how wonderful everything was, she would join in. She would see it was good I had gone ahead and told him. But no. The second Vern said Amen she pulled me out of the church in a rush to the car, buckled my seat belt for me like she never had when I was a child. She steered the Rabbit with her knees.
“Heat makes people crazy.” She pressed the accelerator. The Rabbit choked and tried its best to be fast. “I guess that must be why you went ahead and told him. Went and did the one thing I said not to do.”
She blew a stop sign and then another.
“Didn’t you see how happy everyone was?” I said, small and low.
“I was suffocating in that church.”
“Forgive her, God in Vern.”
“They were hot in there, too,” she said.
“Don’t be mad at me.”
“I used to think I was going to be a movie star,” she said. “It’s like I’ve forgotten that part of me for years and lately it’s coming over me, banging my head like a bag of bricks. All the things I never did. But you know what? I can still do those things. I ain’t dead.”
It was like she wanted to wreck the car. We careened into the parking lot of the Wine Baron, tires squealing. “It’s hard sometimes when God doesn’t answer your prayers.”
“You mean the rain?”
She put the Rabbit in park, squinted like she was just remembering where we were. I could tell her mind was switching to a different track.
“You think it’s possible to fall in love with someone you’ve never met?” she asked. She looked me in the eyes. She really wanted to know. I had wanted to talk about me for a second, my blood and what it might mean. I even liked that she was mad at me, that I had her attention. But now her voice was dreamy again, back in her otherworld.
“No,” I said sharply.
Her shoulders drooped and she let out a big tired sigh. “Hmm,” she said. “You’re probably right.” She seemed disappointed by me, by my lack of creativity, of fun.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe.” I thought of God then. I had fallen in love with Him, hadn’t I? We had certainly never met in the traditional sense. “Maybe you can.”
I knew nothing of love.
She perked up and smiled at this admission, but then her eyes attached to a man who was idling on his motorcycle next to the Rabbit. He was tall and covered in leather, a ruddy bush that curled over his top lip. He wore dark glasses. My mother got out of the Rabbit and slammed the door, cocked her hip into the mean sun. The man’s jacket said Valley Fine on it. He was just her type.
“Want some fairy dust?” he said, and she stepped up close to him like they were familiar, threw her leg over his seat, wrapped her arms around his waist.
“Just the ride.”
He revved the engine. She looked at me blankly, not a worry in the world as they rolled away.
I ran inside the Wine Baron. From the back came Bob, an Indian man with a thickness of white hair and a tunic that buttoned to his neck. He was a nice man. He must have considered us regulars by now, I realized.
“My mom’s on a motorcycle,” I said.
“Television,” he said, offering the word like a consolation prize, gesturing to the small screen mounted above the Slurpee machine that no longer housed Slurpee.
I took a palm-sized green Bible, small enough to fit in a pocket, so convenient, from my purse and set it on the counter. “You open to Vern’s work in your life, sir?” I said.
He looked at the Bible but didn’t touch it. “Mom likes beer” was all he said.
“I wish you would pretend to be out of stock when she comes.”
He slid a pack of watermelon gum across the counter. “I can give you candy and that’s all I can do. Don’t ask me for cigarettes.”
What would it be like if Bob were my father? I could spend my days working at the Wine Baron, saving all the patrons who came in for their fix. We could fill the bottles of whiskey with food coloring water and my mother could be in love and we could bring Bob to Vern and Vern would convince Bob to make her not drink anymore. I wanted to ask if he was married, but then I saw myself through his eyes and knew he would not want a daughter like me, grease-haired and begging for help in a quickie mart, a wife driving drunk through town, getting on trashy men’s motorcycles for no reason.
“You should get rid of those dirties you got back there,” I said. I pointed to the adult entertainment aisle where I’d accidentally lifted the yellow plastic cover off one of the magazines the week before and not understood, not entirely, what I’d seen. All the flesh pressed together sent a shock through me, the slick shaved skin, the faces of the women painted and hard.
“I sell what people want,” he said. “And everyone wants that.”
I left Bob to tend his cigarettes and waited for what felt like hours outside the Wine Baron. I spat on the ground between my feet. I wondered if I’d have to walk home. If the motorcycle man would be with her when they finally showed up and, if so, if he’d never leave. What would he need from me? I was older now and the thought scared me.
But then she came: my mother, like a mirage, back from the ride, her voice high-pitched, carefree, a performance for the man. She looked revived, cheeks red, clutching him like they’d known each other for years. “You have to do it, Lacey! It’s amazing.”
“Better make room on that motorcycle for God,” I said.
The man said, “Come on, little country girl, when you gonna get to ride a hog like this again?” There was a laugh in his eyes but I knew the quick underside of it would be a violent hand.
“Feel this motor!” my mother squealed like the dumbest person alive.
I looked at her. “Tell me where you go,” I said. “Or I’ll tell everyone you’ve been sinning.”
She smiled. “You don’t know what I’ve been dealing with, little girl.”
“Take me with you, then.”
The man grunted, bored. He needed my mother’s attention. “She’s got baggage,” I said to him.
“Come on, Lacey, be nice,” she said sweetly, but the man guided her roughly off the bike by her arm and pulled out of the parking lot. I knew we’d never see him again.
On the drive home I wanted her to say it was all a joke, that she wasn’t pulling us into that same hole we’d lived in before our conversion. But she didn’t, and I felt us falling and falling and fear filled me, for I knew the hole we were going down would be darker than ever now that we’d been living in the light.
The next Sunday my mother was drunksick. She lay in bed and
