Eventually Romeo gets bored, shoves the piece in his pocket, and drives off. Not in his panel truck either, Mariah’s Chevy Monza being the better getaway car. This is not the end of Mariah’s bad day. It’s the beginning. The front door he’s left standing open so she can see Matty in his playpen in the living room. She has to watch him getting hungry and scared out of his mind. He’s far from walking yet, barely sitting-up age, always-empty age, crying out his heart and looking through the white mesh of the playpen, his little sad eyes asking whymommywhy?
The first time, it’s two hours. Then Romeo comes back with his pretty smile and asks her if she’s sorry. She says yes, she runs to calm down and feed poor Matty, and that’s what passes for making up in this love nest.
Mariah can’t go begging her parents to let her come home, because she was warned. Plus stubborn as the day is long. She begs her sister for help. June is still living at home but in community college now, and a genius. The whole Peggot family in fact is a shed of sharp tools, all these gifteds and talenteds. The exception being Humvee, of the birdhouse, that recently brought disaster on the family by getting himself killed. Dark clouds over the Peggot house.
Things get worse. Romeo leaves for days at a time, only to come home demanding his dinner and sex if he feels like it, but generally so toasted he passes out facedown on the bed where he’ll sleep through hell, high water, and any number of pager beeps. Mariah looks forward to these times. Because he’s threatened her with all manner of shit by now, knocked out a tooth, and the tying-up thing gets to be a habit. Again one evening he leaves her outside where she can see Matty in his playpen crying himself apart. It’s winter now, cold, the door’s standing open, and Mariah is sure this time her child is going to die. She can yell for help all she wants, with nobody up there but the owls in the trees to answer. She’s yanked her wrists around till they’re cut and bleeding, but Romeo is a careful man and knows how to tie a knot.
The first hour, the baby cries till he’s lacquered his little red face with snot, eyelashes all stuck together, chin quavering. Second hour he goes quiet, lying still, looking at her with those eyes. Third hour, the eyes close and his little body’s shaking. She’s guessing on the time, it could have been three hours or thirty minutes, but once it starts to get dark, she knows, and this is the point where Mariah remembers how to pray. Something she’d forgotten how to do some while ago, around middle school where life gets mean and a girl starts to see how mad is better than sorry, and telling better than asking. Even where God is concerned.
Mariah is thrown back on her ass. Back to asking. Please God don’t let my baby die. Her boobs are rock hard and burning, she’s crying tears, crying milk, lowing like a cow. Matty starts to wail again in the dark, the special howl a baby keeps on reserve if the need should arise for exploding a mother’s heart. Mariah feels it like a knife in her rib cage, lifting skin from bone, but she’s thanking God her baby hasn’t died yet of hunger or cold or the bad luck of getting born in this shit family in their shit two-bedroom A-frame outside of Duffield. Romeo will not be back before morning. This is the night that will break and make Mariah.
She’s going to act real sorry, yes, to see him come back home with his big smile. She’ll put on a show, let this man believe he’s the answer to her prayers. But this night she remembers the other thing she was fool enough to forget: that mad is better than sorry.
Mariah will sneak a blade out of Romeo’s truck, one of those X-Actos, and duct-tape it to her body where she can reach it the next time she finds herself backhanded, in need of a cutting edge. Taped to her butt, below the butterflies-are-free tramp stamp that her parents still don’t know about. One more secret, this sweet blade she takes to wearing at all times. If she finds herself tied up again, this butterfly will get herself free.
It’s the edge she will use on him too. The day Romeo finally deals out one too many shitfaced fuck-you-alls to herself and the baby prior to passing out cold, deep enough that she can flip him faceup and go to work. Slicing into his cheek from the corner of his mouth till she hits jawbone, both sides, for a shit-eating smile he can wear the rest of his life. And a big heart carved into the skin of his chest. She lets no gushing blood stop her, nor the sight of yellow cheek fat falling in little chunks out of cut-open flesh, nor the screaming as he comes around. She stops short of Lorena Bobbiting him （which was maybe not invented yet）， but she does enough. She can grab little Matty and light out of there knowing Daddy will not be modeling any khakis for any J. C. Penney’s.