labor, sold the baby, then told her sister the child had died.” Mabel had clipped the article and held onto it, saving it to put on Lily’s pillowcase when she had her next long fit.
“It’s time Lily saw her mother again,” Jordan said with a shrug, as if saying, Isn’t it obvious? As if saying, Don’t we want the best for Lily?
Mabel walked away from Jordan and looked out a broken window, down to the familiar street. The streets of the town square were all brick with patches of gray concrete. She could hear the rattle and bump of every car she’d ever ridden in as it crossed the streets, could feel the rough ride in her spine. If Jordan took Lily away, even for just a week, even if they never made it to Mexico, everything would change for all of them.
Jordan took Mabel’s hand, and he slipped a ring onto her finger. In the set of the ring was an opaque sphere, and Jordan flipped it open on its tiny hinges to show something could be kept inside. “I found it under the stage,” he said. “There’s all kinds of things under there. Maybe it was good luck for the actors to drop things through the loose floorboards or something.” Jordan lit his cigarette lighter, led the way to the base of the stage, and pushed aside a panel. The stage was so low to the floor that Mabel had to lower herself to her stomach to get beneath.
As she bellied her way across the floor, she could hear Jordan crawling in behind her. Her sandal fell off, and she felt Jordan touch the sole of her bare foot. She felt his fingertips stepping as light as spider’s legs across her heel and up along her ankle. She remembered the afternoon that her mother read aloud her father’s unlikely suicide note and how her mother then took Mabel and Lily to the river for a swim. Naked in the cold river water, the three of them hid beneath the trestle as a train crossed. They shivered and held each other. Unable to hear anything other than the passing train, they sent wordless messages, Mabel pressing her palm to her mother’s stomach, Lily putting her cheek to her mother’s breast, her mother running her fingers over the goose bumps of their skin.
Jordan, his face next to Mabel’s, relit the lighter, and Mabel leaned back from the heat in her face. “You’re filthy,” she said, pressing her thumb against a spot of dirt on his cheek. As the lighter went out, Mabel lay back and thought more about her father’s last words—he would have written them on thin pieces of paper and baked them into fortune cookies. With a puddle jumper, he’d have smoked the words across the clouds. You’ll live happily ever after, he would have promised them all.
Jordan tried to find Mabel’s lips in the dark, kissing her cheek, then her nose, then her lips. He kissed her only once, then crawled away and back to the front of the stage. With the kiss, Mabel forgave him everything—for liking Lily more and for buying a car to take Lily away. And she forgave him all further destruction; she would forgive him if he ruined Lily and if he ruined her and if he became someone she and Lily could only talk about very carefully.
3.
IT WAS MABEL’S BIRTHDAY, AND LILY had slipped a card beneath her bedroom door, inviting her down to her school-bus apartment for cocktails and cake. As the sun set, Lily unplugged the lava lamp from the thick orange extension chord that snaked in through a break in a window of the bus; in its place, she plugged in a string of blinking Christmas lights. The cord, its other end plugged into an outlet in what had once been a hog shed, into what had once powered a low electrical fence that Lily had once tripped over, jolting her knees, was her only source of electricity.
With the summer so hot, Lily spent only nights on the mattress in the bus, mosquito netting delicately draped above her.
Lily hadn’t spoken much to Mabel since the evening a few nights before at The Red Opera House, though she knew she was wrong to be angry. It shouldn’t matter that she and Mabel didn’t share every interest. Lily should love that Mabel and Jordan were close and could appreciate together the dirty dark recesses of collapsing rooms and the studied appraisal of the worthless. It was sweet, after all, to see them stumble up from that basement window, happy with the precious junk they’d discovered. Lily used to love the antique shop, but after living there for several years, she had become tired of all the topsy-turvy: the old incomplete sets of encyclopedias in the kitchen cabinets; the dishes and saucers on the bookshelves; the chairs and rugs stuffed into the rafters of the ceiling; stamped tin from ceilings rusting in a pile on the floor.
Lily longed to be more peaceable, to remain aloof and serene in the face of her frustrations. She longed to be calm and wise and forgiving. People love you more when you’re quiet, Lily imagined, when you can simply accept. When again she saw her mother, Lily would be the sweet, understanding girl that she had never been before, and she and her mother could enjoy an uneventful afternoon of simple questions and simple answers. Aside from some kisses and some hugging when they first saw each other, their reunion would lack all drama. It would lack all punishment. Lily relaxed, imagining the few hours she would spend drinking tea within the mud walls of her mother’s cool, blue house. Her mother had written of the papery sound of scorpions on the floor, a sound she said would be soothing if it weren’t for the fear of the sting.
Lily had found a traveling cocktail set on a back shelf of the shop, the worn leather strap of the case having turned as fragile as cardboard. As she assembled the martini glasses, screwing the glass cups into the red metal stems, she decided it would be a perfect evening. Just the night before, as she and Jordan sat naked in the heat of the bus, too hot to touch, Jordan had suggested they go find Lily’s mother, that they drive down to the border town where her mother wrote lovely letters to her daughters.
Their mother had called from time to time when Lily and Mabel were still girls. Her voice buzzed and popped with distant noise and tickled Lily’s ear. Lily always asked, “What have you been doing?” and her mother always said, “Oh, keeping the wolves at bay.” Lily hadn’t known what that meant, but she had liked the idea of her mother keeping wolves. She could imagine her in a bungalow along the coast of Mexico, the walls reflecting waves of blue as she licked an oyster from a shell. Near the window overlooking the bay, dirty wolves wrestled. “Can we come to Mexico?” Lily once asked. “Oh, you wouldn’t like it here,” her mother said. “There are bandits to steal your purse. Black widows build webs above your bed. In the cafés, you can’t even get a glass of ice with your pop.” At the time, Lily longed for this terrible place as her mother described it. There, she and Mabel and their mother could live in fear and disgust, never answering the knocks at their door because, in a foreign land, no one could be trusted.
Lily put on a dark-blue sleeveless velveteen dress that was too hot for summer but too cool for winter, and she curled the ends of her hair with a disposable butane curling iron she bought at the Everything for a Buck. She and Mabel always dressed up on their birthdays, and they always gave each other gifts. They didn’t allow each other to spend a dime, however; they were to find something appropriate in the shop and wrap it up. Lily cheated a bit this year, having gone through a trunk of her father’s things in one of the spare rooms. She selected for Mabel a Joan Armatrading album with her father’s handwriting on the back of the cover, in the upper corner: BOUGHT OCTOBER 12, 1977, FROM THE LICORICE PIZZA, OMAHA. HAD LUNCH AT THE JOE TESS CAFÉ—FRIED RAINBOW TROUT ON A SLICE OF RYE.
Lily loved having found the record hidden at the bottom of a box of patched-up work jeans. Growing up, she and Mabel had listened over and over to their father’s favorite music. They would set a portable record player in the window of Mabel’s room and crawl out onto the roof where Lily would smear coconut-scented lotion on Mabel’s freckled back and Mabel would soak Lily’s hair with spray-on Sun-In. Hours later, Lily would crawl back into the house as a strawberry blonde. With lines of sunburn crossing their shoulders and hips, they walked downstairs to stand in front of the window air conditioner, both exhausted from their afternoon naps. Eventually they learned all the words to all the songs of ELO and Rickie Lee Jones and Roxy Music, all performers their classmates
