Summary

Terese feels "like a squaw. The type white people imagine: a feral thing with grassy hair and nimble fingers wanting" (92). When she kills a ladybug, Casey looks at her "like [she is] wild" but he does not understand that, as a child, her house was infested with ladybugs that would not stop biting. She knows Casey thinks ladybugs are lucky and she writes that "so much of the world shames me" (93). Having the baby has not made anything better.

Terese writes that she married her ex-husband Vito as a teenager to get out of her mother's house, but that their relationship was dysfunctional and violent. After having their first child, she got pregnant by him a second time, and writes that "people have a right to think things will change" (94). Terese alternates short paragraphs about Vito and Casey. She writes about a...