front porch. His suit, upon close examination, was not two separate pieces but a onesie.
Cherry invited him in for a feast of pastries, but he declined. She practically pulled him by the arm, and he stopped her.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m not getting paid to be foolish.”
His rejection made her testy and so a few hours later she placed an even larger order, what she called on the phone an emergency.
But to Cherry’s dismay, when the emergency order came a few days later, it wasn’t the older magician man, but a scrawny someone wearing the green velveteen, but his long skinniness didn’t suit it, didn’t fill it out proper, and instead of evoking otherworldliness I saw it for what it was: a Christmas elf suit from the Dollar Disco. He tossed the package of mice on the porch with no ceremony at all. The box nearly landed on my toe. Cherry said, “Where’s Eugene?”
He turned. “My uncle’s setting up to retire. All’s you get today is me. I can paint your lawn if you want me to, though. That’s my very own business.” He pointed to his sky-blue truck, where he had handwritten in thick black marker, Central Cali Valley Lawn Painting. Under the words, a smiling orange garden snake poked its head up from a lush patch of grass.
Cherry snorted and pushed the boxes toward the door with her cane. “Painting lawns. Boy, I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“One hundred dollars for bright green grass. Grass that looks like nature but better. Grass that looks like there wasn’t ever no drought. I’m telling you, God couldn’t even make grass this nice. The only thing that’ll ruin it is rain, and rain ain’t gonna happen.”
“You wouldn’t know God if he bit your ass and called you Sally,” Cherry said, and shuffled inside.
The man shrugged, looked at me. “Crazy bat,” he said, and winked.
Never pay mind to a man who winks, my mother always said, even though hadn’t all of her beat-down boyfriends been winkers? The man spat on our dead blond weeds and walked slowly back to his truck, twirling keys on one finger. He got in and reached his arm out the window, patted the outside of the door like giddy up. I watched him from the porch squinting against the sun. He wasn’t like any man I knew from church, that was for sure. I looked down and saw one of the packages had a different address, for a Haggard Wayne down in Kerman. I picked up the box. “Hey!” I yelled. He took his sunglasses off. I started to skip but then walked instead with no rush, the package against my hip. I was some other girl walking then, jaw clenched. I realized only when I was almost to the truck that I was wearing the yellow bikini and nothing else. No matter. I stood, holding the box just out of his reach.
“Well, hello, savior,” he said to me.
“You’re not from Peaches,” I said.
He scanned me toes to tits. “And you aren’t from Peaches either, little girl, or you would have said ain’t just now.”
“I’m no hillbilly,” I said.
“No hills around here.” He pretended to scan the distant flatness. “Me, I’m from Popcorn, Indiana, population forty-two—well, forty-one now that I’m gone, unless one of them broads had another kid, as broads will do. Just landed here a few months back, ready to start anew, and lawn painting is where the money is. You wait and see, I’m gonna have every house in Peaches back to a state of glory.”
It was like the world had contracted and opened back up new and distorted. He didn’t scare me even though up so close I realized that he was older than I’d first noticed. I didn’t feel my throat get tight like I usually did when a man talked to me. Perhaps I had entered the place where the Diviner house was, where my romances existed, and now, I thought, where I was a body who stood talking casual-like to strange men in trucks.
“You a believer of God?” I asked.
“My name’s Stringy.” He reached his hand out to me and I gripped it hard. He winced and pretended I’d hurt him. I giggled in a way that would have embarrassed me to high heaven had I heard it come from my mother, but here I was laughing just like her, as natural as sin. He pulled me close to the truck and snatched the package like a trick.
I waited for him to ask my name, but he didn’t.
He peeled out lifting a hurricane of dust around me. Lacey May Herd, I should have told him. Pleased to meet you. I watched him drive away as the dirt settled on my mother’s bikini, and I felt something strange happen inside me, or perhaps it was in the atmosphere—like the air I had always breathed had shifted into something unfamiliar. That by breathing it, I was now an unfamiliar kind of girl.
I THOUGHT OF that lawn painter the rest of the day and into the night and by next morning I saw he’d been thinking of me too. Cherry’s grass was a neon green wash, loud and alive with color. I could hardly look at it directly, it was so bright.
Cherry thought the green grass was a sign from God and not a sign of admiration from the lawn painter. She called me into the bathroom, her home waxing kit hot and ready, and wanted me to get at her pits. She wanted someone to photograph her on the lawn, arms raised in praise, and send it to a newspaper somewhere far away. She wanted the headline to read: Most blessed believer receives sign of rain to come!
I waxed one pit but the stink of her, the layers of unwashed skin and sweat, got to me. I walked out onto the porch to stare at my grass in peace but there was Lyle sitting on the rocker holding a Bible.
“Let’s go somewhere Cherry won’t interrupt,” he said.
I thought of Cherry, sweating and waiting for me to service her, and I nodded toward the shed. Lyle pushed the door open and set his Bible down on Grampa’s workbench. One of his knees was bloody—from playing pickup baseball in the rock dirt fields behind the church, he said, and his white shirt was now yellowed and ripped. I was wearing the bikini again, a new skin, my breasts indecipherable under the bag of the unfilled cups. I moved the strap to the side to see the pale flesh under it and peeled a shred of burned skin off my shoulder. I had no idea how I looked to anyone else. I was accustomed to people focusing on my mother’s appearance out loud, telling her she was beautiful, affirming what she knew as fact. My body felt like a new thing to me without her next to it.
I sat on the workbench. Put my hand on his Bible. It was tattered with notes and folded pages. “God’s testing me,” I said.
Lyle looked sad. He understood my grief maybe, or was trying to. It was more than I could say for anyone else. “Vern said something interesting the other day,” he said. He paused. He shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you.”
I clasped his arm. I could smell Perd’s deodorant, metallic and peppery. “I’m a woman,” I told him, confident this time, my voice steady.
“Something’s going to take this town over, and it’s bigger than all of us combined. It might take time for everyone to get it, to really understand it, but once they do, the gifts will know no bounds.”
“What could be more powerful than when Vern brought the rain?”
“It’ll be bigger than that. But people are afraid of power when it comes down to it.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, wishing it were true.
Then Lyle hugged me. I was stiff at first but then I softened
