The Coach Eric business was extremely distressing. He had kissed her at the end of one of their practice sessions on the beach. There were several volleyball courts down at the beach, free for anyone to use, and mostly they remained unused except in the height of summer, but Eric and Bunny spent an afternoon down there three times a week. That Friday they had stayed to see the sun set; the sun was setting earlier and earlier as winter settled in, and they’d sat, sweaty and exhausted in the sand, their bodies too close.

“I could hear his knee creak when he moved it,” she said to me later, rapturous. And then he had kissed her, and, as she put it, “smashed her down on the sand.” I took this to be the most unromantic description of dry humping I had ever heard, and I did not ask questions, desperate to have no further particulars root themselves in my imagination.

“This is,” I said as brightly as I could, “a super-bad idea! And you should stop! Immediately! ’K?”

“Phh,” Bunny said. “Says the king of online hookups.”

I had lost credibility with her.

The next time they met, he told her it was a horrible mistake, never to be repeated, that she must not tell anyone, that they must go on as before, that he would hold himself in check. But of course it proved “difficult to control himself” around her, and Bunny for her part was doing absolutely anything she could to break his resolve, from wearing her shortest, tightest shorts to accidentally spilling water all over her breasts. She was a comically large Lolita. Coquettishness was also not something that came naturally to Bunny; “on the nose” was her flirting style in toto.

“So then I said that having a nice butt was like my number one quality that I was looking for in a husband, and he kind of did this thing with his eyebrow, like, did you just say that? And then I said, ‘And you have a nice one!’ And he blushed!”

I mean, I was fish-mouthed, just blinking, trying to take it all in.

She would say things to him like “Dang, I hope I don’t get sand in my cootch, I’m not wearing any underwear!”

It was madness. It was lunacy. She was a child bull in a china shop of adult social norms. I didn’t think I could handle hearing about it for even a single day more.

After Thanksgiving, there was a long weekend to endure, and I was dreading seeing her, but spending time in my own house was out of the question. Jason had friends over and the living room was a miasma of farts, Axe body spray, and cultural appropriation. “Na, son,” they crowed to one another, bouncing on the balls of their idiot feet, “she a trap queen!”

I was expecting to find Bunny ebullient with her latest frontal-assault flirtation, but instead she was somber and preoccupied. Ann Marie had been comatose for more than a month, and I realized, looking at Bunny as she chewed her thumbnail on her father’s white sofa, that she had lost quite a bit of weight in that time. Her cheekbones were more prominent, giving her face angles that made her look more like her mother. “Will you look at something for me?” she asked. She got out her backpack, which was white canvas and covered in small black hearts. She pulled out a wad of opened mail, handed me the clump, and went back to chewing the skin around her thumbnail. “What do those look like to you? I mean, do you think I’m reading them right?”

I opened the first one. They were letters from the IRS. Some were notices of deficiency, some were notices of examination. They spanned, in the tax years they referenced, almost a decade, and the amounts they listed as owed were staggering. For 2007, they claimed Ray Lampert still owed $107,000 in back taxes. For 2009 he owed $65,489. There was a notice of a tax lien placed against their house. There were notices explaining that his bank account had been frozen. What was most confusing, as I sorted through them, was that there was not a clear escalating time frame. The notice claiming his bank account had been frozen was from five years ago. The lien on their home was new.

“Where did you find these?” I asked. “I’m guessing Cassie doesn’t know about this.”

“I don’t know,” Bunny said, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “That bitch would die for him.”

“So how did you get these?”

She sighed. “They were in his office here at the house. I mean, they weren’t even hidden. They were just on his desk. I was never curious about what was on his desk before, but I got the mail today and there was a notice they were putting a lien on the house, and so then I went looking and found the rest.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, “he’s been making money hand over fist, so why not pay his taxes? It just seems so weird!”

“He’s been overextended,” she said. It was such a Ray word, such a typically grandiose euphemism, but for what exactly?

“Upstanding city council member and tax dodger,” I said, in a game show–host voice, but she didn’t laugh.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked me.

“I mean—I guess, eventually, he’ll have to pay?”

“He doesn’t have the money to pay,” she said, “I mean, obviously!”

“Bullshit,” I said, “he has this house. I’m sure he has other investments. He’s just living in some kind of system of cycling delusions where he thinks he can catch up. But he’ll figure out that he can’t, and he’ll settle up with the IRS and maybe you’ll lose the house, but you’ll be fine.”

Bunny began to cry. “Where will we go?” she asked.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “you’ll rent an apartment!”

She nodded, wiping her tears.

And then a young woman whom neither of us recognized opened the front door of their house, and Ray Lampert came in with a bandage wrapped in a thick halo around his head and bruising of Technicolor plum in perfectly symmetrical triangles under his eyes and on the tops of his cheekbones. Something was wrong with his eyes and he seemed to be blind, or his eyes seemed to be stitched shut—in any event, they were swollen and something was deeply wrong with the skin above them. The young woman led him to one of the pretty French armchairs and helped him heave himself down onto it. “Hello,” she said in a singsong voice, “I’m Charity!” She was wearing all black: tight black pants and a black lace shirt over a tank top. She was delicately pretty and had pale, milky skin.

“What happened?” Bunny asked.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Ray said, which led both of us to continue in our assumption that he had been in some sort of fight. “I had to get it done before we went to court and you never know when that’s gonna be.”

“Okay, baby,” Charity said, “I’m putting your meds in the kitchen. He should not drink on these pain pills! Okay, Bunny? Don’t let him drink. I gotta go to work.”