Often these talks were of irrelevant and petty matters that were amusing on the pillow but so easily forgotten off of it. One time he asked her what she would be doing the following day; she told him that she had to go to Wal-Mart to buy the boys some underwear and socks and some paint for the deck, and that she might look around for some clothes for herself at a mall; and then he expressed how once a cleaning lady who was doing her work in the men's bathroom in the mall had caused him to be unable to relieve himself. She giggled like a schoolgirl at a slumber party. She reciprocated by telling him that in "Bang-COCK" cleaning ladies "go in and out of bathrooms with their mops with impunity." She teased him that maybe there were these ostensible cleaning ladies everywhere whose real duties were to cause inhibition, clogging, and insecurity within the male gender. From this her mind took a tortuous and serious linking of ideas. She began to ruminate that society was upside down. Cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, forced to smell urine, soap, and bleach all day should be paid the most and that they who were the benefactors of the world like presidents and prime ministers should be paid the least. She argued that only then, when equality was gained and each person given either money or admiration as compensation for their work, would the world be a just and harmonious place. He laughed, thinking it was another joke, but she was deadly serious. And yet once he told her something significant. He told her that his mother was not his mother at all but his aunt; that his real mother, suffering from post partum depression, suffocated his baby brother in the bath water, dumped him, Michael, in the bracken waters of an abandoned well at her parents' farm, and hung herself in a shed. After the funeral, his aunt was urged to come to them from her home in a small Italian town. Gabriele felt an empathy as deep as the gods for she too had been run over in family which for her made hugging, touching and feeling emotions such an alien plain to this date. She too had been recalcitrant and had done antipodal actions to thwart this Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jake but for all her freedom the actions had been emulation or rebellions against this absurd, vague memory of family. Thinking of him at the age of three clinging to rope and pail she knew that she loved him.