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Pixie. “I can accept one mistake, but not two.” Pixie Sexton stared straight ahead with her dark, sleepy eyes. Velva called Teresa and put Joey on the phone. He told Teresa he was seeing Pixie again. He said he’d run into Willy Sexton at Canton Center Mall. The family hadn’t moved to Montana, he said. “Willie said things are all worked out,”
    Joey said. “He said Pixie wants to see me and stuff.” Joey said he’d driven over to the house on Caroline Street and asked Pixie to go for a ride. He wanted her to see his new apartment, but Ed Sexton stopped them. “He said I couldn’t take her to my apartment,” Joey said. “He jumped all over me about it.” Teresa wondered why. She wanted to hear it from him, though Velva had already told her. “Pixie had another baby,” he said, shyly. “Is it yours?” she asked. “No, it’s that guy from the Navy.” The old boyfriend had returned, had a one night stand with Pixie, then disappeared again. “I thought he was dead,” Teresa said. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what they told me.” Make a mistake once, Teresa thought. Every kid was entitled to that. But twice, that’s a pattern. “Joey, you really need to find somebody else that doesn’t have kids,” she said. “Somebody you can have kids with.”
     
    “But I love Pixie,” Joey said. His luck appeared to turn with Pixie Sexton’s first appearance. Both aunts noticed he was always short of money. He decided to let the sister of a former classmate move in to share his apartment expenses. He came home from work one day to find his stereo missing. Then his TV and VCR disappeared. He asked the girl to leave, but she refused. One night, he got up from his bed to go to the bathroom and found a man walking naked down his hallway.
    “Get back in your bedroom,” the stranger said, “or you’re a dead man.”
    A few days later, Joey showed up at Velva’s door. “I haven’t been able to do things right,” he said. “Can I come home, Aunt Velva?” She hugged him, saying, “Why sure.” They moved him into Velva’s upstairs bedroom and began seeing more of Pixie Sexton firsthand. Joey would go to Pixie’s house after work and bring her back to Velva’s, often without her kids.
     
    When they arrived or left, Velva couldn’t help but notice the way Pixie always stood behind her nephew, peeking at her over his shoulder, as if she was trying to hide. She remained a girl of few words. The two of them would sit on her couch, Velva trying to pry a conversation from Joey, Pixie in silence, her eyes on the living room TV. ,
     
    Velva told a friend one night, “God, she acts like I’m going to hurt her or something. The girl is very weird.” The family was weird, Velva thought, though she’d never met the parents. Joey always had to have her back by ten. “You’re how old?” Velva asked her one night.
     
    “Twenty-one,” she said. The girl seemed oblivious to the point she was making. It just didn’t make sense, Velva thought. She’d had two children out of wedlock, but she couldn’t even stay out until midnight as a legal adult. Joey’s brother Danny moved in with Velva. She felt good about having the two brothers reunited, but it soon became clear that even his own brother wasn’t going to diminish Joey’s infatuation with Pixie Sexton. He began spending less time at home, leaving every night after work to go see Stella at the Sexton’s house. The hours became later. One night, Velva came home after midnight to find an infant’s car seat in her living room. The next morning she yelled up to his room. “You don’t have Pixie up there with you, do you?” No, he explained, his car had broken down on the freeway the night before.
    He’d walked home. “Why do you have that car seat?” she asked. “I didn’t want anybody to steal it.” Velva thought, the girl is taking over his life. She wondered, what if she tries to get pregnant again?
    Velva’s 32-year-old son Jack