skinny body passed out at odd angles across the bed, the shrunken world of her hangovers that could last all day when nothing else could go on around her, each sound too assaulting, even my quiet voice too mean. The way she would refuse me simple things, drives to school, bread from the store, until I was red-eyed from staying up all night either wondering where she was or wishing she would leave again. The frightful way she would look at me like she was reaching out from a black hole, trying to drag me down into it. Nothing was over. It was only just beginning.
“She’s been drinking,” I said.
“Well,” Vern said, turning to my mother. “Your drinking alone is grounds for banishment, not to mention the love you’re in.”
A small sob escaped from my mouth. “Wait,” I said. But it was too late.
The Body became a flurry of movement. The men screamed for exorcism, arms to the sky. Someone grabbed me and held me up over his head, repeating that he was saving the daughter, and the women formed a circle around Cherry, sputtered in their protective ways. I saw only a glimmer of my mother’s long hair before she disappeared through the side door without me. I looked for the Turquoise Cowboy but he was gone, too. I primed my heart to my mother and sent her messages: I’m coming. I’m sorry. What a big misunderstanding, I thought. That’s all it was. A misunderstanding.
My mother gone and gone, I spent the night at Cherry’s. She dragged a dusty mattress made for a baby in from the shed to the craft room. She handed me a thin sheet and kicked back her crates of sewing supplies and cookbooks then puttered down the hallway to remote control her way to heaven with her beloved televangelists. I curled into a ball on the mattress and decided there was no reason to ever leave that room. I counted flowers on the peeling wallpaper. I listened for cawing crows out the window. I dreamed in feverscapes, my betraying words a haunt running through me. She’s been drinking, she’s been drinking.
BY MY SECOND motherless day, Cherry took to bringing food and leaving it on the dresser and then standing over me with a heavy iron cross, poking me with it like I was some mystery, a possibly dangerous animal. God in Vern, she’d pray. Rid us of your devil. At night she’d toss chocolate sandwich cookies into the dark and they’d land on my face and across my body. I’d eat them slowly and feel sorry for myself. I understood clearly then how shut-ins were born.
AFTER A WEEK, Cherry finally softened toward me, lowered her round body and squatted on the edge of the tiny mattress. She patted my back. “Maybe it’s time you get out of this room and face the music.”
“I’ll come out when she comes back.”
“My own momma passed on when I was eighteen years old,” she said. Her eyes sort of drifted above me and settled on a crack in the wall. Her mother had been a busybody of a woman, Cherry explained, and one day she took to her bed, covered herself in blankets. Cherry knew something was the matter, for truly her mother never did rest like the lazy. They checked on her every hour, and she was sweating and shaking in fever. Finally she called them in and pulled back her blankets, and her skin was covered in sores a-fester and she said, “The mortification has set in.”
My mother had never mentioned any of this.
“We didn’t know what she was on about, the mortification, but she died the next week.”
Cherry clapped her hands once, like that was that. Her eyes bore into me. “You know what I did after she was no more?”
“What?”
“I put her out of my mind. I knew no amount of slothing around was gonna bring her back. A girl can be fine without a mother.”
But my body told me this wasn’t true for me and it wasn’t true for Cherry either. She had missed her mother desperately and still did or else she wouldn’t have told me the story.
Young Cherry, a woman I’d seen in photos, trim and wind-kissed, that long hair always in tufts around her face and down her back, her sharp nose and pointed chin. Cherry was unpossessed by beauty, yet arresting, hard to look away from. I imagined her a girl looking at her mother’s sores, the fear she must have felt, and I pulled myself out of the craft room by afternoon, and Cherry saw that it was good.
“Praise be to the Lord of honey and milk! She’s back and I see the life of the church still in her!” she proclaimed into the phone. “Yessum. Okay. Well, I suppose.” She hung up. “Vern said he’ll see us when God tells him the time is right. Until then, pray.”
“He’s not coming over?” I asked.
“Lucky you weren’t thrown out with the bathwater of your mother, keeping her dirty shames all to yourself,” she said, hard suddenly. Like it was difficult to imagine how my mother and I were of her family tree at all. My mother’s face was not capable of getting this hard, I didn’t think. “Sin’s a disease like anything else. Sit in a barbershop long enough, you’re gonna get a haircut.”
Like everything in Peaches there seemed to be Before Vern and After, and this went for Cherry too. The Cherry of my early life was not prone to such hardening, was soft toward my mother, was understanding of her foibles because at that time there was no Vern to steer her straight, there was no light. She would listen to my mother go on and on about all her cruddy men and she’d lean over the kitchen counter and nod and pat my mother’s hands. Hand me sweet after sweet so they could go on talking.
You think it’s possible to fall in love without meeting the person? my mother had asked me. Maybe, I’d told her. Maybe you can.
IT FELT BAD to have Cherry’s boxes strewn around my head as I slept, the haphazard shadows of the clutter looming against the wall at night, so I tried to move her things into the closet to make more room. For what I didn’t know. All my belongings were at the Lakes just where I’d left them. I’d been wearing the same jean dress I’d worn the day my mother left, the denim thick and stiff from my sweat.
The closet was its own spectacle, and in it I unearthed clear plastic tub after plastic tub of what looked like still and stiff stuffed animals that smelled of urine. I brushed a finger against a squirrel’s tail and it felt so real I pulled my hand back. It even had sharp little teeth. Under the squirrel were dozens of mice with long wormy tails and fear-struck eyes. Where had these come from, I wondered. I’d never seen anything like them sold in Peaches. I shivered and closed the lid and moved on to a duct-taped brown box. ROMANCE was written on the outside in black marker. I ripped it open and inside must have been forty compact paperbacks, looping cursive titles down each spine. I opened one to the middle and the first sentence I saw was he palmed her breast. I recoiled as if from a hot flame, tossed the book to the ground, kept my eyes on it like it was a striking snake. I called for Cherry. I pointed to the tawdry cover with skin spilling from corset and demanded who was reading such sin. She pressed her lips and said, “Wouldn’t crack a math book, but those your mother loved.”
I looked at them wary but I felt a strong pulling current coming from them.
“You was just a little thing, but you remember how it was before Vern, just living life to live, no meaning whatsoever.”
I figured she was going to take the books away, burn them in the yard. Call the church and report them. But she shuffled back down the hall. “Anyhow,” she called. “Don’t touch them animals in there. Them’s my specials.”
I
