The nail had burrowed into my skin like a worm, like there was nothing doing on the surface anymore, and despite all the pain it was causing me I had to sympathize with its motivations; given the choice, I would have done the same thing.

Marlene brought me down to the living room where the tub of hot water was waiting for my foot. She had put two pillows on the carpet for my head, and before her she had set out an array of all the tools she might need during the course of the operation: a needle, a metal file, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a large pair of nail clippers and next to them a smaller pair, a pair of tweezers and finally a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey and a shot glass with a monogram of the San Juan Islands. It was the needle and the tweezers that concerned me the most. After that it was the bottle of whiskey.

One thing you should know about Marlene is that one of her arms is shorter than the other; her left arm is two inches shorter than her right arm. Once she told me that was the reason why she drank. She said, “When I drink, I forget that my left arm is shorter than my right arm. After a while, I begin to think it’s my right arm that’s actually longer than my left arm.” I never really understood that, but it seemed reason enough for her.

Looking down on us from the kitchen, my father washed the dishes. “I don’t think you should do this now,” he said. “Now’s not the time.”

Marlene shook her head. She didn’t acknowledge that he’d said anything, that he was even there, besides to say to me, “We’ve got to do it now. If it’s not done now it’s going to get infected.”

I had clipped my nails two weeks before, excited by the prospect of another thing I could do on my own. I was already brushing my own teeth; another couple of years and I’d be shaving and then, to be an adult: what did it mean, this word? To be adulterous? To sit in grimy movie theaters marked “Adult” above the marquee? To no longer be a minor, to be a major, to be allowed in. It all terrified me just as much as I welcomed it.

Earlier that afternoon when my father had come to pick me up he’d noticed me limping, and when I told him my toe was swollen, that I didn’t know if I could help him in the yard that evening, he suggested I let Marlene take a look.

“Give her a chance,” he’d said. “She’s good with those kinds of things,” and so I did. I showed her my toe hoping it would inspire some empathy in her. “See?” I meant to say. “I’m deformed just like you. Both our left sides are weak. We are siblings in pain,” I tried to say, and I expected her to soften, to take this evening off from destruction, to offer solace. Instead she studied my toe like a problem to be solved and said, “We’re going to have to fix this.” She said, “It’s going to get infected.”

“Now?” I asked, and she nodded, and then my father, who’d been pretending to watch the five o’clock news, said from his armchair, “Not now. We’re about to have dinner.”

“After dinner,” said Marlene. “I’ll go get everything ready,” she said. “We’ll do it downstairs.”

For dinner we had macaroni and cheese with broccoli. It was usually my favorite but I could barely touch my food. We ate from little trays in front of the television. Marlene ate like a bird and twice went to the bathroom, talking a little louder each time she came back out. There was an old movie on, an action film with Charles Bronson, and I sat there with my eyes glued, thinking each bad guy he killed brought me a little closer to pain. Marlene went into the kitchen and took down the bottle of Canadian Club, the prop, and then she said to me, “Ten more minutes. Just let me get a couple more instruments from the bathroom.”

My father came to take away my full plate and I hoped he would look at it and send me straight to bed—no fun and games or surgery tonight. I bowed my head and welcomed his punishment. Instead he picked up the plate without a word, scooped the noodles and broccoli into the trash. “You should go put on your pajamas before you and Marlene do whatever it is you’re doing,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

I know now, just like I guess I knew then, that my father would never leave Marlene because he knew she would never leave him, but there were other things I didn’t know, other things I still don’t know. I’ve always wondered at what point my father realized Marlene had been drinking. Did he know after a tipple or two? Was it only clear to him after she could no longer stand, when her words had devolved into a series of grunts and insinuations? In the summer, when the fields outside the bathroom window were waist high with foxtails, when it was all so scorched you could almost hear it crackle, when a spark would set it off in an instant, Marlene would climb up into the loader tractor and commence driving it around the field, moving bucketfuls of red dirt from here to there, forgotten cigarette dangling precariously from her lips.

The ritual was pretty much set from the beginning of July to the middle of September. I would try to distract her with some diversion while my father made his feeble attempts to forbid her—a vain gesture, and all of us knew it. All that ever resulted was yelling, the slamming of doors, broad declarations in a slurred tongue, threats of divorce. Hitting, sometimes. And then she’d go up on her tractor just the same.

As soon as the sun dipped beneath the horizon a tremendous tension befell the house. The room got heavy. Who knew where to focus my concern? Should it be toward my father, strung out and seething, rocking violently in his armchair as he pretended to watch television? Or Marlene, one instant away from overturning the tractor on her neck, lighting up the property like a pyre? It wasn’t the explosion of violence and vitriol that I dreaded so much as the moments leading up to it, the tension building, the unpredictability of a man not in control of his temper and a woman not in control of her behavior letting loose.

But it was winter now. The cold outside insulated us from ourselves and now she drank to stay warm. I suppose she trusted me enough to drink in front of me because when it was too cold to step outside for a little nip she could rely on me to go around the house the next morning and collect all the red plastic cups from behind the armoire or next to the couch or inside the pantry before my father found them. Did I do it for her? Did I do it for my father? Did I do it for myself? It could change from cup to cup.

“First let’s see if we can get to it without cutting any of the skin around the nail,” she said. My foot was still wet from the hot water and the hard, callused skin around the nail had softened, the undersides of my toes wrinkled like an old man, like alien digits. She was sitting cross-legged in front of me with my foot resting in her crotch, cradling the toe in question like an infant. I winced and jerked my foot back. “Hold still!” she cried, pulling it back into her lap. “I haven’t even touched it yet!”

I grit my teeth as I felt the file probe under my nail, as it searched around the cavity that had formed and swelled around the corner; it felt white-hot. With her free hand—her right hand—she picked up the small clippers and tried to edge the teeth around the barb, but the skin was in the way, it was no use, it was too imbedded. “Okay,” she said. “Plan B.”

“What’s Plan B?” I dared ask, praying it involved patience, thoroughness, and the steady hand of a professional.

“Anesthesia,” she answered and released my foot to prepare the shot, and I realized under any other circumstances, I would have had something spectacular to tell my friends in school the next day: my first taste of alcohol, a rite comparable to a first kiss, a first touch under any other circumstances. “How much do you weigh?” she asked.

“Eighty pounds,” I said. “Why?”

She didn’t answer. She uncapped the whiskey bottle and filled the shot glass up to the brim, drowning the San Juan Islands in an amber ocean. I imagined I was a gunslinger, plugged with a bullet. I imagined I was Charles Bronson: “Take the shot. Bite the wooden spoon. It’ll only hurt a minute.” Only I was not a gunslinger. I was not Charles Bronson. I sipped the whiskey like a limey sips his tea and I tasted fire. I coughed. Marlene laughed. “There you go,” she said.

I don’t know what she did after that because I was staring at the ceiling, watching it swim around like a whirlpool, and trying to count how many times Marlene had snuck away to the bathroom—at least four. Whatever she was doing to my foot, it hurt like hell. It was the brimstone to the hellfire burning in my throat. “I still feel it,” I said. “How long does it take to not feel it?”

“Sometimes it takes a while,” said Marlene, and it did, and what she didn’t say then, what I only discovered years later, long after my toe had healed and I had learned to shave and live alone and then live with someone else, was that sometimes it can take a lifetime.

I have never let anyone touch my feet since.