Summary

When they were brothers, they played all kinds of games. They would stack on top of each other to make a woman. They were the Three Musketeers, then monsters, then the Three Bears. They would play God; “Manny was the Father, Joel the Son, and I the Holy Spirit’” (25). One day, Ma explained about sex with a big book on “‘Reproductive Systems’” (26). She had had Manny at only fourteen, when Paps was sixteen, since no one had taught her how sex worked and Paps had lied and told her that she wouldn’t get pregnant. They had had to go to Texas to get married, since she was so young. The brothers played a game where bridge trolls tricked sex on the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and they were the “half gruff, half troll” (27) babies. They walked to the drugstore and asked strangers...