And this would be precisely when I fell in love with Karen: "GET FUCKED!" And the last clown come whizzing at his head, through the big picture window.

Fiona can't call Steve until she's at the motel job -- far from the house and what it means -- so she can call Steve to yell at him/figure it out/risk hoping just this one time. He refuses to tell her anything about the washer, just that he sent it so she'd remember his phone number. Which clearly worked. She lies and says it's in the yard and quickly will begin to rust, but he doesn't believe her. "Did the guy connect it?" Yes. "It's working okay?" She's a thing in a cage, who's given up so thoroughly on the future that she's come to resent it. And Steve, I will tell you, is being completely upfront, which we can see and she can't afford to see, so really this whole story takes place inside Fiona. Where things are hard, because they have to be.

Ian's job is working at a tiny Muslim deli/grocery, whose owner Kash is a young, sweet fellow with a beautiful white wife (Marguerite Moreau!") who wears a headscarf, and two really cute kids. He's not the kind that resists temptation very easily; not one of those kind of guys. He tries to do the right thing, but wave some pork rinds in his face and he's going to take a bite. And no matter how many times he promises he'll stop, the thing is that they're delicious. And it's hard to really believe something is wrong when there's nothing wrong with it. When nothing about it feels wrong.

The wife smells his breath, on the way out of the store, and Ian steps in to say the pork rinds were his -- probably not even from pigs at this point -- and she looks at him. Not mean, not hateful, not entirely stupid either. Just looks for a second; speaks softly and not without softness. "Ian, I am the one that signs your check. What's bad for him is really bad for you. If you are stupid enough to start lying for him...?"

"They're just corn chips with fake hair," the boys protest, and Kash's wife tells him to get his ass to the mosque, "So your dad stops blaming me for the fact that we're all going to hell." And to call his mom too, because she won't take her meds and won't listen to the white girl: "I don't want the cops dragging me out of bed again at four AM because she's out in the alley yelling that the CIA is stealing her trash." Ian asks whether that didn't actually happen: "Four years ago, yes. But now she's locked in the basement, making a helmet out of tinfoil. Enough's enough!" Beat. "I have to take the boys to Cub Scouts at the mosque before all the carpets are taken. She's your mother, get her to take her Thorazine."