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Amanda Parr is twenty-one years old when she meets the man who will one day be the father of her children. It’s her last shift of the night, and a group of drunken men with receding hairlines and wandering hands are causing more trouble than they’re worth, apparently at the club for someone’s birthday. There’s a blonde one with a ruddy face and the bravado of a man with a laundry list of insecurities—an easy target. There’s another blonde with him, who has a cane and looks too young to be here. Sandwiched between them is the apparent birthday boy, who’s likely already wasted and ready to spend money. She makes a b-line for them, but gets stopped by a large, rough hand closing around her bicep.
“Here, sweetheart,” It’s one of the guys in the birthday group who’s caught her on his way to the bathroom. He’s tall and thin, but there’s strength in his frame. He’s got a ratty mullet and an awful mustache, and he smells like booze and burnt plastic, but he could be worse. He shoves a wad of crumpled bills into her hand. “Take care of my buddy, would’ja?” He leers at her when she looks at the bills (it’s probably around three hundred dollars in fifties and there’s no way she’s turning that down) and nods at the little group.
“Of course, honey.” She purrs, batting her lashes up at the man who is still gripping her arm. She tucks the money into her bra (an ugly neon purple zebra print that she hates but her manager loves) and drags the nails of her free hand down his chest in a hollow pantomime of flirtation. He lets her go.
The man he gestures at is stocky and solid, with an air of smooth confidence to him that makes him easy to clock. A drug dealer. Only criminals have that sort of “nothing can touch me” grace to them. She’s known enough of them to be able to spot it a mile away. That explains the easy cash, at least. He’s cute, actually, which is a nice change of pace. He’s got thick black hair and bright blue eyes, and his hooked nose keeps him from looking too boring and all-American. He looks like the star of an action movie.
She smiles at him and introduces herself as Krystal, guiding him away from his posse and to the dark, dank champagne room of the run down club. She keeps him close, placing his hand on her waist with a sultry wink and a whispered instruction not to tell her boss (he’s not special—she does this with all of them, but she supposes that when all your blood is in your dick, it’s harder to think straight) until they get to one of the small alcoves with ratty faux-velvet curtains and a tacky plastic armchair that’s peppered with glitter and squeaks when any weight is put on it.
She presses her criminal client down into the seat and slinks into his lap, rubbing her ass firmly over his thighs and pulsing her knees against his hips to feel for any bulge that could be a gun instead of a hard on. She’s good at hiding it—she’s got enough friends here who’ve been doing this for longer than she has, and she’s learned all the tricks. She makes small talk, asking the man’s name with feigned interest. He only gives her an initial.
“M? That’s all I get?” Her tone is playful, but she doesn’t actually care.
“I don’t think ‘Krystal’ is your given name, honey.” M shoots back, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Amanda resists the urge to be charmed by him. She can tell that the mysterious M is a fan of the chase. He likes to feel like he’s won something by paying for her. She’s met plenty of men like him: men who think they’re something special and try to drag her real name out of her, or some other unimportant fact they think makes them some master of seduction who’s managed to free the poor, helpless stripper from the cage of her own cold insecurity. Usually, she lies to them. They give her a good tip. Everyone wins.
But M hasn’t outright asked for her name, so instead she smiles back at him and lets his observation hang in the air, gyrating against him to the song pulsing through the worn out speakers mounted on the walls. It goes on that way for a few songs; the two of them swapping teasing jabs and flirtations until it’s time for her to get off work and M’s friends are breaking into factions and leaving. He goes with a promise that he’ll come back soon that she doesn’t heed, thought she giggles and tells him she can’t wait. The bartender, Sinamon, rolls her eyes at M as he saunters out, muttering to Amanda that she doesn’t know how she keeps her temper with boys like that who get too big for their britches. Mostly it’s the money and the short dances, Amanda says, crudely miming the motions of a client blowing his lode. She laughs all the way home.
She doesn’t think of him again until he’s back a week later, alone, this time. He wants a dance from her, a crooked smile on his face that she finds attractive despite herself. She doesn’t mean to be disarmed by his gentle touch and his sharp tongue, but she finds herself in his lap and then in his car and finally in his bed. At first, it’s just another fling—something to occupy her in the warm summer months when she has nothing better to do. In fact, she hardly ever thinks of Michael other than when he’s breezing through town with money from mysterious places he won’t tell her about, and they get high and fuck and giggle and talk about their dreams together.
She gets along with his friends alright—Trevor (the one with the mullet and the mustache from that first night) hates her, but Michael assures her that he hates everyone and that he’ll come around. She doesn’t care much either way: it’s not like she’s going to be hanging around these lunatics for much longer. But she enjoys the thrill of Michael’s desire and the warmth of his affection while it lasts.
She doesn’t want children. She never has, actually. Her parents were terrible, and she’s known enough girls who’ve gotten knocked up too young to know that nothing good ever comes from it. So when she discovers she’s pregnant, she doesn’t actually tell Michael that. Instead, she calls him and asks him for at least half the money for her abortion, considering that it is half his fault, and she’s annoyed because they should have been more careful and now she’ll have to take a week off work and that’s money she fucking needs, Michael.
But Michael surprises her. He proposes to her out of the blue; promises her a house and a life and a real family, like in the movies. And of course, she turns him down. She likes him, sure—hell, she’s sort of in love with him, she thinks, but the only time she’s ever imagined them as anything other than fuckbuddies is when she’s high off her ass and he’s pouring poison in her ear with his mercury tongue. But Michael is persistent, and he promises her that he’ll make her his whole life, he’ll take care of her, that together, they can give this baby the childhood they never had. And all the while, the bump in her abdomen morphs in her mind from an annoyance to a life that she is the steward of.
She’s four months pregnant when she agrees to marry him. She’s known Michael for five. Fall is fast approaching—she wants to get married sooner rather than later, because she knows that now that she’s decided to keep this child, she has to be sure she can keep Michael, too. If their baby is born and it becomes too much for him, she wants to be sure she has something to fall back on.
So they have a small ceremony at the courthouse that should go smoothly, but Trevor is supposed to be Michael’s witness, and he doesn’t show up. Amanda is far more distressed by this than Michael is—she’s angry on his behalf, while Michael just sighs and shuffles his feet and seems unsurprised. It irritates her that the man who is supposed to be her soon-to-be-husband’s best friend, this man that she has tried so hard to get to like her for Michael’s sake, this man who has the nerve to call himself Michael’s brother, doesn’t even care enough about him to show up to his fucking wedding. But Michael chuckles into her hair and kisses her forehead and tells her that while he appreciates that she wants to stand up for him, that’s just Trevor for you. It’s no big deal. When you love people, Michael tells her, you love their flaws, too.
That gives her a little hope, at least. Michael is a kind and gentle man, she knows, but there’s a side of him that worries her. He’s a criminal—a robber, she knows now—and he’s very, very good at what he does. He’s never said it to her, but she knows he’s killed people. She knows he has a short fuse, like her. But if he can forgive the only person Amanda’s ever heard him speak of with something close to love when he’s a no-show at the most important event of his life, then maybe the two of them have a chance of making it as a couple, after all.
They go home to a trailer that Michael has bought them (another part of his bid to make her see that he is a responsible man worthy of being the father of her child) and for the first time in a long time, she’s genuinely happy. It’s no mansion in the hills, but it’s a start, and it’s theirs. It’s sparsely furnished but it’s cozy, and when they tumble into their bed together, her whole heart sings with love for Michael Townley.
The next few months fly by. She can’t work once she stops being able to see her feet—more for her safety than for lack of strange men who desire her company—and Michael puts around the house because she’s made him swear that he’ll be there for when the baby is born. He’s shockingly domestic, she discovers. He cooks and cleans and does everything to make sure she’s comfortable, doting on her like she’ll break at any moment. It’s sweet. During those golden months, she discovers that pregnancy suits them both—she and her husband both glow at the prospect of starting a family together.
When their daughter comes, she does it as she will do everything else in this life: with great fanfare and against everything her parents wish for. It’s a hard birth—a long labor followed by the realization that her daughter is breeched and has to be turned—but when they hand Amanda that screaming bundle that is still attached to her by her tummy, Amanda finds that everything in the world seems to suddenly make sense. She looks her little girl in the face and sees her own nose and Michael’s chin and she didn’t know that you could love another person as much as she loves her. She’s perfect, from her fuzzy blonde head to her tiny, round toenails. Amanda knows in that moment that there is nothing she will not do to protect this child. She is the most precious thing in the world, and may the good Lord help anyone who dares stand between them.
They name her Tracey. Michael picks the name out of nowhere and says it just came to him, and Amanda thinks that it’s sort of romantic to pick a name for no reason other than because it was on the tip of her husband’s tongue. She likes it. It suits their bright-eyed daughter, she thinks, and Tracey Townley has a nice ring to it anyways.
They bring her home and both of them spend every second staring at her, if only to make sure that she’s still breathing. She seems impossibly small and delicate, though her grip is superhuman. Amanda and Michael spend the first month of Tracey’s life hovering over her crib and smiling at each other because holy shit, they made this little girl and she is perfect.
During that same time, Michael is planning another job. His ragtag team of bandits has a lair of its own, but it’s simpler for Michael to meet with Trevor and Lester—his main supports in these endeavors—at their home so that he can help Amanda with Tracey when she wakes up wailing and wanting no one but her father. Amanda likes Lester well enough, and when Brad is with them, she likes him well enough, too. It’s Trevor that she has problems with.
And she would like to state for the record that she and Trevor’s issues are and never were her fault. Especially at first, Michael had spoken of Trevor as his brother and companion in all things, and she wanted to win his approval, if only to please Michael. But as the days wear on, it becomes abundantly clear that Trevor lives to piss her off. He’s constantly making comments about her boob job (which looks damn good, thank you very much) or her old profession or her tired eyes after two hours of sleep with her fucking infant. He even finds a dog that he keeps for a few weeks and names Krystal “because she’s a bitch.”
It gets to the point where Amanda wants Trevor out of her house. He’s an asshole, plain and simple, and all he wants to do is needle her into fighting him. She does her best not to get into screaming matches with him in front of Tracey, but Trevor knows all the right buttons to push to reduce her to a steaming heap of rage. She knows Michael means well when he jumps to her defense, but it only annoys her further: she can fight her own battles, damn it.
The unfortunate thing about it, though, is that Tracey absolutely adores Trevor. She’s crazy for him—she wants nothing but to be on his lap or in his arms any time he’s within her gaze. Maybe even worse is that Trevor adores Tracey right back. He dotes on her constantly and without measure. He never sees her without some new trinket or knickknack for her. In fact, Amanda doesn’t think he’s ever so much as cursed in front of Tracey, which is a feat of strength that neither she nor Michael have yet proven capable of. The two of them are inseparable, and Amanda refuses to rob her daughter of someone who loves her when she has so few of those people in her life already.
It’s not until a half a year later that anything about Trevor makes sense. It’s one of those precious nights where Michael is home between jobs, and Tracey is finally sleeping peacefully, and the two of them can spend some much needed time together. Michael is sitting on the floor of their meager living room with her, folding laundry while some news show plays in the background (and this is one of the things she cherishes in those early days—Michael doesn’t complain when she want help with things like this. He’s patient and helpful and when she remembers this man years from now, she will not blame herself for being foolish enough to love him) and they’re just talking. Michael tells her stories of mishaps on the job, and she listens eagerly. His profession seems romantic to her when Michael talks about it: he makes his crew sound like secret, clever spies in a big budget action movie.
“So we go to this little shithole bar in the middle of nowhere, right, just trying to blow off some steam and get a pulse on what the deal is with this town, but there’s this kid there. Can’t be more than seventeen—skinny blonde guy, all dressed up in this biker gear and shit, right? Turns out the twinky fuck is some big shot biker’s bitch boy, but of course Trevor fuckin’ gets what Trevor fuckin’ wants, and he won’t lay off the kid.” Amanda is smiling faintly, because the Trevor that Michael describes is always much funnier and more entertaining that the Trevor she has to deal with, and stories about him are the best ones. Michael continues on, not even focused on her as he barrels through his story. “And I’m tellin’ ‘im, Mandy, I swear to God, I keep tellin’ him to just leave it alone, y’know, because he’s just gonna get us in trouble, but Trevor’s damn persistent. Next thing I know, we’re getting’ run out of the fuckin’ place because they caught Trevor slamming this kid in the bathroom! Can you believe that shit? We lost a great opportunity with that damn bank because T couldn’t keep it in his fuckin’ pants.” Michael chuckles, rolling his eyes with an indulgent smile, like one gives a puppy that’s chewed through an old shoe.
Amanda doesn’t freeze; she keeps folding their warm clothes and going through the motions as Michael keeps talking, moving on to a new story without noticing the way the gears are turning in Amanda’s head. She laughs and murmurs affirmatively when the story calls for it, but she’s in another world entirely. Before now, she’s never heard anything from Michael or otherwise that would indicate that Trevor is anything other than perfectly straight, but now that she has, she’s surprised she hadn’t seen it sooner. Everything clicks suddenly into place. Trevor is in love with her husband. He has been since he met him. Every personal jab, every unwarranted insult, every annoyed glance and hateful stare makes sense.
She feels strangely calm. She and Michael have fought plenty of times when he’s come home with whore’s perfume and lipstick stains on his clothes—they’ve screamed and roared and hated each other and then fallen together in an explosion of kisses and promises neither of them can keep. It’s just their way. But there are times when Michael comes home and Amanda smells sex and something else, something unplaceable but familiar on him and her accusations freeze in her throat. Now she understands. She’s not angry; this is the first moment of clarity she has had with her husband. She has a map, now, and she knows that she must be careful when she navigates Michael. She has been crowned the victor in a war she didn’t know was being fought, and she plans to keep her throne.
Her hand goes to her stomach without thinking—she’s three months into another pregnancy, and she feels compelled to protect her growing child from this nameless threat that she feels in her very bones. She knows that she will have a son. It’s too early yet for the doctors to tell her for certain, but she feels different. She will have a boy to carry the Townley name, and that will feed Michael’s vanity enough to keep him at her side for now. She knows she can never, ever let him know that she knows that he is keeping Trevor Philips as his mistress right under her nose. She loves Michael, but she knows there is something dark and dangerous within him that he has not yet had directed at her, something that has kept him fucking Trevor but prevented him from loving him. It is not something she wants to awaken.
Amanda is no fool. She was raised in the rural Midwest in the 80s, is all. She’s never even seen a gay person, let alone thought that her husband could be having an affair with his best friend. She knows, too, that she is twenty-three with a young daughter and another child on the way and no skills to speak of outside of lying on her back in the dark. She knows that she needs Michael if she wants to be able to protect her children. The decision is simple: she will do whatever it takes to keep Michael by her side for as long as she possibly can. She will prepare for the worst. And she will never, ever, ever let him know what she knows about him.
Michael blathers on, unaware.
Their son is born in the height of summer. It’s much easier with him than it was with Tracey: he is born smiling, with doughy cheeks and a button nose, and once again, Amanda is flooded with unfathomable love. They name him James, Michael’s middle name, and he lives up to it. Unlike his sister, Jimmy is prone to fits of misery like Michael is, where he wants to do nothing but pout with his thumb in his mouth, and there’s nothing to be done to make him happy again. Where Tracey was a handful with her dangerous curiosity and constant need to be on the move, Jimmy is a calmer but more emotional child. He is content to sit on Amanda’s hip all day while she goes about her errands, but his laughter and his tears come in equal measures.
Interestingly, her son is closer to Lester than to Trevor when he’s young, preferring Lester’s gadgets to play with and his fuller figure to snuggle against over Trevor’s angular body and rough skin. She finds it endearing in a way—she’s never had much of an opinion about Lester (other than a distant discomfort with the way she can sometimes feel him watching her like he knows something about her that she does not even know about herself) but seeing the way her son opens him up brings a smile to her face. As strange and dysfunctional as it may be, they have created a family. If nothing else, she has given her children people who love them.
By the time Tracey is six and Jimmy is four, they both want to go on all sorts of adventures with their “uncles.” Amanda has kept one secret rule for all these years, and she knew that eventually, it would be challenged: she will not ever leave Trevor and her husband alone with her children. Michael on his own is fine, and even Trevor on his own can be trusted to keep them safe, but she knows better than to give Trevor the room to show Michael what a good family they could have had. Amanda knows her husband is easily swayed—he loves whoever is in front of him. It’s too dangerous for Amanda to let them out of her sight to play house. She isn’t bitter about Trevor’s love of her husband, but she won’t allow him to steal the only thing keeping her safe, either.
She watches Trevor with her children, and when he makes a snide comment about her baby weight, she can only smile at him tiredly and shrug in response. She doesn’t hate him anymore. She can’t. She knows that if anyone were to ask Trevor what the worst thing someone could do to him would be, he would say it would be to pity him, so pity him she does. She understands what it is to love Michael fruitlessly. She knows what it is to feel like you’re made for him, and to want to hit him and kiss him and love him and destroy him all at once. She knows what it is to be beholden to him, whether you want to be or no, and to hunger for his love in return.
Their children grow older. Michael stays away from the crew for longer and longer. He starts saving money. Tracey starts middle school and Amanda thinks that it was just days ago that she was learning to walk. She sees so much of she and Michael both in their children—it’s rewarding in a way she’d never imagined it could be. She has something close to hope for maybe the first time in her life. She and Michael aren’t the best parents, no, but they’re okay. A damn sight better than either of their parents had ever been. And that means something, right?
The day Amanda has planned for since before Jimmy was even born comes in the middle of a roaring North Yankton winter with three feet of snow on the ground. Michael is only hours back from a job; cash in his pockets and a frown on his face. He says he needs to talk to her. Amanda wills her body to soften even as she turns her insides to steel: she will not break. She has gone through every possible scenario, knowing that eventually, Michael would come to her and tell her the truth about Trevor. Maybe looking for her forgiveness, maybe to tell her he’s leaving. Maybe, even, to ask her to share with another, to let the other half of Michael’s heart play nicely with her in their sandbox. She has made herself ready for each one. She will fight tooth and nail for her kingdom and her heirs.
But that’s not what Michael wants to tell her. His face is worn and she’s struck by how old he is—by how old they both are. He’ll be forty next year. He sits on the edge of their bed with his head in his hands and tells her that the FIB has found them, but they’re willing to cut him a deal. At first, she’s wary—this is the only life they’ve ever known. She suspects a trap. But Michael promises that Dave is a good man, and besides, they have the money to make sure that he keeps his word.
Dave Norton reminds her of her husband. He has tired blue eyes and steady hands and a low, smooth voice that makes you feel safe in his presence. She likes him a great deal, she finds. She imagines the life that Dave promises them: a life where they’re normal people, and Michael has a normal job and she’s a normal housewife. She imagines inviting Dave and his then-wife Jill over for dinner, in their big house somewhere warm and sunny, where she and Jill can gossip about their neighbors and celebrities and Dave and Michael can watch the game and talk about their children. She imagines they can be normal people.
But she doesn’t realize the cost. Michael doesn’t tell her directly; when she asks him what the rest of the crew have been offered, Michael shrugs and says he hadn’t thought of it. When she’s supposed to be sleeping, Dave and Michael sit at her kitchen table and she listens through the door as Dave promises Michael that if he will lure Trevor to them, his death will be “humane.” It will be clean and quick. That’s the merciful thing to do, Dave tells him. Amanda feels sick.
It’s not that she has any undue love for Trevor—hell, she knows that she should be happy that her husband is finally getting rid of her greatest rival for his love, but all she can feel is a vague twinge of premonitory fear at the thought that perhaps one day she, too, will only deserve the small mercy that is a “clean kill.” (Ten years later they will sit on a couch with a few inches or the whole universe between them, and he will turn to her with eyes like an ocean storm and swear that he’ll put her in the ground with the rest of them, and she will remember this moment and think that her time has come, too).
She goes to bed and does not think about the price Michael will pay for their freedom from this life. She will do it for her children, because she loves them and because she doesn’t want them to end up like her and Michael, with nothing and no one in the world but someone who was never supposed to be anything but a summer fling anyways.
They have to sit their children down and tell them that they’re leaving North Yankton. They’re going to move to a new city and leave all of this behind them. They smile and tell them that everything will be okay. Tracey clocks them immediately, but it’s Jimmy who asks why they’re moving, and will Uncle Trevor and Uncle Lester and Uncle Brad and everyone else come too? Amanda and Michael exchange a look. Michael sighs and says that sometimes, you have to leave people you love because even though you love them, they could hurt you. They might want to hurt you.
Jimmy shrinks in his chair a little, but Tracey’s eyes narrow at the pointed lie. She knows even in her naïve youth that Trevor would never so much as pluck an errant hair from their heads. She knows that her parents are liars. Worse, that her parents are lying directly to her for their own gain. But Amanda and Michael are the adults, and so they get their way. Everything goes according to plan at the set up robbery, and then they’re packing in a whirlwind and being chauffeured to the airport, and then they’re on a plane and everything changes.
Los Santos is supposed to make everything better. For a while, it almost does. But the months go on and she and Michael find that without the constant pressure of being caught (first by the police and later by Michael’s crew) and the ever-uniting goal of getting out of poverty and crime to hold them together, she and her husband have very little in common.
In the beginning, they lounge around all day in their big bed or by their beautiful pool in the gentle San Andres sun, and Amanda is happy. But she and Michael are used to having long breaks from one another while Michael cases joints and pulls jobs and lies low that are now unnecessary, and they find themselves growing sick of each other. It doesn’t help that their children have transformed into different people before their eyes. Amanda suspects that yanking them away from the only life and the only people they’d ever known (even if it is to give them something as perfect as this) is perhaps not their best idea, but the change in Tracey and Jimmy seems unprecedented.
Jimmy grows sedated and lazy, withdrawing in his room and refusing to talk about anything more important than the amount of Sprunk in his minifridge, while Tracey grows more careless and violent, even going so far as to be sent home from her new school within the first month for getting in a fight with one of the popular girls and breaking her nose. Amanda is at a loss. She and Michael are briefly able to rally together in the face of their children’s adversary, but that, too, goes away with time.
It doesn’t help, either, that there seem to be constant, sharp reminders of their old lives in every move any of them makes. Michael’s night terrors are the most obvious, but it lurks in Jimmy and Tracey, too. Amanda sees it in the angle of Jimmy’s head as he studies some handheld game, the way he squints and rubs his lips together in concentration like she has watched Lester do over floor plans laid out on her coffee table. It’s in Tracey’s barking laugh and proud heft of her chin that she learned from years of ghosting behind Trevor’s heels. Something bitter and petty in her twists at these observations; it pains her to see the life she and Michael worked so hard to get them away from bleed into them even here. She wonders if it’s too late, if the venom in she and her husband’s veins is already poisoning her children. Perhaps they are destined to fail from the start.
Amanda has nightmares, too, though she is better at hiding them than Michael. She dreams of a creature that is shaped like Dave Norton but has the brilliant yellow eyes of Trevor Philips. She dreams it has smoke swirling around its feet and tattered rags hanging from its hunched shoulders. It tells her that her husband has thought to fool Death, indeed, to blaspheme His very name—to use Him as a pawn to pay his debts. It tells her that Michael paid for this life with a bad check. You cannot sacrifice one life for another. It lowers its mouth to his, then, and sucks the breath out of his lungs, and Amanda wakes drenched in sweat with a scream stuck in her throat. But it’s always nothing. Time marches ever forwards. Tracey goes to high school. Jimmy follows. Michael grows drunker and fatter by the second, stagnant and lifeless on their couch. Amanda begins to hate him.
It’s not fair of her, of course. Neither of them knew how hard this would be. They thought this would be the easy thing, the final prize that was their right, damnit. But instead, they nip at each other and it stops being a fun game before good sex and starts being bitter and mean. The years bleed by. She and Michael fight day in and day out with each other and with their children. She cries more than she did in North Yankton. Her husband’s clothes still smell of strange perfume (or, more painfully, strange cologne) like they did back then, and she thinks that it all seems so futile. What was the point of coming here if everything is going to be the same?
But she can’t leave him. In fact, it never even occurs to her to do so. Yes, Michael fucks strippers and whores and rent boys and probably other people, too, but he always has. Amanda starts fucking people, too. It makes her feel a little better, at least. But neither of them have affairs, she knows for a fact. She, because she can’t find anyone that she likes well enough to sleep with more than once or twice, let alone have feelings for, and her husband because he left his mistress for dead in Luddendorf in exchange for the life they have together now.
She meets Kyle eight years into her family’s self-imposed exile. He’s a tennis coach and a friend of her then-Zumba instructor, Sequoia. She takes lessons from him and eventually sleeps with him, too, but she doesn’t count that as an affair, either, because she doesn’t actually like him. She fucks him because he makes her feel young and because he treats her like a human being, but he’s dumber than a sack of bricks, and an absolutely terrible tennis player, as it turns out.
She knows that Michael knows, but neither of them say anything because it’s been a long time since they’ve done each other the courtesy of pretending they give a shit about their marriage anymore. She starts stealing things from stores because it at least makes her life interesting. It gives her a thrill, and for the first time, she understands her husband’s lifestyle choices. There’s a certain heady rush to criminality that she got years ago from coke and then from Michael’s touch. It’s nice to feel it again.
And then everything goes downhill very quickly. Firstly, something happens with Michael’s stupid boat and Jimmy and Jimmy’s new car is somehow involved, too. Then there’s a strange boy in her house and Michael says he’s a friend the same way he used to say that Lester and Brad and Trevor and any stragglers were his “friends” and she fears that the return to his old ways will kill him, or worse, resurrect him.
Secondly, Michael catches her and Kyle fucking in their bed. She typically doesn’t do that, and neither does he, but she’s in need of something to calm her down after she’s paced holes in the floor worrying about Michael’s hands that are now so restless, like they used to get the day before he left to pull a score. She wants to unwind a little, and a fast fuck against cold bleachers won’t do that for her. Michael isn’t pleased. He and the new boy take off after Kyle down the road and Amanda wants to scream.
Franklin reminds her of Michael like Dave once did. He’s built like him, and the few times she’s laid eyes on him, he’s had a look of drawn worldliness that comes from years of hardship and struggling. She considers sleeping with him. She wonders if Michael has considered it too. Maybe he’s beaten her to it. The thought slices through her, bitter and sharp. She slams the door and slumps against it. Maybe she should get into coke again. Tears spring to her eyes, unbidden, even as she begins to laugh at the ludicrous life she leads.
She wanders into the kitchen and pours herself a drink even as she continues to laugh and cry and lose her mind. She doesn’t notice Tracey in the doorframe until she speaks softly.
“Are you ever gonna leave Dad?” She asks. Amanda shuts her eyes, her drink swirling in her hand. She knows Tracey sees that she’s been crying. She also knows that Tracey knows that she’s been fucking someone in her father’s bed. She isn’t sure where exactly everything went so wrong.
“No, sweetie.” She says softly back. She remembers, oddly, something Michael had said to her once, when they were just two kids getting high and hooking up. “You forget a thousand things every day. I’ll just make sure this is one of them.”