my case for why they should stay out. I tried to create a pile of necessities for when my mother came back but Cherry put the pile in a garbage bag when I wasn’t looking and added it to the others. I touched my things on my small shelf by the bed. The costume jewelry she’d given me, my angel figurines. Who needed any of it now? I tossed it all in a garbage bag and then went into the tiny bathroom and took out my romance. I was deep into the story about the two fugitive lovers, how the whole time the reader knew that the woman had it out for the man, that she was the smarter one, and was biding her time. They did have romantics, though, for sometimes she gave in to her woman’s needs and the necessity of satisfaction.
Women’s needs had never been mentioned in the church, never mentioned by anyone that I could remember, and I lapped up any sign of them by instinct like a long-starved wolf. My mother had held this same book before me, but why hadn’t she ever told me she’d read it when she was my age? It felt like something I should know about her. All the things she’d never told me waited just under the surface of this world like untouched land mines.
Lyle came in and shut the door behind him. In the small bathroom there was really only space for one person, unless it was my mother and me, who got ready side by side in our synchronized routine. The bathroom never felt small with us in it, but with Lyle here it was crowded and my knees nearly pressed against his stomach. I curled them up to my chest. This close, he seemed taller. Thin, but arms long with rivets of muscle, his shoulders stooped a little, the last evidence of his boyness. His sandy hair swooped over his forehead. He brushed it out of his face and then I saw myself. Yes, there were my same eyes. My high freckled cheeks and pointed canine teeth.
I turned the sink faucet on and let brown-tinged water cover my dirty toes.
“Takes a gallon of water to grow one almond,” Lyle said, turning off the tap.
“Pearl says you’re gonna teach me the Bible. You don’t think I know the Bible by now? Been at church long as you.”
“We’re concerned over the quality of your belief,” Lyle said. “GOTS ain’t just any church, you know. You can find a church anywhere. Vern’s church is different.”
I wondered if Vern had put him up to this, if he still cared for me and hadn’t forgotten my use.
Lyle turned the tap back on and looked at me. It seemed like a permission to waste water, to be bad. His hand grazed my leg. Drips of sweat clung to his earlobes. He cupped my shoulder and I could feel a low tremor run through him to me. “Lacey,” he said. “This is what family’s for.”
WHEN ALL WAS loaded into Perd’s truck we drove together to the Peach Pit Mini Storage and Cherry went in to do the paperwork. She charged back to the car after a few minutes.
“I’m not shelling out forty-five a month to store a bunch of crap,” Cherry said. “She’s your sister, Pearl. Maybe you could contribute something here.”
“Mama, this isn’t my fault,” Pearl said in a high baby whine.
Cherry turned to Perd and said, “To Tent City, then.”
TENT CITY WASN’T really a dump, but a name for the town homeless encampment, though it was well known that you could take your garbage there, your broken dishwasher, your kicked-in armoire, and someone would find use for it. The homeless of Tent City were in Peaches proper, but they were not of Peaches. They were a Fresno problem that had leaked over. Everyone called it Tent City on account of the makeshift tents everywhere, and the town knew to wear thick-soled shoes because of the needles. I asked my mother what the needles were doing there, why there were so many, and she said the needles were to inject the devil right into you, and that was just what some folks wanted. We were always trying to convert the people out here because they were desperate for any kind of saving, but now it was deserted aside from a few sleeping lumps, shaded by cardboard boxes. It seemed most had left for greener pastures.
It was a familiar place to me, but somehow I had never noticed that from Tent City you could see the red Diviner house in the far-off distance where Peaches ended and turned into Fresno County.
Cherry watched me and lit another Sweet Dream. Clucked her tongue. “Don’t even think about it.”
THE DRIVE HOME in Perd’s truck was quiet. I was happy for it. I felt if I spoke I would cry and I didn’t want to offer that up to any of them. Before I got out of the truck Lyle leaned over and handed me a plastic bag with something light in it. “Thought you might want it.” He smiled gently, like he understood that my mother and I were not monsters.
I waited until I was safe in Cherry’s bathroom with the door locked before I opened it. My mother’s yellow bikini. Lyle had saved it for me. I smelled it. Chlorine, something salty, a little mold. The elastic had lost its strength, but she still loved it. The high waist of the bottom covered her belly button, the one part of her that wasn’t perfect. My fault. I had pushed it out when I was in her stomach, she said. Made it ugly. The top had wires that crammed her boobs together, made two half moons of flesh rise up toward her collarbones.
Before Vern she had always talked about taking me to the sea, to let me hear the ocean. It wasn’t even that far away, she told me. A few hours’ drive. She’d been there once with Cherry and Grampa Jackie and Pearl when she was a child. She had kept it close to her, the memory of eating hot clam chowder under the smudge of overcast sky, how they had all shared one bread bowl because they didn’t want to spend money and how my mother wanted a kite like the other kids but buried her toes in the sand and looked out over the crashing blue instead and was still content. She said she had seen her whole imagination right there in that water, glimmering out toward the endless horizon line. Once she became a believer, she said, she realized what she had seen was God.
Loneliness. That’s what this feeling was, the wiry crawl under my skin telling me something was about to go very wrong all the time, making me jump at the slightest noise, imagining the Turquoise Cowboy’s car out front, him giving my mother thirty seconds to find me and if she didn’t he would take her away forever and it would be my fault, so stupid I was, busy daydreaming. I was on high alert even in sleep, my body an electric wire waiting for the contact of another, but no one ever came. Who can say, until it is gone, how much you will miss the warm body that sleeps next to you?
IN THE SHED I hid from fly duty. I looked around at Grampa Jackie’s things, hammers of every size, tin boxes full of nuts and bolts. A chain saw leaned in the corner, a shotgun hung high on the wall. My second blood had colored my underwear in the night and I folded one of Grampa’s old hankies into a pad and put it in the bikini bottom. I had my current romance and some of my mother’s things from the apartment I had jammed into my pockets. With her deodorant and a few of the crystals she’d amassed during her assignment work, I set up a little altar and tried to pray for her return. I touched the crystals lightly for I feared they harbored dark spirits, but they were too beautiful to be truly afraid of.
I knelt and whispered mercy, mercy to God, and when neither He nor my mother appeared, a wish came over me that my mother was dead. It seemed I was on a course of evil, thinking like that, but I wondered if it would be better somehow. Having a mother gone by a Godstricken force rather than a perfectly alive mother who simply chose another life. But while I wanted my hatred of her to cover me, to harden my skin to scales and become me, the opposite happened. I only loved her more.
AS I WALKED back from the shed to the house, I saw old Officer Geary sitting with Cherry on the porch, drinking sweet tea, long white braid down his back and a white suede Stetson on his head.
I
