Because after Dad left, Ma got better, but it hadn’t happened yet when she danced at the Bits & Grits Nightclub and because I was just a child when I stopped trusting her moist, hot breath, when she took to skinning rabbits and hanging them out to dry on black, moonless nights and because my husband Bob tells me again all lovey-dovey that what turns him on the most is “my faint southern accent” and I bark, there’s nothing Southern about me asshole, and because spring is breaking out, all the flowers and pollens, winds blowing baby rabbits to and fro, trucks flattening them on the highway, and because getting pregnant has always been a fool’s game and nothing to get excited about, and because Bob, out to sea with his maleness will fly around the front yard, nekkid as a rabbit, as if to challenge me, and because my mother never thought twice about murdering a jackrabbit in the late afternoon, I find Ma’s old pistol in the coat closet, point it directly at Bob who blinks for a sec then packs up his truck and hightails it west for good—and because I’m downing shots at the What’s Up Cantina, throwing back more than most girls can handle in a lifetime, flirting with a long-eared fella called Buck, who claims he left a pack of ungrateful kids back home in Ohio, and says, “to be perfectly honest Honey, I have zero interest in family at all.”