“I’m going to the drug store, I’ll be right back,” Father Pain said once the children were all in bed.

Mother Pain, a nurse, was working the night shift at the hospital. After Mother left for her shift at 10:30 p.m., Father usually made his exit an hour or so later. Sometimes Father would ask the children if they wanted him to bring anything thing back. Nicole would always ask for a Hershey bar. But Father never brought back the things he promised because he was never at the drugstore. He was always at another woman’s house.

When Father Pain left the house at night, leaving the children alone, Michelle, Nicole, and Yvette would sit up in bed, ready to own the night. Susan and David were usually asleep not old enough to fight back sleep and stay up past their bedtime. Michelle and Yvette would usually be the ones to get out of bed first and make a foray downstairs to the kitchen and get a snack. Nicole could hear their giggling downstairs, and, not wanting to be left out of the fun, would go downstairs too after she overcame her fear of being left out. Downstairs in the kitchen the girls ate cereal, actually pouring enough cereal out to get the prize. They would get glasses of juice. Then they would daringly go into the den to watch the last minutes of Johnny Carson and part of the late movie. Sometimes they would go right back upstairs, but sometimes they would look out the living room window to see if Father was really gone then do a special reconnaissance ritual of going through Father’s things.

Even at the age of 10, 9, and 7, the girls knew that their father was with another woman. But they had never known it to be any other way. The first mistress the girls had ever known was Father Pain’s first wife, Jean. For some reason or another, Father divorced Jean, but Jean still wanted him back even after he married Mother Pain. Mother Pain actually kept the love letters Jean wrote to Father with her wedding dress. This was one of the earliest discoveries the girls had made because, after all, it was only natural that girls wanted to try on their mother’s wedding dress. They were never really sure what the letters were about, but Nicole read them when she was on her own secret mission. They were letters of confusion, hurt, and guilt in Jean’s hand:

“…I know it’s wrong to continue loving you, but I still hope that in your heart you still care for me too…”

Nicole wondered if that was what marriage was supposed to be, continual hurt. And did all men have another woman or other women? Was that the way it was supposed to be?

Another place the girls would snoop is through their father’s shaving case. The shaving case is where he kept nude pictures of his girlfriends, and once again, this was always occasion for the girls to make fun. Father Pain liked fat women, and the women in his pictures were grossly obese, and yet, they wore underwear, panties, and bras much too small so that the doughy folds of their skin hung over the satin and nylon ribbons of delicacy. Mother Pain was never fat; she was overweight by 20 pounds, but even at that weight she was constantly dieting to lose the weight. Father’s preference for fat women was another mystery Nicole couldn’t understand.

After the girls made their secret excursion, they always made sure they got back to their beds by 1:00 a.m. On rare occasions Mother Pain would come home on break to check on them and Father Pain. If Mother did come home during the night and Father was there, the girls knew that hell was around the corner.

In bed, sleep now seeping its way in the crevices of their eyes, forcing their mouths into yawns, there would be giggling and unspoken, self-satisfied victory over their midnight accomplishments. Their rendezvous with the night wasn’t an act of defiance; it was a sneaking off to meet a lover yet to come into their lives. The daytime was for rules and obedience. At night, the girls could revel in the absence of their parents for the honest acknowledgment that it was. Their parents were gone, caught up in their own escape, their emergency exits. And now the girls had theirs.

For Michelle and Yvette, the things they saw and did never lingered, never became cause for worry, but Nicole thought about the secret lives of her parents. Perhaps that was when Nicole started a secret life of her own.