I’d never read another romance again.
But she wasn’t on about the romances. She was on about clearing out my mother’s things from our apartment.
“I’m not going,” I said.
“All right then. We’ll just burn it all.”
I DIDN’T LIKE going places with Cherry because she didn’t have a car, she had a magenta hearse, and not just any. It was the hearse that had held Grampa Jackie’s coffin and within that, his body, and she loved it and sang to it and still wiped it down with one of his old shirts most every day. After his service, she had insisted on riding along with the driver, who was young and quiet and she distrusted him immediately based on the dopey way he held his face, his slight underbite. Halfway to the fields where Grampa was to be buried, Cherry demanded the driver stop, and she pushed him out and threw a wad of bills at him before she sped off. We saw it happen, my mother and I, for we had been driving behind the big pink thing, my mother nervously laughing about how much Grampa would have hated it. The driver collected the bills off the ground and began a solemn walk back in the direction he came. For weeks we waited for him to return and collect the hearse but he never did and no one ever called. “Country magic,” Cherry said, an explanation for why the hearse was suddenly hers. Soon she would understand there was no such thing as magic. Only God’s giving and taking away.
“Get in,” Cherry said to me now, opening the pink passenger door. “Ain’t no ghosties gonna bite you, just your dead grandpa in here feeling like a damned fool to have gone bellied up.”
“You think he regrets killing himself?” I said.
She winced, but then recovered. “Missing out on your mother pulling this, maybe he made the right call.”
THE LAKES, APARTMENT 204. Little green Bibles littered the mat where the Body had shown their concern, a deep red cross drawn on the door. WHOREWITCH under that.
Perd and Pearl and Lyle got out of Perd’s dirty work truck, Perd’s Valley Pest emblazoned along the side. “We’re here with bells on,” Perd said, and took a long greedy drink from the liter bottle of Mountain Dew that was, in varying degrees of fullness, his constant companion. None of them had come by to see me since my mother left, and I expected they might hug me now, or say something kind, like people should when someone has died. But nothing.
Pearl braced her legs apart and raised two hands toward us and closed her eyes. “God in Vern, do not let Louise’s sin that has rubbed off on her daughter rub off on us. Keep us pure and purer in our devotion to you.” She opened one eye. “Had to put my armor on, you understand.”
Cherry fumbled with the lock and Lyle came close to me and said, “What’s it like living at Cherry’s?”
I paused. Did I want to tell him the truth? How my fingertips bled from scraping the larvae and my nails had worn down to stumps and my eyes burned from the bleach and I missed my mother in each place on my body, that my neck had stiffened and knotted, that all my sadness was stored in those knots and if I pressed a finger into the largest most painful one, tears arrived behind my eyes as if on command?
“Not what I expected,” I said to him instead. But he was already pushing his way inside.
INSIDE, THE APARTMENT was how I left it, upturned, the carpet covered in rice cake crumbs and candy wrappers that seemed to have never not been there. I looked for a note, a phone number, a sign in case I missed something in the flurry of searching moments the day I’d come back to the apartment and realized she was gone, but there was nothing. I stood in the doorway as they threw things into garbage bags with not a lick of grace. Perd muttered to himself about how it was his one day off and tossed my mother’s toothbrush in with a box full of opened Ajax containers and stained washrags, and then put her sprays and lotions in after that. My mother had always turned her nose up at Perd and Pearl, making fun of his nearly incomprehensible valley drawl and the way Pearl was plainer than soda crackers in looks and mind. Pearl and my mother seemed at quiet odds with each other, my mother the one others took to with quickness. It was true that people wanted to look at a beautiful thing.
“Let’s just pay one more month of rent,” I said to the room. “What will she think of us getting rid of her stuff like she’s dead?” I tried to sidle up to Pearl, my mother’s own blood sister, after all.
“You think she’s off making sure this guy’s gonna be a good daddy for you?” Pearl said. “If I were you I’d be praying double-time.”
Guilt covered me. I hadn’t been praying. For the first time since Vern had claimed me saved, I was at a loss for words when I knelt before the baby mattress at night and closed my eyes. And I knew that each minute I spent with my romances was a minute I was not spending with God. I hung my mother’s pageant sashes around my neck. I’d never seen her in pageants. They were her other life before me. I’d never considered she could have a life apart from me, but here I was in it.
“Can’t imagine a child living in this filth,” Pearl said, shaking her head. “No wonder she wouldn’t have us over. I’d have left myself just to get away from the mess.”
It was filthy. My mother stopped cleaning after she’d taken up assignment and we lived amid our trash. I only saw it clearly then, though, the blond hairs balled up in the corners of each room, the trash overflowing out of the kitchen to the living room, the brown of the toilet bowl. The dishes in the sink and how once they were dirty they were dead to us. We just didn’t use that dish anymore. Now, though, a smell had taken hold, my mother’s iceberg lettuce rotting on the countertop, the decay of stuck macaroni and cheese in a dish, cans left open and waiting for nothing. It was strange, I could not remember eating with my mother, only the image of her leaning over the sink, picking at things. Never cooking, just opening cans and handing them to me. Once she said to be careful not to cut myself on the sharp raw tin and it felt like a kind of care. I loved Spam and sardines and could imagine that she was cooking up delicacies, but now seeing the piles of cans on the floor I felt embarrassed for us.
CHERRY SMOKED A pink berry-scented Sweet Dream cigarette in the corner, muttering to herself. The smell of the Sweet Dreams covered the rot a bit, but meant a probable headache for me. Cherry told me I just had to get used to them and had offered me one in the living room a few nights before when I was sullen and it was agitating her. I smoked it and coughed and got a headache so bad I asked all night for God to take me in my sleep. I imagined telling Lyle about the cigarette to make him jealous or shocked, but something told me that it was like the dirty apartment, another thing to hide.
“Vern’s right,” Pearl said. “First thing to go is your obedience, then the church, then your community, then your ever-loving mind. And them witch women. That’s another story.”
Them witch women. I tried again to imagine who they were, how they’d poisoned my mother with their ways. It was clear something had happened to her working there. Something they said maybe, that slowly pulled her from faith. From me. Something that pushed her to start drinking again, and when the opportunity came, to run and not look back. It seemed likely that all of this was their fault, a curse we were under.
“You’re lucky you’ve got us around to keep guiding you,” Pearl said low. “Lyle said just the other day he was going to start coming by to help you in your Bible studies and whatever else.”
I looked at Lyle in the kitchen dumping my mother’s collection of colorful plastic forks and knives into a bag. He’d never shown me any attention before. The extent of our contact was rolling our eyes in solidarity when Cherry loaded stale years-old raisins into her special meat loaf for Sunday dinner. Pick them out and mouth gross.
