he’d marry you, didn’t he?”
    “I was starting to show,” she said. “I didn’t want to get married to him like that, even if it was just in front of a justice of the peace. He had a good job and was respected, and I didn’t want that to be lost to him because I couldn’t keep my legs crossed.”
    “He had something to do with the blessed event.”
    She smiled a little. “Yes, he did.”
    “So to stay respectful, you left him and came here and ended up marrying Don while you were showing, and now here we are, me toting a stick of stove wood and you a cure-all drunk.”
    “I was seventeen,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
    “I’m seventeen.”
    “You’re sixteen.”
    “Close enough.”
    “You aren’t the way I was when I was your age. You’re strong. Like your real daddy. You have a determination like he has. You’re hardheaded in the same way. He wanted to marry me no matter what. I ran off in the dead of night and caught a ride and ended up with a job in a café. I met Don there. He wasn’t so ragged and mean then. He wasn’t an intellectual or financial catch, and no one thought so highly of him that if he married a pregnant woman it would matter. I decided I could deal with that with him, but not with Brian. He deserved better.”
    “You didn’t think you was good enough?”
    “Were good enough,” she said. “It’s ‘were.’ That’s the proper word.”
    “You been sleeping up here and wandering around in a vapor of cure-all, but now you have time to fix my English?”
    “Brian was a good man and it would have changed things for him.”
    “What about me?” I said.
    “I was young. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
    “That’s your hole in the bag? You were young?”
    “I wanted you to have a home. Don said he didn’t care whose child it was. He just wanted me. I thought he meant it, and things would be okay, and Brian could go on with his life. Next day after our wedding, Don got drunk and blacked my eye and I knew who he was. But I was stuck. He got what he wanted, and then the hell began. It’s gone on now for over sixteen years. He has times when he’s like the man I met, but then he has more times where he’s the man I know now.”
    “And here you are, wearing hell’s overcoat and happy to have it.”
    “I think Don has done the best he could,” she said. “I think, in his own way, he loves me.”
    “I know this, Mama—Jinx don’t have to go to bed at night with a stick of stove wood.”
    “I stayed for you.”
    “No, you didn’t,” I said, leaning forward in the chair. “It was for me, we’d been long gone a long ways back. You stayed because you’re too weak in the head to do anything else. Weak before you took that damn cure-all. Weak and happy to be weak. You’re just glad he don’t hit you as much as he used to, and when he does, not as hard. He’s got you in a bottle now, and he can pour you out and use you when he wants to. That ain’t right, Mama. You left me to deal with him while you was floating on some cloud somewhere. I don’t blame the cure-all for it, Mama. I blame you.”
    I could see my words had stung like a bee, and that made me happy.
    “You’re right,” she said. “I am a quitter. I quit the man I loved. I quit life, and I married a quitter, and I’ve pretty much quit you, but I didn’t mean to.”
    “Now that makes it all better.”
    “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.
    “Somebody meant it,” I said. “You wasn’t swigging cure-all back when you got pregnant and run off. Tell you what. I’ll leave you a good stick of stove wood by the bed. When you ain’t drunk on your medicine, which is about fifteen minutes a day, you can use it on him. I think a good shot to the side of the head is best. Rest of the time, you can float in the clouds and he can do what he wants, and you can pretend you don’t know or