Jenna: Marjorie was awful. It was like the evil stepmom. She was always angry with us, maybe because we were left over from Dad’s other life before her.

Tony: She walked really heavily when she was mad. And we were always so scared of her. She would scream and yell and bang the doors of cabinets.

Jenna: We had a very large Doberman named Ming, and Marjorie would accuse me —a girl— of peeing on the walls. Even at that age I could reason there was no way I could pee on the walls. Maybe on the carpet but not on the wall. I told her that I didn’t do it. And she was like, “You are lying to me and I’m going to spank you. You have a choice: I can spank you inside or outside in front of people.” And I was like, “You aren’t going to spank me. No, no, no.” She grabbed me, pulled my pants down, took me outside, and spanked me with a hairbrush until I bled. I couldn’t sit down I was hurt so bad.

Larry: You told me about that. Marjorie and I had a huge fight afterward.

Jenna: She was so angry with me after that. If I said something sassy, like any kid does, she would reach across the table and smack me across the face. You don’t do that to a child. I was a little thing. I was being punished constantly for everything. But the scary part was that I loved her because she was all I really knew as a mom. I constantly wanted her approval but I never got it.

Larry: Well, she was just an idiot.

Tony: She was just a bitch. Remember the time I had an asthma attack on the way home from school, and I didn’t have my inhaler.

Jenna: You came home and were beating on the door and saying, “I’m dying of asthma.” And she was like, “Well, you should have thought of that before you left the house. Come back in an hour.”

Larry: Why wasn’t I home?

Jenna: That’s when you were working swing shift and you slept during the day.

Tony: You always treated us like adults. You would reason with us. But Marjorie would get angry if anyone else was good to us. She would never buy us anything, but she’d get mad if anyone else did.

Jenna: I remember I saw this little doggie key chain that had a shih tzu on it and Marjorie wouldn’t buy it for me. So I stole it. I tucked it away in my nightstand, and then Dad found it. And he knew I wanted it because I had asked him if he would buy it for me. He was so disappointed in me. I just cried and cried. I was so broken up about disappointing my dad that I fell asleep holding on to his picture. In my mind, it was the worst thing I could have done. Dad was a cop and I was a criminal. I was one of the guys that Daddy chases. And I remember I woke up and dad grabbed me and was holding me and was rocking me and was like, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Larry: It was okay. I didn’t even reprimand you that much.

Jenna: I always felt that I had to protect you from having any more pain because I knew how much it hurt you when mom died. So I tried to be the strong one, and when bad things happened I would just internalize everything.