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There was a scar just beneath her clavicle. It looked like a bright pink worm crawling toward her shoulder. She noticed me staring at it.

'This here’s a gift from my dad,' she said, tracing it with her index finger. 'He came home drunk and dinner wasn’t ready. He threw me across the room. I ain’t seen him in fifteen years. But this don’t let me forget him.'

She said that her mother and father were both alcoholics. Her father was given to indiscriminate spasms of violence. Her mother’s temperament was sullen and submissive—she never uttered a word of protest against the beating of her children.

Michelle fell in love with a neighborhood boy when she was seventeen and moved out of her parents’ place to live with him. She got pregnant shortly thereafter and had a son. Then she had a girl and another boy. She confessed that, at the time, she had been drinking too much. 'Hittin’ the hooch,' she called it. After one bleak episode during which she blacked out, her boyfriend left with the kids and later sent them to live with his mother in Pennsylvania. Michelle visited them a few times there, but she’d been made to feel unwelcome, and after a while she stopped going. She didn’t think her children should see their mother treated with open hostility. She could imagine the things that were said about her behind her back, for her kids seemed wary of her. 'I been beat, I been cheated, but nothin’ ever hurt me worse than that,' she said. She had not seen them in several years.

As she said this, tears glistened on her lashes. She sniffled once or twice but kept the tears from tracing down her cheeks. I wanted to reach out and touch her, as though my skin on hers would be the perfect salve. She looked frail and small, clothed only in a bath towel, her thumb incessantly flicking a cigarette butt. But I feared that if I reached for her, she might take it the wrong way, as if I were demanding her submission. And the sad thing was, she must have expected it. Why else would she come out of the bathroom in a stranger’s home with nothing but a towel on? That was her tacit signal that she knew the rules of the game. Everything had its price, and she had made her bargain. Or did she, in fact, trust me more that I trusted myself?

Either way, there seemed to be nothing in the way of consolation I could give. The only favor I could offer was to withhold my impulse to reach out for her. And so I listened, nodding my head from time to time, handing her another cigarette. After a while we fell silent. I rose, went to the bedroom, and took the comforter off my bed. I made up the futon for her, each crease and tuck a kind of penance, a displaced gesture of the affection I dared not show. She thanked me and curled up under the comforter. I turned out the light, went into the bedroom, and crawled into bed by myself.

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