Tara Dugan

For as bad as Dad got, he never drank out of cans.

Bottles, not cans. Bottles by the six-pack, then the twelve-pack. In a single weekend he’d make two trips to Burley’s, that brick cube with no windows sitting between the auto parts lot and a caved-in barn, and come home with two twelve-packs, buying only what he could carry inside in one go.

My uncle was crazy, but that’s beside the point. The real point is that my uncle was broke. He was the kind of broke where even the people who were out for blood stopped hunting him down because they knew there was nothing more to take, he’d been stripped to the bone. The last time