Jo lives in Port Richmond. She's recently started writing poetry to deal with her mental anguish. Her sixteen year old son Charlie bursts into her house, calling her by her first name. He demands food. Jo doesn't know what Charlie does during the day; he's never at school. One time, after Jo publicly confronted Charlie while he was with some friends, Charlie came home very drunk and slapped her hard across the face. After slapping her, he had groped at her breast. While Charlie is home, he finds a poem Jo wrote about him and makes fun of it. He then burns her entire notebook of poems over the gas stove, cackling. Jo wakes up the next night to the smell of fire. Across the street, an apartment is burning. Later, Jo finds out that a woman she had often seen around the neighborhood is dead, along with her two boys and two girls. Apparently, one of the boys killed his family, set the fire, and then killed himself. Jo writes poetry to the dead woman about both of their sons, and leaves the writing next to a makeshift altar that's been set up outside the apartment building. She then heads over to the bodega, where she sees a headline — it was the mother, not the son, who killed her children and then herself. The handwriting on the apparent suicide note, found near the son, matched the mother's handwriting. At home, Jo takes a note down from the fridge written by Charlie and begins to mirror the letters in her own hand. This time, she thinks, the dead boy will sign his own name.