“Sometimes I wish I were.”

Bill looked at Moses over her head. “No, you don’t.”

Wy sighed. “No, I don’t.”

“How is Natalie behaving?”

“She’s still sober,” Wy said. “She’s staying in town, renting a room from Tatiana Anayuk. Got herself a job bagging groceries at Eagle.”

“She’s living with Tasha?”

“Yeah, I know, the oldest established permanent floating party in Newenham. But they’re cousins, and Natalie’s pretty much broke. And like I said, she’s still sober.”

“She must go straight into her room and lock the door.” Bill made Moccasin Man another margarita and sent a pitcher of beer over to Moses’ table. The place was in its usual lull between the people-getting-off-work crowd and the people-coming-in-for-their-after-dinner-drink crowd, and she was able to return to Wy in a few moments. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” Wy said, startled out of her absorption with beer suds.

“Let Natalie see Tim.”

Wy made a face. “I didn’t really have a choice. The judge ordered visitation. Limited, supervised, but still.”

“Bullshit,” Bill said, speaking with all the authority of the magistrate she was. “You could have run her off. You still could. Why haven’t you, if it’s making the boy so miserable, and you miserable with it?”

Wy drank beer. Bill waited.

“She’s his mother, Bill,” Wy said at last. “She’s got rights.”

“Just because you didn’t give birth to him doesn’t make him any less your son. Crying out loud, Wy, I could tell you stories from now until next year about cases I’ve had before my court, parents aren’t fit to keep a dog, much less a child. She’s one of them.”

“She is when she’s drunk,” Wy agreed. “Maybe if she stays here…”

“What? You going to give him back?”

Wy’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing.

“I didn’t think so,” Bill said, her voice very dry.

“It was right to let her see him. It was right for him to see her, so that he doesn’t always remember her as the drunken monster who beat him. Damn it, Bill, it was the right thing to do!”