“What is wrong with you?”
“Not a thing,” she said. Her brother’s phone-call hadn’t been unexpected.
“You’re fucking insane.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to behave yourself.”
“You’re completely fucking insane.”
He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a note on the kitchen table, terse: “Gone out. B.” The handwriting sent him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days when they’d been a family, when he’d signed Brad’s report cards and hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.
Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare words there. She was draped in her wings.