"If not Perry, well then who?" She remembered the time she'd seen Carl kissing his very own sister. Carl and Mona. Wasn't that sweet? And poor Florence with her eternal headache. Or was Florence fooling just like she did herself whenever she wanted out of a ticklish or dreary situation? Yes, maybe she'd picked up a few of her mother's bad habits. But there didn't seem to be any harm in it. The headache had surely gotten rid of Perry the night before. She wandered on around the pool and into the house through the big back patio.

Aimlessly she entered the billiard room and drifted to the pinball machine in the corner. She had punched up her first game and let the ball go when Howell came into the room and went behind the bar. She heard the hiss of a beer opening. Her brother came over just as she shot her second ball.

"What's going on, Sis?"

"Nothing, big brother," she said, concentrating on the downward slope of her ball. She flipped it once but it sank in a penalty hole and the machine gave her only five points for her effort.

"I could do better than that with the head of my dick," Howell laughed, swigging beer. For some reason, Abby appreciated his vulgar attempt at humor. Maybe because she was so damned bored.

"My, my," she said, "what else do you do with that thing?"

"Come upstairs and I'll show you," her brother drawled, squeezing his beer can until the metal clinked.

Abby didn't look up from her pinball game. She should have been shocked at what her brother had said. But he'd been laying out the naughty innuendoes for years really. It was a kind of joke of his. Her brother had never so much as put a hand on her in the past year. But she was remembering the way he'd been looking the other night. She'd felt a new hunger, a fresh and hungry electricity in his attentions.

"Naw, you shoulda let it bounce before you flipped it," he said, reaching around her waist.