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Roy said, “Don’t say nothin’ to him when he gets home from school.”

“All right.”

“You just let me handle everything.”

“All right.”

“It’ll be better for us,” Roy said, trying to make her feel better.

“Haulin’ that kid everywhere we go, that isn’t the kind of life we want. We want to be free, babe. That’s just the kind of people we are. Free.”

Roy had killed people before and it had never bothered her. But never a kid before, that she knew of. And his own kid to boot.

He kissed her breasts a final time and then said, “I’ll figure out what to do about Jason and then you’n me’ll go dancin’ tonight. Okay?”

“Okay, Roy.”

Roy was gonna kill him for sure.

One day, when Angie was thirteen, her grandmother said, “That body of hers is gonna get her in trouble someday.” The irony being that Grandmother herself had had a body just like it—killer breasts and hips that made young men weep in public—when she’d been young. And so had Angie’s mother, the person Grandmother was talking to.

The thing being that the worst trouble Grandmother had ever gotten in was getting knocked up by a soldier home on leave from WW II, a pregnancy that had brought Angie’s mother, Suzie, into the world. The worst Suzie had ever gotten into, in turn, was getting knocked up by a Vietnam soldier home on leave, a pregnancy that had brought Angie into the world.

Angie, however, got into a lot more trouble than just spreading her sweet young thighs. She saw a TV show one night where this beautiful girl was referred to as a “kept woman,” a woman who lounged about an expensive apartment all day, looking just great, while this older man paid her rent, gave her endless numbers of gifts, and practically groveled every time the kept woman was even faintly displeased. An Iowa girl with a wondrous body like Angie’s, was it any wonder she’d want to be a kept woman, too?

When she was fifteen, she ran away from home in the company of a thirty-two-year-old woman from Omaha who took her to a hotel in Des Moines. Angie slept with ten men in three years and made just over a thousand dollars. One of the men had been black, and that gave her some pause. She could just hear her dad if he ever found out about her (A) screwing men for money or (B) screwing a black man for money.

She went back home. Her dad, who worked as an appliance service repair man for Al’s American Appliances, didn’t have the money for a private shrink so they sent her to the county Human Services Department, where she saw this counselor for free. She spent two hours filling out the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test, which just about bored her ass off. He kept peeking in the room and asking her if she was about done. That’s what he pretended to do, anyway. What he was really doing was staring at her breasts. Held fallen in love with them the moment they walked in the door. She ended up screwing him on the side. He had a wife who worked at Wal-Mart in Cedar Rapids and two little girls, one of whom was lame in some way and whom he got all sad about sometimes. He was thirty-eight and bald and felt guilty about screwing her and cheating on his wife and all but he said that her tits just made him dizzy when he touched them, just dizzy. He kept her in rap CDs. She loved rap. The way the gangsters in the rap videos took care of their girlfriends. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to meet some guy who’d give her a life of ease. A kept woman. No work. No hassle. No sweat. Just sit around some fancy apartment and read comic books and watch MTV and porno movies. She loved porno movies. The thing was, she didn’t like sex very much, except for masturbating, but if sex was the price she had to pay for a life of ease, so be it.

She dropped the counselor as soon as she managed to get through high school. She got a job in Cedar Rapids as a clerk in a Target store. She lasted three weeks. She took her paycheck and bought a very sexy dress and then she started hanging out in the lawyer bars downtown. Her first couple of months, things went pretty