In a pub in Portland, Maine
"Dad was mafia, I grew up on the racetracks. I was there three times a week, waiting in the car with attack dogs protecting me. There are bodies in my old backyard, but I haven't checked it. Horses buried there, too. I had a sandbox as big as this bar, if you take out all the walls…they'd drag the horses across the sandbox, I remember the blood trails. We had big earth-moving equipment, too. Backhoes and such. In the middle of the night, Dad'd wake up my brother to help him bury bodies, bury the horses out in the huge fields. My brother hates horses, now. I didn’t want anything to do with them for a while, but now I’d like to work with them again.
"My brother's seven years older than me, sister's ten years older. Dad beat them. Horribly, especially my sister. And Mom. Once he brought lobsters home, and there was a huge pot of boiling water…he threw it on her. We had to take her to the hospital, her body was covered in burns. I've asked her why she stayed. I can't remember her answer. I don't understand it -- that will to stay. She doesn't admit to it all, even now. Excuses things. She was a 'dumb southern woman,' met Dad at the racetracks in Alabama. She knew he was an alcoholic.
"And I was absolutely untouched. My sister and I broke over it eventually, didn't talk for years. I was the wonder child, the daughter born after they told him and Mom never to have another child, it'd be disastrous. I loved him. We were close. When he was alive, I was so young I didn't how to disconnect the love from the violence. I call him evil, now.
"I could never figure out why I hated the scent of carnations, then a few years ago Mom gave me an album of Dad, from when he was young until his death. In the Polaroids from the funeral, there are hundreds of mourners. I laid the photos out from end to end, and there was bouquet after bouquet of carnations from the outer edges of the parlor to the center, his casket. Then I understood."