CHAPTER ONE

Sandy

The Vagabond Motor Lodge sat across the street from the Fiji Island restaurant, wedged between Johnny’s Auto Parts and a gas station with a flying horse on its neon sign. Our first few days staying there felt like a vacation. In the morning, after Dad left for his new job, we swam in the motel pool, doing cannonballs off the diving board as my mother lay out under a blue canvas umbrella with white fringe, watching cars go by on the highway. In 1972, I’d just turned twelve, and my family had moved for the third time in so many years. The August heat was ruthless on the bright cement, relenting only in bluish spots of shade. There was glamour in the way the heat slowed my body down and penetrated every moment with languor. In the late afternoon, when it was time for my little brother, Philip, to nap, we walked in our wet bathing suits across the parking lot, heat rising around us in visible waves. Our mother let us stop at the gumball machine outside the front office. Inside, the motel owner, a bald man who wore a Texas string tie, sat with his little dog, Mr. Buddy, on his lap, watching television.

We were moving again and the reason was, as my father frankly told us, that there were not many jobs for defrocked ministers. The members of First Methodist hadn’t liked when my dad let his hair grow so long it brushed his coat collar, or that he traded his clerical collar for bell-bottoms and blue shirts with wide ties. They didn’t like it when he encouraged the youth choir to sing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” accompanied by guitars rather than the organ, and they really didn’t like it when he started a Gestalt workshop in the church basement and began preaching against Vietnam. When he held a commitment ceremony for Barry and Don, a parishioner complained. This led to a clergy trial, with a jury of nine Methodist ministers who decided that his actions were not compatible with Christian teaching. They read from the Book of Discipline, stripped him of his credentials, and—from what I heard—my dad, who refused to defend himself anyway, walked down the center aisle and into secular life.

After getting fired, Dad stayed in bed and read from a pile of old New York Review of Books that we dragged from the rectory to each new rented house. He read books about history, science, and psychology. Once he was over the shock, he started to get enthusiastic: church doctrine was draconian; we’d figure out our own relationship to God. He gathered us together and explained that we were going to make a fresh start in Virginia.

It would have been nice if my mother was the strong, long-suffering type, but this was not the case; with every move she got a bit more unhinged. When we were supposed to be asleep, she cried to my father about how unhappy she was. Explained the she felt like a zero, a nothing. Listening to her, I tried to judge her freak-out level. She was at a 5 pretty much all the time. Brow furrowed, vaguely unhappy. Often, say, around the dinner table, she got to a 4 or even a 3 if my dad was sullen or my little brother complained about the food. She’d been at a 2 the whole drive down, but now she was at a 3, a good 3, not a bad 3.

When we got back to our room the owner’s wife had made up our beds, vacuumed, given us new towels. She was skinny as a skeleton as she pushed her cart, loaded with tiny bars of soap, glasses in white paper, and clean towels. Every day while she worked inside the rooms, jerking her bones around as she pushed the vacuum, I gazed at the cart until I got up enough courage to ask for more motel writing paper. She turned off the vacuum, gave me a sour look, and told me the stationery wasn’t kiddie stuff, but she guessed I could have a page or two. She didn’t know I was writing a long letter to Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, telling her about myself and also how sorry I was her father drank.

By midweek we still hadn’t moved into our duplex in Bent Tree. We no longer walked down the highway, parking lot to parking lot, to Sambo’s for dinner, but instead ate American cheese sandwiches and chips from a big foil bag we bought at the convenience store.

After dinner we took baths and got into our pajamas, and our mother let us out in front of our room to play in the parking lot. Across the street the Fiji Island was lit up so we could see the huge carved Easter Island statues on either side of the bamboo doors. The sign out front, bookended by plastic palm trees, read PINA COLADAS—TWO FOR THREE DOLLARS. For some reason nobody could explain, an old railroad car sat to one side of the parking lot. My mom knocked on the window from inside our room, pointed to the highway and shook her head vigorously. Then she leaned against the orange headboard and read a magazine, occasionally glancing to the television screen where Nixon’s head was huge and wiggly like the bobblehead dogs older people liked to put in the back windows of their cars.

In the half-light we ran around the motel to the Dumpster. Across a mangy field was a farmhouse that had wandered out of an earlier time period, gotten lost, and was now unable to find its way back. Fireflies floated over the field and above the farmhouse. Tiered up the side of the mountain were brick ranch houses, lit in two colors: incandescent gold if the families inside were having dinner, or indigo blue if they were watching television.

I wanted to crouch down in the field and pretend the Viet Cong were after us. But I could tell this game frightened Phillip. Whenever he was scared he pretended to look very carefully at some object on the ground, in this case chunks of parking lot gravel.

As it got darker the fireflies rose up and we went back around to the front of the motel to spy on the owner. Mr. Buddy sat delicately on the bald man’s lap as if he were the dog of a French diplomat. The owner and his wife lived behind the office and we could see them through the doorway at the back; the wife rattled around the kitchen.

The parking lot was packed with cars, license plates from Alabama, Mississippi, even Florida and Texas. The backseats were jammed with coolers, stacks of magazines, and clothes hung from hooks above the back doors. A fat man who held his pants together with an expanse of rope had dragged a chair from his room and was sitting out smoking.

The fireflies multiplied; there were so many it was easy to reach out and catch one and hold it in the palm of your hand. Phillip got his Wiffle bat and swung at the bugs until he had a patch of glowing tails stuck to the plastic. He smeared the tails over his forehead so his skin glowed.

After we caught as many as we could in the ice bucket, I opened the motel-room door and told my mother we had a surprise for her. “Now what?” she said, letting the magazine she’d been reading fall to the bedspread. She and my dad had yelled at each other earlier and now he was in the motel bar reading his book and drinking a beer.

I turned off the overhead light, then lifted the top of the ice bucket so the fireflies rose into the room and began to blink over the bed and around the night table. One flickered so close to my mother’s face that I could see the white of her eyes.

“How will we get them out of here?” she said.

Though her voice sounded worried I could tell by the way her eyes followed the little lights around the room that she liked the fireflies. After a while she helped us trap the bugs again and let them go outside.

I had trouble sleeping. To try to calm myself I thought about our life before we left the church. Dad used to say prayers before every meal; he sat on my bed and prayed with me at night. There were Sunday services, Sunday school, funerals, baptisms. When I slipped into the church in the late afternoons, the altar was dark and beautiful. The crimson carpet, the blues and greens from the stained glass like a doomed kingdom under the sea. We visited the lonely, we collected cans of food for hungry people, coats for people who were cold. We prayed for sick babies. We were at the center of what I thought of as THE HOLY, and our every move had weight and meaning. But out in the world away from church, we floated free. What if my dad did not come back? What if he met a lady in the bar he liked better than my mom, one who wasn’t always complaining about money? One who didn’t tell stories about giant worms in New Guinea that lived in your intestines or housewives who laid their bodies down over railroad tracks? He might go off when the bar closed and we’d never see him again. I sometimes imagined my father had another family. Rather than upsetting me, this gave me a certain respect for him. This second family would explain why he was always so preoccupied.

Our room was not far from the motel lounge with its orange hanging lights with wrought-iron filigree. Cars came and went; as it got later people laughed loudly in the parking lot and used the cigarette machine just outside our door. I watched the few remaining fireflies bob in the air, blinking on and off. I tried to stay awake to see my father, but I must have fallen asleep. When I woke again he was lying beside my mother and there was just one bug left flying frantically by the doorway.

*

The next day my mother forced my dad to go over to Bent Tree and give the manager an ultimatum: if we couldn’t move in by Friday, we were going to ask for our deposit back and look for another place to live. Usually when my parents talked seriously my father sat beside my mom, but on his return he paced the floor and his eyes kept opening wide as he went up on his toes. He talked as if the details of our life were an exciting movie, not anything that actually affected us.

“Get this!” he said. “The woman who is in the unit we’re supposed to move into has barricaded herself inside. She told us through the door that while she was moving out Sunday morning, her ex-husband threatened her with a knife.”

“Lovely,” my mom said.

Her mouth turned down around the edges and her chin started to quiver like it always did when she was about to cry. Seeing my mother in such misery jolted my sleepy bloodstream like a candy bar. My mind started to click down my well-worn list of ways I could help her: (1) Write an anonymous letter about what a great person she was. (2) Spend my allowance on lottery tickets. If I won, which I figured I was bound to do if I really concentrated hard, I could buy her the house she was always talking about. (3) Run away from home so she wouldn’t have me to worry about anymore. I knew that last one would hurt her more than help her; a few items on my list were radical. Rather than make her feel better, they were meant to throw a glass of cold water in her face.

My father continued to talk about the evil ex-husband. I pictured him sitting in his pickup truck looking at the duplexes through binoculars and playing with his Swiss army knife. He wore a red bandana on his head and mirrored sunglasses. I pretended to shift in my sleep, so I could see my mother in the dark hotel room. Her eyes were large and wet as she watched Johnny Carson. A 3 moving toward a 2. To my mom, the intrigue with the woman was just another example of how our life was in decline, one more detail added to the long list of others, chief among them the fact that we couldn’t afford to buy a house on my father’s tiny salary.

*

Sometimes when my mother cried and said she wanted a house, Phillip, who was four, would rub her back and tell her not to worry, he was going to buy a big house when he grew up, and everybody could live there—not just us, but all our friends, grandmas and grandpas, birds, all the rabbits and mice. Even polar bears, if they promised to be nice and not eat anyone.

I’d had the same fantasy for a while, that I’d grow up, get rich, and buy her a house that looked like the Taj Mahal; to me the pink marble and deep purple reflecting pools looked like heaven. But I was getting tired of her endless longing. Wherever we lived wasn’t good enough. We might call it a house, and think of it as “our house,” but to Mom no place we’d lived in was nice enough to be a house. It was as if the walls had fallen down, and we were just camping out, completely exposed to the elements.

*

It rained all day Friday. We watched television as heavy drops pelted the big plate-glass window. We fought over whose turn it was to get ice from the machine at the end of the open corridor. The ice machine sat next to the candy machine, each bar of chocolate lit up like a tiny god.

In the evening the rain cleared and we drove over to Bent Tree, passing Long John Silver’s, Hardee’s, and a 24-hour do-it-yourself car wash. There was a drive-in movie theater playing a film called Dallas Girls and a string of brick ranch houses with Christmas lights up around the porches and a sign by the road that read MASSAGE.

Eventually the strip malls got farther apart, interspersed with black glass professional buildings and churches on both sides of the highway. Just before we turned off, there was a brick church with white columns, a steeple, and a sign that read SIN KNOCKS A HOLE IN YOUR BUCKET OF JOY. The parking lot was empty and glittering under the overhead light.

Off the highway I counted thirteen NIXON FOR PRESIDENT signs stuck in front yards. My father hated Nixon, but I felt sorry for the president because he always looked so dazed and miserable. Warm air came through the window, damp from the rain and tinged with the scent of dirt and grape juice.

I didn’t understand why we couldn’t rent a different duplex in one of the other developments—Lux Manor, Sans Souci, Evergreen Estates—spread like bread mold over the side of the mountains. My dad was acting like he did when he was a pastor, like everyone else’s life was more important than our own. He drove slumped back in the seat, his hand dangling over the wheel, the motel envelope holding the rental listings from the local paper on the dashboard. He intended to slip the envelope under the woman’s door and gently encourage her to think about moving out.

When he told us his plan, my mother had been folding clothes she’d just brought back from the Laundromat, a pair of my little brother’s corduroys on her lap. She looked up at him.

“That’s your plan?” she asked.

In the last few days she’d rolled her eyes whenever my father talked about how much he liked his brand-new job at the VA hospital, or said something about the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Most of the car ride she’d been silent, her head pressed dramatically against the window frame, but as the car climbed the mountain and my father said we were close, she started to talk. Her features became unfocused, and when she opened her mouth I knew she was going to say something about rich people.

“Did you know in Hyannis Port the Kennedys keep a pony for the children to ride?”

“I wish we had a pony,” Phillip said.

Between places, while we were in transit, she always went back to the Kennedys. Once settled in a town she picked a nearby rich family. In Philadelphia it had been the Westerfields. She knew the girls went to Emma Willard for boarding school and that they summered in Lions Head, Maine. She knew that their house had six bedrooms and that each bathroom was fitted with delft tile.

I was sick of the Westerfields as well as the Kennedys. I had to hear about Caroline, how she had christened the USS John F. Kennedy with her mother, Jackie, how she once received a puppy from Khrushchev and was moving schools from Sacred Heart to Brearley. My mother went on reviewing. John-John had spent the summer on a dude ranch. The Onassis yacht had a hot tub and a steam room. Then, as my dad tapped the brakes and took a left turn onto a road lined with freshly planted pine trees, she turned to new information she’d gotten out of the Roanoke World-News. She’d learned that the Vanhoffs were Roanoke’s first family. Mr. Vanhoff was president of Shenandoah Life Insurance Company. His great-grandfather had been governor. The paper said Mr. Vanhoff had hosted the fund-raising golf tournament at the Roanoke Country Club while Mrs. Vanhoff had taken her children to the family’s vacation compound on a private lake in Michigan. There they raised rabbits and took French lessons. While my mother spoke, I bent my fingers up and back so slowly I was able to slow time down, so the syllables of what she said were so far apart the words were unrecognizable. I imagined that I was one of the astronauts on Apollo 15 landing the Falcon on the Apennine mountain range, taking the lunar rover for a spin on the silent surface of the moon. After trying to catch our eyes in the rearview mirror she realized neither Phillip nor I were going to respond.

“Here we are!” my dad said as we passed the Bent Tree sign and pulled onto a street lined on either side by two-story duplexes. Twenty-five units climbed up the side of the mountain, each a boxy red-brick building with six front windows, two doors, and tin chimneys like mushrooms springing up from the roof. My dad had made the place sound like a fancy mountaintop resort, the sort of hotel in which the young heroines in the books I read spent their summers. But the duplexes in Bent Tree looked more like army barracks.

The manager, a short man with a comb-over and a huge set of keys dangling from his belt, was waiting for us. He looked like an even smaller version of Sonny Bono, bereft without his Cher.

Dad followed the manager into the duplex and we sat in the car waiting. Insects throbbed and a bird shrieked back in the woods. My little brother crawled over the seat and got in Mom’s lap. The top half of each duplex was covered in beige aluminum siding; strips had fallen off here and there, exposing patches of gray cement. Most of the windows were covered with blinds, but a few people had strung sheets over the glass. One showed a Confederate flag. A rusty grill lay on its side and a few motorcycles were parked along the street. In the yard next to our unit was a concrete birdbath.

*

As we drove out of Bent Tree, my father told my mother how the woman inside our duplex wouldn’t speak to him or the manager. The manager said Bent Tree’s owner felt once you’d signed the contract, you’d committed yourself to spending at least a year in the development. Still, if an annulment was needed, if we really wanted our deposit back, he would issue us a check. My mother didn’t answer; she just ran her hand through my brother’s hair as he slept on her lap. I kept waiting for Dad to tell us about his plan B but he was quiet. I knew my father wouldn’t get his first check for another week and we were down to our last forty dollars and that the motel room cost $19.95 a night. I knew, too, that we couldn’t go back to Philadelphia; our house held a new family, a young couple with a baby. Once, when a job hadn’t worked out, we’d gone to live with Dad’s parents. Another time we’d stayed with my mother’s sister for a few weeks, but my aunt had made it clear when we left that that would be the last time.

The sun had gone down and my dad turned on the car headlights. After a while he stopped on the side of the road and spoke to a hitchhiker waiting on the soft shoulder. The man wore a small backpack, a cheesecloth shirt, and jeans with a V cut in the bottom of each leg and a triangle of paisley material sewn in to make the bell swing wide. His curly brown hair fell at his collarbone and he had a mass of freckles. Most thrilling was the string of seeds—Love Beads—around his neck. The young man got into our station wagon. I was all the way in the back lying on my stomach, reading the funny pages of the newspaper with a flashlight. I peered over the seat. My mother had smeared white cream on a rash around my mouth and I was terrified an actual hippie might see my greasy face, or worse, the red dots all over my chin.

“Hi, everybody!” he said. “My name is Guy.”

“Where you headed, Guy?” my father asked in the nothing-to-lose voice he always used when talking to hippies.

“Up to Floyd,” Guy said. Floyd was farther up in the mountains, the place local hippies hung out. I could tell my father was disappointed with Guy’s reply. I knew my father felt if Guy was free enough to be a real hippie, he would march in protests against Vietnam, or head for the Deep South to register black voters. I knew Dad had been sad to miss the fund-raiser that spring for McGovern, the one where James Taylor and Carole King sang.

“Do you live up there?”

“Oh no,” Guy said. “I’m just checking it out.”

Wow! I thought. Guy doesn’t have a home either. But unlike us, he didn’t seem to care; he was living free and easy. Sitting sideways in the backseat, looking out the window, he told us he’d hitched up to Maine, which was crazy beautiful. He was thinking about checking out Japan. A guy he knew was teaching English. My mother pressed her body against the passenger-side door, as if Guy might have head lice. Just before we pulled off the highway we let Guy out. I turned to see him receding in the glow of our headlights. He walked backward carrying a cardboard sign that read: HELLO, FELLOW HUMAN! CAN YOU SPARE A RIDE?

*

After Guy was gone, my father talked about life on the road, speculating on the potential for adventure. We could buy a camper and just take off, live in the moment. I knew he was saying this so he wouldn’t have to talk about Bent Tree. Finally he asked my mother what she thought we should do. She didn’t answer. She stared out the window, her lips pressed together.

Back in the motel room she went into the bathroom to change into her nightgown and take off her make-up. When she came out she flung herself on the bed. At first my dad continued to try to talk to her, saying if the woman—whose name was Miranda—wasn’t out by Sunday, that was it, that was absolutely the cut-off date. Mom didn’t say anything. She just lay on the bed staring at the dull ceiling, her eyes open and empty like a dead person’s.

After a while Dad gave up trying to talk to her. He got us changed into our pajamas. I heard the television in the room next door and in the parking lot a car door slammed. My brother fell asleep immediately. I pretended to sleep, every now and then letting out a long dramatic breath to prove I was unconscious.

My mother stood up and walked over to the phone on the dresser beside the television. She had on her mint-green nightgown and she’d taken off her mascara so the skin around her eyes was smudged.

“I’m going to call my parents and see if I can take the children there.”

“Don’t do that,” my father said from behind his newspaper.

She picked up the receiver and put her finger into the plastic dial.

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “I’m calling right now.”

“Don’t!” My father lowered the paper.

My mother pulled the rotary to the end and let it ratchet back.

He stood up and tried to take the phone from her hand, but she held on so hard the skin over her bones turned white.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, holding the receiver over her head.

“You’ll feel better when you’re in the duplex,” he said, taking the receiver from her hand and placing it back into its cradle. “You’re just tired.”

She let him lead her over to the bed, but when he tried to put his arm around her she shrugged him off and moved back to her earlier position on the far side of the mattress, her face to the wall.

In the night, when the train whistle woke me, rattling the window beside my bed, I saw through the dark that my mom was still lying on top of the covers, now in her quilted bathrobe, her back to me, her face toward the wall. I thought she was at a 2 moving toward a 1, but then I heard her long, even breaths and realized she’d fallen asleep. My dad was sitting in the vinyl chair by the television. At first I thought he was sleeping too, but then I saw the whites of his eyes gleam in the parking lot light slanting through the break in the curtains. Of course he was worried about my mom, where we’d live, if we had enough money, but I think his grand plan was also failing. He’d given up church stuff, the prayers, the creeds, the vows that he had told me were a waste of time. He didn’t want to dig a channel, he wanted to find the spring and let it flow over us. We were, he had told me with great enthusiasm, in a period of devolution, unlearning what we knew. It seemed crazy to me that my dad was trying to get to a place without maps, or directions. He was tired, confused, despairing. And what if God actually was dead like a lot of people said? Then, rather than finding Him, my Dad was going to have to invent Him all by himself.

*

Early in the morning, Dad came in with donuts. He told us he’d already been back up to Bent Tree. Miranda was gone and we could move in. We got dressed and threw everything into our suitcases. On the drive Dad played the radio, and he kept glancing over at my mom in her paisley head scarf and sunglasses.

“You look like a movie star going incognito,” he told her.

She turned her head toward him and softened her mouth.

As we pulled up in front of our duplex, Mr. Ananais, the manager, stood by the curb waiting for us.

“She’s still in there,” he said. “I had her out earlier this morning but she got spooked and locked herself back in.”

“Now what?” my mother said.

“Well,” the manager said hesitantly, “I think if she heard the children’s voices—”

“No way,” my mother said. “I’m not having my kids exposed to some lunatic.”

“Come on,” my dad said. “It’s worth a try.”

“I’m not going,” my mom said, looking straight out the window.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“Me too,” said Phillip.

Inside the duplex a few boxes were stacked against walls. The floor was covered with mangy gold shag and the walls were white, holes here and there where pictures had hung. The rooms smelled like incense.

Mr. Ananais led us upstairs, down a short hallway to a closed bedroom door.

“Miranda,” Mr. Ananais said, “the new tenants are here.”

Beyond the door, mattress springs released and I heard soft footsteps moving closer. I could hear Miranda breathing against the wood.

“I’m in a very bad mood,” she said.

“Do you want me to tell you more stories about my cat?” Mr. Ananais asked.

Dad looked at me with his eyes wide open. Mr. Ananais was more accommodating to the woman than either of us had expected.

“Yes,” Miranda said, “that would be nice.”

“Well my cat, Hector, likes to watch TV. Bonanza is his favorite show. He knows exactly when it comes on each afternoon. If it’s not on, he gets mad and goes to the television and meows until I turn it on. I put a pillow down and he lies with his paws folded in front of him.”

Mr. Ananais looked at my father, who was flushed and smiling. More than anything else in life, Dad grooved on surreal situations. If my mom had been here, she’d have been whispering that this was crazy.

“Why don’t you say hello, kids?” Mr. Ananais suggested.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jesse. I’m twelve . . .”

What else would she like to know about me? I could tell her how I loved to read or that lavender was my favorite color, but in the end I went with my favorite candy bar.

“. . . and I love Almond Joy bars . . .”

“I like fire engines,” Phillip said. “And pizza!”

There was silence but it had a different texture, more like macramé than leather.

“Come on, koukla,” Mr. Ananais said. “Remember how we talked about having to call the police? I really don’t want to do that.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, no, no,” Mr. Ananais said. “But really, what do you want us to do? This nice family wants to move in here, these children need a place to sleep, you can’t just stay locked in there forever.”

“What if he comes back?”

“I already told you,” Mr. Ananais said. “His mother says he’s gone to Texas.”

There was quiet from behind the door.

“Are you still there?” Mr. Ananais asked.

“Where else would I be?”

“Are you coming out?” he asked.

“Could you sing me a song?” she asked. “I think that would settle my nerves.”

The only song we all knew was “Jingle Bells,” and before we got through the first verse, our car horn sounded.

“That’s him!” Miranda screamed.

Mr. Ananais looked at my father. I knew he was worried that any gains would be lost if Miranda got frightened.

“We’ll go,” Dad said. “We’ll come back in an hour or so.”

In the car my mother’s face was fixed in a smile that was not a smile at all. She’d moved over to the driver’s side and before we had our doors shut she took off down the mountain, speeding past the ranch houses in the subdivision below.

“Getting us killed,” my father said, placing a hand on the dashboard to steady himself, “isn’t going to solve anything.”

“Is she coming out?”

“I think so,” my father said. “Though you may have ruined it by laying on the horn.”

“Now it’s my fault?”

“I didn’t say that.”

My mom swung around a corner, coming so close to a boxwood hedge that the branches scraped against the side of the car.

“Remember that guy who came to our door in Philadelphia saying he was a narcoleptic?” my mother said.

“He was very convincing,” my father said. “He fell asleep several times right in front of me!”

She pulled onto the highway and sped out toward the interstate. We were going so fast that the buildings and trees melded into one long ribbon, unfurling behind the car.

“Remember the time you gave a hundred dollars to that slut?”

“She was a member of the congregation and she was pregnant,” my father said.

“Remember how you used to go to the loony bin every single Saturday?”

“I was making pastoral visits.”

“When you let that drug addict sleep in our guest room he drank all our cough syrup.”

“For God’s sake slow down,” my dad said.

“You want me to stop?”

“Yes.”

“Say please,” she said.

“Please,” my dad said.

She hit the brake and we all flew forward, then fell back hard against the seats as she rolled the car onto the shoulder. The tires crunched on the gravel and the fender pressed against a patch of weeds.

Throwing open the door, my mother stumbled out of the car and started to walk down the side of the highway, her dress whipping around her knees in the wind and the silky tails of her head scarf bobbing. Heat made the air muzzy and thick as if she were going through a time warp, moving away from us into another dimension.

My dad slipped into the driver’s seat. I made funny faces at Phillip. We were screwing up our mouths and shaking our heads, but when Dad turned around we froze.

“Your mother’s upset,” he said.

“Understatement of the universe,” I said.

“I want Mommy,” Phillip whined.

My dad put on the hazards and drove up behind her. He kept so close that I could see the muscles flexing in the backs of her legs. She was pretending to enjoy her little walk along the highway, looking at the weeds in the ditch, glancing up at the hazy sky.

“Just tell her you’re sorry,” I said. “That’s all she wants to hear.”

Dad leaned his head out the car window.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “OK? Just please get back in the car.”

She turned, took off her sunglasses, and looked at us through the windshield. Her face was pink and wet and her eyelids were so swollen she looked like a sea creature. Behind her was a string of fast food restaurants, a McDonald’s followed by the Long John Silver’s and the Hardee’s. Every time a car sped by, her clothes sucked against her body. She stared at us for what seemed like a very long time—at least a million years.

This is it, I thought, this is when she decides to leave us and start her new life.

*

Maybe because Phillip was so much younger, moving didn’t seem to bother him in the least; he loved packing up his toys in his old suitcase, and once we got to Bent Tree he knew how to hang around out front in the mornings, running his remote-control tank up and down the sidewalk, until he attracted a kid his own age.

At Bent Tree, Eddie was the first kid to come around. Though he was only four, the same age as my brother, he looked like a tiny adult, his white hair cut in a mullet, short in the front and past his shoulders in back. He had a white plastic knife tucked under his belt and a bandolier made of toilet paper rolls attached with electrical tape to his T-shirt.

My mother was pleased Eddie had come over because she wanted Phillip to stop running in and out of the duplex. All week, while she tried to unpack, he’d been sliding down the banister and jumping off the couch. Mom agreed that Phillip and Eddie could play together in the woods if I walked with them. On the way, Eddie showed us the unit next to ours; it looked OK from the outside, but inside wires hung from all the ceilings. The wood frame next in line was overgrown with weeds. On the lot beyond, the builders had given up completely. There was only a large hole and a few bags of cement ruined by the rain and dried to hard chunks in the sun. Eddie told us that in the spring, rainwater collected at the bottom of the pit and he had caught tadpoles there in a Dixie cup.

The tree line was scattered with stuff people had dumped: a television with a smashed screen, a plastic bag of clothes, a broken-down playpen. Vines covered everything. I’d always thought of nature like the happy woodlands in my childhood storybooks. But now I was frightened by the large shiny leaves, the heart-shaped ones veined purple, and the ones small as doll hands covered with white hairs. The trees seemed angry; I felt if I turned my back, they might poke a sharp branch into my heart. I wanted the woods to be a place where I might make friends with a fawn or see a unicorn. I wanted to meet a squirrel wearing a little vest or a frog walking on his hind legs, leaning on a tiny carved cane.

Eddie felt none of my anxiety. Once we got a few yards into the forest he insisted that no girls were allowed in the hooch, that he and my brother would walk the rest of the way alone. I watched their thin legs moving over the packed dirt path. Where they made a sharp right, the trees thickened first to dark green and then to black.

*

When I got back, our nearest neighbor, Mrs. Smith, was standing in her doorway wearing a housedress with metal snaps down the front. She wore her hair teased up in a beehive and smoked a cigarette with a long dangling ash.

“Would you mind getting me my newspaper, honey?” she said. “That boy threw it onto your side.”

I pulled the paper out from under the ratty boxwood.

“You all moved in?”

“Still unpacking.”

“Where you all from?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Up there,” she said. “My Lord!”

I nodded and smiled.

“I hear your daddy’s a preacher.”

“He was one. But he’s not anymore.”

Mrs. Smith frowned. She was the sort of character I’d imagined lived down South. Someone who made fried chicken and loved okra, someone who watched the Grand Ole Opry on television.

“Was it him I heard up in the middle of the night?”

“Either him or me,” I said. “We both have trouble sleeping.”

“Y’all and me both,” she said. “I haven’t gotten more than a couple hours’ worth since my husband passed.”

“When was that?”

“Twenty years ago,” she said. “But it feels like twenty days.”

Her cheeks sucked in as she pulled on her cigarette and let the smoke out of her small nose, the stream thick and gray.

*

Eddie’s mother, Sandy, lay out on a lawn chair beside her unit in a leopard-print bikini, spreading oil mixed with iodine over her legs. When she turned over on her stomach, she undid her top so her back was bare. To me she was exotic as a lizard soaking up the sun. Listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd on her transistor radio and drinking a can of beer. I stared for a while at her brown back and perfectly shaped butt from my bedroom window—until she glanced in my direction and I went back to unpacking my few possessions, hanging my dress and arranging my shoes in the closet. I had three pairs of shoes: red Keds, sandals with tire-tread soles, and a pair of Mary Janes that my mother had made me pack but that I swore I would never ever wear again even if someone held a gun to my head.

I opened the box that held the old encyclopedias I’d gotten at the Philadelphia library sale. Wedged in between the volumes was my baby doll, Vicky, her ratty sleeper scrunched up under her arms and her blue glass eyes clearly frustrated. I could tell she was mad I’d left her in the U-Haul for so long, and so I let her lie on my chest and I stroked her bald head as I sang “American Pie,” the song that was now always on the radio.

After a while I got up and peeked out at Sandy. She had turned back around and was eating orange Cheez Doodles out of a big plastic bag. I went out to see if we had any mail and to get a look at her up close.

As soon as I came out our front door, she raised her sunglasses.

“Are you a teenager, honey?” she called to me. Her voice, like a little girl’s, made no sense coming out of her brown body.

“Almost,” I said, walking over to her chair.

“You babysit much?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to appear too anxious, but I was thrilled she might actually hire me. My heart fluttered. It was as if I were talking to a goddess from another galaxy.

“For who?”

“My brother mostly, but once I watched a new baby while its mother got her hair done.”

“Sounds good,” she said. I realized from the way she waved her hand that she was going to offer me the job no matter if I’d said I’d watched sea monkeys and babysat goldfish.

“Could you come over at seven? My boyfriend is taking me out to dinner.”

When I arrived that evening, Sandy’s boyfriend opened the door. Sonny was a tan, thin man with huge white teeth, his hair feathered back perfectly like birds’ wings. I’d heard from Eddie that he was an oral surgeon and that he was rich. He poured himself a drink from a decanter with a gold top. Sandy’s living room was filled with spider plants hanging in macramé holders. One wall was mirrored. There were ceramic lamps with large silk shades and a geometrical print suspended on the wall over the long, low, brown couch.

“I hear you’re a Yankee,” Sonny said, turning back toward the living room. He wore an Izod shirt with the collar turned up, khaki pants, and loafers without socks.

I nodded.

“We’ll try not to hold that against you. Right, Eddie boy?”

Eddie, who sat on the couch holding a Tonka cement mixer, turned his head slowly, squinted his eyes at Sonny as if trying to remember who he was, shrugged, and went back to the television.

I sat down next to Eddie on the couch.

“What are you watching?” I said.

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

It was early in the evening on a Saturday; the cartoons were long over and the sporting events too. Eddie slumped his body against mine. He was the kind of kid who would lean on anybody. Though I’d known him only a few days, he was already all over me, wanting to sit on my lap and hold my hand.

As Sonny lifted his glass to his mouth, I heard ice clink against his teeth. At first I thought he was watching the stairs, waiting for Sandy to come down, but then I realized he was staring at my profile.

“Let’s see what else is on,” I said, turning the channel. Though Eddie protested, I knew we were near the part where the Child Catcher appears with his greasy hair and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang changes from a kids’ movie into a horror flick.

I kept waiting for Sonny to stop staring at me, but his gaze was insistent. I wondered if I didn’t have a smear of sloppy joe on my cheek. I sunk down deeper into the couch. Finally Sonny reached over and put his cold hand on my chin.

“Open up, honey,” he said.

I didn’t want to, but with his fingers pressed against my jawbone what else could I really do? He turned my head toward the lamplight and looked carefully down my throat, tipping my head from side to side.

“Those wisdoms will have to come out,” he said. “Tell your folks when it’s time I’m their man.”

Footsteps on the stairs. Sandy appeared in a powder-blue dress with ruched sleeves and a puka-bead choker. Her eyes were lined with black like a baby raccoon’s.

“Whoa-wee,” Sonny said, standing. “My own little Cleopatra!”

“No jumping on my water bed,” she said to Eddie, sounding like a girl playing the part of a mother in a high school play. She wrote two numbers on a pad by the phone and picked up her leather patch bag. She leaned down and Eddie reached his pale arms up around her neck and squeezed. He held her head tightly, whispering something into her ear that made Sandy smile.

“Whoa there, little man,” Sonny said, winking at me. “She’s your mama, not your girlfriend.”

As soon as the door closed behind them, Eddie ran upstairs and got his Hot Wheels case and a bunch of bright orange segments of track. I helped him set them up in the kitchen. He showed me, by bending the top of the track up between two soup cans on the counter, how the little green car with the racing flames had no trouble making the antigravitational loop-the-loop. He placed two ramps facing each other so when we released a car from each end the Hot Wheels smashed into one another. After a while the collisions got boring.

“I’ll tell my mom you’re my favorite sitter if you give me some ice cream,” Eddie said. “But if you don’t I’ll say you talked all night on the phone.”

Eddie was clearly experienced with babysitters. I admired his negotiating skills.

Swinging open the freezer door I saw TV dinners, frozen pizzas, and two different flavors of ice cream: cherry and butter pecan. The lower fridge held gallons of soda and thick packages of cold cuts in white butcher paper, a delicacy in my own house. They had strawberries and Cool Whip. They had every kind of cereal: Cap’n Crunch, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms. I used the scoop to curl the ice cream into coffee cups and we ate it while we watched The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

I knew everything about Cher, how her first memory was of being lost in the woods, that she’d had a dog named Blackie and two imaginary friends, Sam and Peter, who were lumberjacks. Ever since I’d first seen her a few years ago in her fur vest and elephant bells tied up with rawhide lacing, I knew she had a message for me. I let Eddie eat Cool Whip with his fingers right out of the container so he’d stay quiet as Cher came out in her red and purple gypsy dress and hoop earrings to sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.” She sang in her low, muddy voice with a certain remove, as if she were embarrassed by the song’s rawness.

Eddie fell asleep while I was washing the cups. I watched him, the freckles over his face and his tiny rib cage moving up and down, before I picked him up, his body warm against my chest, and carried him up the stairs to his bed.

“My dad brought me a monkey home from Vietnam but the monkey stopped eating, all its hair fell right out and it died,” he said sleepily. I pulled the covers up around him. The air conditioner was high and the room felt chilly. “I like you,” he said. “You let me watch as much TV as I want.”

I closed his door and stood in the hallway on the gold shag carpet. The walls were covered with sepia-colored mirrors. I looked at my reflection. If I stared long enough I could convince myself that I had nothing to do with the body before me; it was like I resided someplace else entirely and this body was just a puppet that I controlled by remote.

Sandy’s room was beside Eddie’s, one wall covered with the same smoky glass, the curtains and the bedspread printed with leopard spots. Everything in Sandy’s house was oversized. Even her cat, Lulubell, had a fat furry stomach that dragged on the carpet. I looked through Sandy’s colored eye pencils and Mary Quant lipsticks. The stuff was all of a good quality, much different from my mom’s dime-store lipstick and clumpy mascara. My mom had given up on glamour. She had an all-or-nothing philosophy; if we didn’t have money to buy clothes in real materials like linen and silk, she’d just go around in housedresses and white athletic socks.

I was different. I was drawn to the objects of womanhood. To me they were sacred items: the mascara wand, the cotton balls, the leopard-print panties with the pink bow I found in Sandy’s dresser. My mother wore white bras and big cotton underwear and insisted I do the same. She said lingerie was for tramps.

I kept snooping. Sandy’s closet was jammed. There were a dozen white uniforms—she worked at a nursing home—and lots of party dresses. Many had sequins and were nearly as flamboyant as the ones Cher wore on her show. Sandy was like a tiny Cher, small enough to fit into the parameters of life at Bent Tree. I wondered if I should risk trying one on. Sandy was so petite she was almost exactly my size. I pulled a slinky green dress with a beaded bodice from the hanger.

Once I had the dress on I looked at myself in the mirror. Over the past few months I’d grown so much I looked like a big freak and my hair was cut short just like my brother’s. It wasn’t unusual for people to think I was a boy. Just the day before, the pharmacist at the drugstore had said to my mom, Two boys! How nice. I knew everyone was waiting for me to turn into a young lady and so sometimes I practiced; I had a few moves I was working on. I tried to walk like a woman, to get the rhythm of my hips just right, so that the motion was smooth. I’d noticed that teenage girls always moved as if people were watching them. It was important somehow to move like people were watching you, so that people would eventually watch you. I moved on to the next gesture I was working on: the hair toss. This move was modeled after my fifth-grade teacher. She’d had thick brown hair that lay lightly on her shoulders, and every few moments she would lean back and give her head a little shake. Since my hair was cropped short, I wrapped a towel around my head, stood in front of the mirror, and tipped my head back. But no matter how many times I tried to move like my old teacher it was always too jerky, like someone had told me I had a spider on my neck.

I shook the towel off my head and lifted the dress over my shoulders, then arranged it back on the hanger and pulled my clothes back on. As I was hanging the dress in the closet I heard a car door slam and tires peel out roughly on the gravel driveway. I ran down the stairs and threw myself over the back of the couch. Sandy flew in the door, dropped her bag on the table, and got a wine cooler out of the refrigerator. She plopped down beside me on the couch, shook off her high heels, and put her feet up on the coffee table. Her black mascara was smeared. The skin below her eyes was pink and puffy. I could tell she’d been drinking.

“That jackass is never going to marry me,” she said. “I don’t know why I keep fucking him.”

She swigged from her bottle and stared at the label.

“But if I break it off, where will I be?”

I was watching her small perfect feet, the toenails blood-red and shiny.

“You’re so pretty,” I said. “I can’t believe you have any problems.”

“Right!” Sandy laughed.

I could tell what I said had made her remember how young I was, and she jumped up and pulled a five-dollar bill from her wallet.

“I hope it went all right,” she said. “He can be a handful.”

I took the money but I didn’t want to leave. I had heard adults swear only a few times; my dad said “shit” when he got really angry. But the way Sandy swore was different; it made what she said raw and affecting. I wanted her to keep on talking that way to me all night.

“Why do you keep fucking him?” I said.

“Oh honey,” she said. “Don’t talk like that. It’s just not nice.”

*

At home, my father was already in bed and my mother sat sideways on the couch, with her legs under her, eating from a plastic container of grocery store macaroni and listening to Camelot on the record player. In Philadelphia she’d met with a reducing group that made her wear a pig’s mask if, during the weekly weigh-ins, she’d gained more than a pound. My mother had worked in a department store. On Saturdays, her day off, she sometimes sang along with the records of Camelot or Fiddler on the Roof. I knew to stay in my room. If I came out, she’d tell us how sad it was that Jackie Kennedy had lost two babies; Arabella was stillborn and Patrick Bouvier died just a few days after his birth. Or she’d yell at me for leaving dirty clothes around or opening up the refrigerator door so long all the cold got out.

As she opened her mouth, I prayed she wouldn’t tell me again that James Vanhoff had won the State Junior Tennis Championship two years in a row and that he was now on the board of the Roanoke Historical Society or, worse, about the woman who claimed she was possessed by a devil or the toxic mold particles that were suspended in the air all around us. And I was in luck; she just asked me if it went OK, and all I had to do was nod.

*

I’d set up my stuff in Miranda’s old room. On the little wooden table beside my bed I’d placed my busts of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare. I liked the way I’d painted Emily’s necklace with tiny dots of gold, and I’d highlighted Shakespeare’s gray hair with silver streaks so he looked like a superhero. My Venus flytrap had survived the journey. I had to remember to place a grain of raw hamburger into its clawed blossom once a week. My record player was in the corner beside my box of 45s, and I spread out my posters, one of a kitten and another I’d gotten from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an Egyptian with eyes outlined in sparkly black. I loved how you could never tell the girl Egyptians from the boy Egyptians and how they were all so ridiculously glamorous.

From where I lay on my bed I could see my dad through his open bedroom door across the hall. He was under the covers reading his Ram Dass book. The relief he’d felt after we left the church was fading; at first when I asked how God would find us outside the rectory, he’d laughed and told me God was everywhere, you didn’t need any particular prayers to find him. But now he seemed worried; he stayed up late every night reading and writing in his notebook. Though he wouldn’t admit it, I think my dad was disappointed in Roanoke and the world outside the church; neither were the paradise he’d imagined.

Even though I had my things around me and my dad was nearby, being in Miranda’s old room was still spooky. My room felt penetrable. I had taken precautions, moving my mirror directly across from the window, dumping salt in all the corners to ward off bad spirits, and keeping cloves of garlic on the windowsill to scare off vampires. I felt for the bottle of sage I’d taken from the kitchen spice rack—a safeguard against ghosts—and now kept under my pillow, and I knew my squirt gun, full of holy water, was in the top drawer of my dresser. True, I’d blessed the water myself, but I figured as a minister’s daughter I had some powers, though they were probably diminished now that my dad had left the church. None of these things made me feel safe. I imagined the ex-husband crouched in my closet, his eyes rolled back to white, and I could almost feel the black hairs growing out of the pink skin of my underarms and down between my legs. I figured the sooner I became a woman, the sooner the ex-husband would be threatening me with a knife. It didn’t seem fair that I had to change shape. I wished someone would have asked me; I might have said yes but I would have liked a choice.

At least I didn’t have the curse yet. One of my friends had gotten the curse at nine; during gym a line of blood ran down her leg, staining the canvas edge of her tennis shoe. I knew I was “developing,” as my mother so annoyingly called it. I knew too that it was natural, but I felt like a skinny monster.

What if the hairs filled not just my underarms and crotch but kept growing until I was covered with hair like a werewolf, thick strains growing over my forehead and around my eyes? I was getting puffy as well, and while I knew I was moving away from my old self into a new place, I didn’t want to look like the Playboy Bunny I’d seen on television with the huge breasts and wide idiotic smile. I still prayed that I might swerve away from being that sort of creature and toward something else entirely. I felt my forehead. If my chest could puff out, why couldn’t my forehead develop a horn? I got so excited by this idea that I got out my journal and tried to sketch a unicorn girl. But the horn looked like one on a rhino and I couldn’t figure out how to draw the bone moving out of my forehead. I drew several variations of hooves, but it was tricky to make them delicate; I had heard that female unicorns were so sensitive, they never stepped on living plants.

None of my pictures satisfied me, so I wrote instead about how the unicorn girl ran away from her duplex up into the forest. There she lived among the deer and baby foxes, eating raspberries and soft leaves. She loved the taste of moss and she often had tea parties for the squirrels where she made cakes by mashing crab apples with butternuts. In the night she stared down at the duplex windows floating in the dark like little rafts of light.

*

All the next week Sandy emerged from her duplex each day at noon looking sleepy and carrying a six-pack of beer; she lay out in her leopard-print bikini and sunglasses. Eddie watched television inside. Sandy’s skin nearly purple, she seemed as drunk off the light as from the beers she popped one after another. I watched her pitch the cans toward the trash in time with whichever song was on her transistor radio. I tried to force my thoughts away from her, thinking about Barnabas Collins, or trying to decide if I should go down to the fridge and see if we had any cheese. But Sandy had found a latch door into my head and stuffed her body inside.

I couldn’t stand just watching her. I pulled on my bathing suit, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and left the cool duplex for the blinding outdoor light. The only sunglasses I had were a pink pair from when I was little, but I figured they were better than nothing.

As I stood at the foot of her lounger, I saw how pale my skin was in comparison to hers. I asked if I could lie out beside her, and to my amazement she said yes. I hated my bathing suit with its pattern of strawberries and eyelet ruffles. Sandy said it was cute, but I knew it was babyish. She smelled like dirt and radiator heat and once I lay there I began to feel like a larva, pale and glassy beside her.

Sandy talked, pausing only occasionally to sip her beer. When she leaned up to spread oil over her legs, her bikini top gaped open and I saw her nipple and large areola. I listened to her voice with my eyes half closed, watching the skin around the crotch of her bikini; I saw a bevy of black nubs that made my eyes unfocus.

She told me Sonny was not really a good person; he sometimes told people they needed root canals when their teeth were fine. He called his teenage sons lazy and said they smelled bad. Sonny never listened, just waited for his turn to talk. She had thought she loved him, but now she realized she actually hated him.

“To be perfectly honest,” she said, “I’m still stuck on Eddie’s father. But I fucked that up by fooling around when he went off to Vietnam.” He had a new girlfriend now and she was the one who got to fly over to Hawaii to meet him when he got R and R.

She spoke about herself with a certain distance, as if she were talking about a character on General Hospital.

“When I think about it,” she said, “I can see what a terrible person I am.”

“I don’t think you’re a terrible person,” I said.

“But you would, Jesse, if you really knew me.”

After that she was quiet and I could hear the hot wind in the leaves.

“Sonny took me to the grocery store and let me buy whatever I wanted.”

She didn’t know what she would do if he didn’t help with the rent and the car payments. No way could she ask her family for money. Her parents had five teeth between them and the house she grew up in, if you could even call it a house, didn’t have indoor plumbing.

“I’d rather gnaw my own arm off than go back there.”

The sun beat down. Tree leaves singed around the edges, curled forward like burnt paper, and my skin was dry and stiff no matter how much baby oil I spread over myself. The weeds looked brown and miserable. Sandy’s radio said we were in the dog days of summer, then a buzzer rang over the airwaves and the DJ told us it was time to turn or burn. The sun made a slow lava lamp under my closed eyelids, and I felt my head getting swimmy and realized how thirsty I was. I asked if I could go inside her duplex and get myself a drink.

Inside Sandy’s unit it was dark and cool. All the furniture looked like it was underwater and covered with algae. It was true I was thirsty, and I drank down a jelly glass filled with water and then another, but I also wanted to be inside Sandy’s house. I thought about going upstairs into her bedroom and lying across her water bed, and while I liked the idea of my bare skin against her fuzzy bedspread, I knew I would leave grease stains. What if I just quickly held one of her bras against my bathing suit top? She kept several hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Once I thought of this, the urge to do it was magnetic. It would be like holding Wonder Woman’s bodice against my chest. Who knew what superpowers would spark from the material into me? I started toward the stairs, but then I saw Eddie and Phillip through the back window, making their way through the trees down the side of the mountain. All afternoon they’d been in the hooch, a tree fort made of particleboard with a skull drawn in Magic Marker on the door. The one time I’d been allowed inside, Eddie told a story about how his father had to unload a helicopter filled with body parts.

I walked out the back door and handed Sandy a beer; Phillip and Eddie ran down the raw edge of red dirt, toilet-paper rolls of ammunition taped to their T-shirts.

Their tennis shoes sent up a cloud of pink dust.

“Why are you running?” Sandy said.

“The gooks are after us!” Eddie yelled.

“You’re not supposed to call them that!” Sandy said, but by the time she finished talking they had disappeared back up into the trees.

*

That night, while we waited for my dad to get home from work, my mom browned hamburger in the Teflon skillet and I stood over the trash can and peeled potatoes. The wet strips curled off the blade and landed in the garbage in artistic configurations.

Mom was talking about rich people again, her voice growing lively and familiar. Mrs. Vanhoff was pencil thin and always wore her hair up, highlighting her long and elegant neck. The Vanhoffs had been in last night’s newspaper eating lobster thermidor at the Hotel Roanoke.

“Carolyn Vanhoff is head of the mayor’s art council, and I heard she takes tennis lessons with the pro at the club.”

She sprinkled the Hamburger Helper flavor packet over the ground beef.

“Every January she goes off to a spa in North Carolina to lose the few pounds she gains over Christmas.”

“You and Dad should go away,” I said. “I could watch Phillip.”

“Your father? Take me on a vacation? Like that’s ever going to happen.”

A peel flew off the blade and stuck to the wall. I wanted to defend my dad, but what could I really say? That he read a lot, that he had a great vocabulary, that he helped people. These would only get grunts and eye rolls from my mother. I decided to change the subject.

“Sandy is having trouble with her boyfriend,” I said.

I thought my mom might like this information, but I could tell by how she pressed down the spatula so grease oozed out of the hamburger that she did not.

“I hope you’re not looking up to that woman,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“You know Sonny is married.”

“Separated,” I said.

My mom swung around, holding the fry pan in front of her. It was rare; she’d gone from a solid 5 straight to a 2. The grainy hamburger and the greenish grease pooling in the tilted pan looked disgusting.

“Jesse, you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

At least they’re people I actually know, I wanted to say to her, not strangers I read about in the newspaper. My mom would rather pretend to have relationships with people than actually deal with our real-life neighbors. But I just grunted and ran out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and slammed the door to my room.

I held my View-Master to my eyes, pushed the lever down: Alice’s head poking out of a thatched roof, then the wide, menacing smile of the Cheshire Cat. The colors reminded me of the stained-glass windows in my dad’s old church, gemlike and glorious. But I couldn’t move myself into the tiny 3-D colors like usual, so I tried to read the book I’d gotten from the library on worldwide burial rituals. I was on the part where mummies, after being swathed in linens, are first placed into one coffin and then a second. Through the wall I could hear Mrs. Smith playing hymns on her piano. She had a long list of things that were bad luck. Some of them were obvious, like breaking a mirror, but others I’d never heard before, like sweeping after dark and cutting your fingernails on Sundays.

I had always felt it was good luck that my mom was prettier than all the other moms, and that even though she didn’t dress up anymore, she couldn’t help but look stylish in her paisley head scarf and big dark sunglasses. But now her face was the color of a mushroom and she had velvet bags under her eyes like a zombie in a monster movie. Incrementally, she had transformed from the mom I used to love into a creature, weepy and miserable, a dark thing to be afraid of in the middle of the night.

*

“You’re getting good color on your front,” Sandy said as I spread my towel beside her on the grass, “but you need more on your back.”

It was late in the afternoon. Shadows fell over our toes, but the sun was still hot. We lay before the mountain like virgins about to be sacrificed. I pulled down the side of my bottom, to show her the line of lighter skin.

“Malibu Barbie!” she said, as she shook the baby oil and iodine and squirted a glossy puddle between her breasts.

“He still hasn’t called,” she said, motioning to the phone she’d pulled outside, which now sat on the welcome mat. Eddie sat beside it. He had on a pair of huge stereo headphones that had been accessorized with tinfoil sticking out at odd angles.

“He’s in the Head Crusher,” Sandy told me matter-of-factly.

“My eyes are going to squirt out of my head,” Eddie yelled cheerfully, as he turned the page of his comic book. He wore his father’s recon gloves, the tips of the fingers cut out, he’d told me earlier, so he could better grip his weapon.

“I’m sure there are good reasons he’s not calling,” she said, laying her head against her arm. “Emergency root canal, or that lazy son of his might have gotten busted.”

I watched sparrows rub themselves with dirt in the ditch beside the driveway and listened to Mr. Ananais mowing down by the road. Lulubell lifted her furry head and looked at me.

My dad came out of the duplex in his bell-bottoms, a striped shirt, and a wide tie. He was going to his second job at the psych center, but before he got in the car, he walked over to where Sandy and I lay.

I sat up and pulled my knees into my chest; he held his hand over his eyes, blocking the glare, so he could better see us. I was terrified he’d say something stupid, tell Sandy about my rashes or that as a baby I was always constipated.

“Not much sun left,” he said.

Sandy pulled off her sunglasses.

“There’s enough for me, pastor,” she said.

Before we left the rectory, everybody called him pastor—even people who didn’t go to church called him that. Now, though, the title embarrassed him; he blushed and looked up into the trees blowing around on the side of the mountain.

“Help your mother with dinner,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

He walked back to our car, got in, and started up the engine.

“Your father,” Sandy said, “is a good-looking man.”

“What?”

“He’s a looker.”

“If you say so,” I said, rolling over onto my stomach and pressing my cheek into the grass.

*

When Sandy let me in she was dressed for her night out with the girls: white short shorts and a puffy-sleeved blouse tied high up to show off her belly, and her hair teased up and sprayed. She looked like one of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. I had to admit she was disturbingly tan.

Eddie was already asleep, and when a horn honked, she jotted a number on a pad by the phone and said she’d be back no later than eleven. I got myself a jelly glass full of Pepsi and a handful of Fritos and watched a made-for-TV movie about a senator’s daughter who ran away to join a bunch of hippies who lived in an old school bus. The head hippie—a long-haired guy in an embroidered vest and dirty jeans—took the senator’s daughter to McDonald’s, where he searched through the garbage for food. He tried to get her to eat the food he’d retrieved, but the senator’s daughter couldn’t make herself taste the limp, leftover fries. Then there were scenes of hippies handing out daisies and swimming in rivers. I got bored and turned down the sound.

I’d brought my favorite book, Half Magic, with me, and I opened the pages to where the oldest boy presses the magic coin firmly into his palm and all the children are suddenly transported to the court of King Arthur. The idea that certain objects had magic powers, a concept I’d clung to for so long, was starting to seem ridiculous. I’d also lost the ability, which I’d once reveled in, to pretend I was an animal. I used to spend whole afternoons thinking kitten thoughts or hiding in my closet like a shy baby deer. I’d imagine I was a mother badger living in a civilized badger hole, with a tiny stove and wooden breakfast table.

It was depressing, really, to be stuck always in my own skin. For a short while when I was small, between the time I realized I was myself and when I knew I had to stay a girl, I thought I could go back and forth between girl and boy. I used to imagine I could trade my body for a boy’s. It wasn’t until I said I have a penis, and watched my parents’ faces break apart in laughter, that I realized I’d have to stay a girl forever. I turned the sound back up on the television. On the screen I could see the head hippie and the now-hippified senator’s daughter. She was barefoot, in a patchwork dress with a braid of leather around her forehead. They had returned to the McDonald’s, and they were foraging food left on the tables just out front. The head hippie fed the half-eaten hamburger to the hippie girl, the camera lingering on the girl’s lips as she took the hamburger into her mouth. I could tell by the sad music that played over the closing credits that I was supposed to feel sorry for her. But why? Because she didn’t have money for a fresh, clean hamburger? Or was it because she looked different in her hippie dress from the straight-looking people sitting around her? I thought I knew the real reason. Any girl who didn’t do what her parents wanted had clearly been brainwashed. Now that she was eating garbage, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be in some courtroom singing in Latin with an X carved into her forehead like the Manson girls.

Though I hadn’t realized it till now, whenever I thought of Miranda’s ex-husband, he always had the same wild eyes and long auburn hair as Charles Manson—Charlie, as the girls called him, who could handle rattlesnakes without being bitten and bring dead birds back to life. I walked up the stairs, pushed Eddie’s door open, and stood in the doorway watching his little chest rise and fall a few times, his hair so white it glowed in the dark like the tail of a comet. With one arm he clutched his Dapper Dan doll, the thumb of his other hand in his mouth. I went into Sandy’s bathroom. It was still damp from her shower, and the humid air was scented with musk.

I pulled the neck of my T-shirt over to look at my white strap marks, then lifted up my shirt and stared for a while at my stomach. It was a golden brown, the fine hairs white. Then I examined several darker hairs I’d found earlier that day under my left arm. One of the things I liked best about babysitting was that I had time to look at myself as much as I wanted. Each new hair meant I was moving closer to the Danger Zone. Once my body flooded with hormones, I’d become vulnerable to the whims of men. Men, it wasn’t hard to see, ran everything, and once a girl got breasts and all that went with that, men had wizard power over you, they could make you do anything they wanted.

Sandy had left her bathing suit hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and before I even realized it, I had pulled the bikini bottoms up over my jeans and fastened the top over my T-shirt. I decided to practice a move I’d seen Sandy do when she bent down to tie Eddie’s shoe. It was a small gesture, but I’d been fascinated by how she’d collapsed her skeleton to the ground with concern and focus. I broke the movement into parts. First there was the noticing of the thing that needed your attention. Your face showed a sudden focus as the knees began to bend. The next part was the hardest to do smoothly: you floated downward without any effort, gentle as a flower petal. With my fingers I simulated tying a shoelace before releasing back up into the regular stream of time. As I stood up I tried to look satisfied in a small-time way, but my face in the mirror looked deeply satisfied, as if I’d just prevented World War III or something.

Maybe if I put on a little eyeliner. I pulled the tiny brush out and moved it along the edge of my eyelids. The black made my eyes look separate from my body, as if they had a different destiny from my nose or my mouth. I tried a sort of chaotic walk that Sandy used as she moved over the lawn toward her lounge chair. I walked back and forth in front of the mirror, slopping my body around as if it were liquid in a bucket, but the bathroom was too narrow to get a real feel for the full sequence, how she opened the duplex door, moved across the grass, dropped her butt over the lounge chair, and swung her legs up, centering her face into the sun.

I went down and got a beer from the refrigerator and Sandy’s sunglasses and looked at myself in the mirrored wall.

“I don’t know why I keep fucking him,” I said to myself in Sandy’s high voice. It was no use: no matter what adjustments I made, I never really looked like anything other than a boy dressed up in girls’ clothes.

I was getting sleepy but I knew I needed to stay awake so no harm would come to Eddie or me. At the window I saw that all the lights were off in my own family’s unit across the street—even my dad who usually stayed up late was asleep—and I started to wonder if I’d ever lived there. Maybe I was the one who had betrayed Eddie’s father and was now pining for a sleazy oral surgeon. Though I tried to push the story back, I thought about the babysitter who’d gotten The Phone Call, a man’s voice at the other end laughing. The man kept calling until the babysitter finally called the operator, who told her the man was calling from the phone upstairs! If that one wasn’t scary enough, there was the one about the babysitter who saw a man standing outside looking in the window, only to realize the man was actually standing behind her, and what she was seeing was his reflection in the glass. The scariest of all, though, was the babysitter who had called the parents to ask if she could throw a blanket over the creepy life-size clown statue that stood in a dark corner of the living room. I saw the bloodshot eyes surrounded by white grease paint, the red painted smile and rainbow wig. After a long pause the father said, “We don’t have a life-size clown sculpture!”

I heard a tapping sound and got worried Miranda’s evil ex-husband had cut the phone line. My heart boomed in my ears. I couldn’t stay in the unit; I had to wake Eddie and we’d go out into the yard, just up in the tree line, and wait for Sandy to get back. But just as I was slipping on my tennis shoes, I heard a car come up the street blasting the Allman Brothers. It wasn’t the baby-blue Pinto Sandy’s girlfriend had picked her up in. It was a white Mustang. As the Mustang parked in front of the duplex, a trail of raspberry embers flew out the driver’s-side window and into the weeds. I waited for Sandy to get out of the car, but she didn’t. I saw shapes moving in the car’s back window like koi swimming sluggishly in murky green water.

*

When I finally got home my father was up and sitting in the dark, listening to his jazz records with oversize headphones. I watched his reflection in the sliding glass doors that led out to the deck. Roanoke, it was perfectly clear now, was not the Sun Belt. There were no landscaped parks. No fountains. Things at my dad’s job had already gotten weird. It all started when he told the guy who thought he was Speed Racer Good luck in the big race, and then at group he suggested to the lady who was afraid of her washing machine that form is no form. As a pastor he’d reassured parishioners that they rested inside the heart of God. But he didn’t believe any of that anymore. Now Dad tried new ideas on the patients. Ideas he’d learned in his Trungpa book: that there was no such thing as a self separate from the rest of the universe and that all dualities were delusion. These ideas freaked out his patients: the washing machine lady had to be sedated, and Louie, the man who wore rain boots over his hospital slippers because he was afraid of floods, figuring his body was the same as the bricks, walked right into the wall. Dad was on probation now. At first he’d taken to bed as he always did when a job wasn’t going well; I brought him a crustless grilled cheese sandwich. My mom gave him a pep talk: he’d have to make his job at the VA hospital work, since we’d only just gotten here and we couldn’t afford to move.

*

The thermostat by the side of the house read 103 degrees. I could feel the heat through the soles of my tennis shoes. The duplexes shimmered and swayed in the silver light, made of fish scales rather than brick. One trick of the light and all of Bent Tree would flicker and then disappear. I went inside to the refrigerator, got an egg, and walked out to the sidewalk. I cracked the egg and let it drip out onto the cement. There was a half-hearted sizzle and the bottom turned white, but the top was still gelatinous and runny.

Eddie opened his window and yelled out.

“You got to do it on a car hood.”

I nodded but decided to retreat into the air conditioning instead and read about mummification. I was interested in how the Egyptians pulled the brains of dead people out through their noses with a hook and then held them in jars shaped like cats. I wanted to tell somebody about the cat jars, which were shiny black obsidian, with whiskers cut into the stone and emeralds for eyes, but I knew my mother would just shake her head and say I was morbid. I used to be able to tell her anything, that at times I felt I was a snowy owl, or that I wanted to be a cash register. Not anymore. My dad might be interested, but he was working. I held my View-Master up to my eyes and turned toward the light of the window. Chief Red Feather greeted visitors at the entrance of Knott’s Berry Farm. Click. A stagecoach parked in front of the Old Saloon. I set the View-Master beside me and lay watching the light move over my perfume bottle collection. I liked how it glittered the edges of the glass, how it moved incrementally toward the wall, illuminating the grains in the paint and the strands of the carpet below. I closed my eyes and started to say the days of the week, waiting for the sun to make the inside of my eyelids red.

At some point I heard a car stop on the street. At the window I saw Sonny get out of a taxi and walk over to Sandy’s car. Her front door flew open and she ran over the grass barefoot in her mini-kimono. I ran down the stairs and swung open the door, the heat hitting me as if from an open oven.

“It’s my car. You gave it to me!”

She was up on her toes, the tendons in her neck defined.

“Well,” Sonny said, not even bothering to turn, “I’m taking it back.” He wore a pale blue golf shirt and white pants. Though it was hot, the material hadn’t wilted. The clothes hung on his thin frame as if on a hanger.

Sandy wobbled down the driveway, her bare feet unsteady on the gravel. He swung around and put his hands on his hips; she moved her fists up and I was sure she was going to beat against his chest, but instead she clasped them to her own heart, her knees swung sideways, and she fell onto the gravel.

Eddie ran down from the duplex in just his white underpants and tennis shoes.

“You killed her!” he said.

“She’s just being dramatic,” Sonny said as he stood staring down at her. I walked over to where she lay, her long eyelashes closed, her perfect breasts pointed to the sky. Eddie put his cheek down next to his mother’s and her eyes flew open like a doll’s in a horror movie.

“You fucker!” she said. “That car is mine!”

Sonny waved his hand, disgusted by her theatrics.

“Don’t do this,” she said. “DO NOT TAKE MY CAR!”

He got into the Porsche and cranked up the engine. Sandy leaned into the open window and grabbed the car’s steering wheel.

“What are you doing?” Sonny said, trying to pry her fingers off the wheel. “Stop this!”

“No.”

I was by the edge of the driveway holding Eddie’s hand.

“Mommy,” Eddie yelled to her, “let go.”

The sound of her son’s voice woke Sandy up a little, and she looked back at us, her kimono fallen open so we could see her black bra and purple panties. Her hair was wild, flying around her head.

“Let go of the wheel,” I said. I wanted to say she was making a fool of herself, that she didn’t need Sonny, that she and I could live together and I’d watch Eddie while she went to night classes.

Sonny put up the automatic window so the glass edge pressed into the skin of her elbow, but she still didn’t budge, so he released the emergency brake and the car jumped forward. Sandy was yanked a few feet until the car picked up speed and she lost her grip and skittered into the grass by the side of the road.

We ran over to where she was getting up.

“Oh Lord,” she said, “what a fucking jackass.”

She brushed the grass off her hands and we watched the car snake through the subdivisions and head toward the highway. Now that it was over, she seemed to find the whole encounter hilarious.

“I’m going to borrow Woody’s car,” she said, retying her kimono around her waist. “I need you to come with me to Sonny’s. I need a witness.”

“I can’t,” I said. “My mom is still mad I got home so late the last time I watched Eddie.”

Sandy turned to me.

“You want me to just let him get away with that?” she said. I could tell she was getting mad and this time it was at me. “Some friend you turn out to be,” she said, as she walked away.

“I’ll do it,” I said, “but I have to be home before Mom gets back from the grocery store.”

The car Sandy borrowed from the guy in 9B smelled like cigarette smoke and turpentine. An empty fast-food cup with a straw sticking out of the top lay sideways on the floor.

“I really appreciate your support, Jesse,” she said, glancing at her face in the rearview mirror. Her lips were outlined in red pencil and filled in with gloss, and she’d changed out of her kimono into a white lace blouse that showed both her tan skin and the black material of her bra. Between us on the front seat was a brown paper bag, the cuff of a blue oxford hanging over the top as if trying to escape.

“That shit actually thinks he can take my car,” Sandy said. “How am I supposed to get to work?”

“Don’t say shit,” Eddie said.

“Sorry, honey,” Sandy said. “I mean, he brings his laundry over, I wash that man’s underwear. Once I even pulled a tick off his ass.”

“Gross!” I said.

After the tight way the Porsche drove, Sandy was having trouble keeping the Dart in a single lane. I wasn’t sure if she deserved the car or not. I wasn’t sure what women deserved for being mothers and taking care of men, but I had to say something.

“Sonny is mean,” I said.

“I hate old Sonny,” Eddie said. “He never got me that Matchbox carrier he promised.”

“He is terrible at keeping promises,” Sandy said. We drove past a chain of fast-food restaurants like charms on a giant bracelet. I’d been ready to declare that it was over between Sandy and me. But now that I sat beside her I wondered again if I should offer to move in.

“Sorry you had to see that mess,” she said, turning to me.

“I saw it too,” Eddie said.

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

Sandy’s face came apart, her chin dropped, and she wailed and held a hand up to cover her mouth.

“But it is!” she said. “I did all kinds of bad stuff.”

Eddie climbed up on the back of her seat, hugged her head and grabbed her ears. His shirt was on inside out so all the seams showed.

“How you doing, buddy?” she asked, trying to keep the car from running off the road.

“Not that good,” Eddie said. He had been sick over the weekend and he was still pale.

“Why don’t you sleep some?”

He curled his body into the car’s backseat and folded his hands under his head.

“Tell me,” he said. “Why didn’t I bring a pillow?”

“Use this,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a cotton sweater.

“I don’t want Sonny’s old sweater,” he said and started to kick the back of my seat.

We turned into Hunting Hills. So far I’d avoided driving there with my mom, though I had heard her talk about the houses. They had private verandas, butler pantries, and sunrooms made completely out of glass. We passed a stone house with a circular drive and one built to look like a Spanish hacienda. My mother had pointed out the styles to me in her home design book.

“I just want my car back,” Sandy said as she pulled into the driveway in front of a brick Georgian. Her sports car was parked in the open garage.

“I won’t be long.” She walked up to the front door and swung the brass knocker. The door opened, though we couldn’t see who stood in the darkened hallway.

“This is old Sonny’s house,” Eddie said. “We came once to swim in his pool.”

“Does his wife live here?”

“How should I know?”

“How was the pool?”

“OK.”

We watched the house. In one of the top windows I saw the edge of a peach-colored chair beside a pale blue ceramic lamp. The sprinklers were on and spray hit the side of the Dart, throwing droplets up on the passenger-side window.

I wanted Sandy to drop off the bag by the front door and run back to the car so we could go get ice cream and talk about Sonny. I really enjoyed hearing what a jerk the guy was, how he had never done a dish at her house or even scraped his own plate. How he would say she was getting a little chunky and how she had to listen to his same goofy jokes over and over.

Eddie handed me a bunched-up piece of newspaper.

“Open it,” he said.

Inside the paper was a good-looking rock, granite with flecks of mica.

“Thanks,” I said.

He’d been giving me presents lately, including a handful of acorns and a bracelet made of buttercups.

“Don’t mention it,” Eddie said, hanging his freckled arms over the seat.

“In a battle,” he said, “do you think a lion could beat a moose?”

“I’ll say yes.”

“What about a skull? Could it beat a karate man?”

“Unsure about that one.”

He set his cheek down on the top of the front seat.

“Does your mom ever say she’s going to kill herself?”

“Not in so many words,” I said.

“My mom said it.”

“She doesn’t mean it though.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“Can I sit on your lap?”

“Sure.”

He squeezed himself into the front seat and onto my lap. His hair smelled like butter and his knees were covered with dirt. He turned the radio dial. All that ever played on the Roanoke radio stations was Lynyrd Skynyrd, with an occasional Little Feat or Allman Brothers song. All day Skynyrd blasted out of car stereos and at night from duplex windows. I twisted the dial down to the far end of the numbers, the one station that played the trippy stuff from the sixties—Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and my favorite song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Eddie showed me how when you pressed your fingertips against your closed eyelids, colors came up, reds and oranges melting into each other.

Sometime later, Sandy came running down the slate path, her mascara smudged around her eyes. I looked up through the windshield. Sonny stared down at us from an upper-floor window; he had a strange smile on his face.

Sandy swung open the door.

“What happened?” I said.

“Same old shit,” she said. “At first he said he’d give me back the car but then he said he wouldn’t.”

She made Eddie and me get in back and put on our seat belts.

“Hold on,” she said as she jumped the sidewalk and ran over a row of rhododendrons and up onto the lawn. Eddie and I looked at each other and he gripped my hand. She spun the car around the fountain in the middle, shards of grass and dirt flying up outside, before the car bumped over the curb and ran right through a patch of petunias.

“I believe that’s called a donut,” she said, once we were back on the road. She moved the dial to the Skynyrd station and turned the volume up loud.

•

It rained the next day, and I stayed in my bedroom arranging my school supplies into different configurations, putting pencils into my new puppy pencil case and sniffing my new erasers. After practicing it many times in different script styles, I wrote my name very slowly on the cover of all my new notebooks. To me the blank white sheets were like photographs of the Milky Way. They gave me a weird feeling of reverence. Every little while I went to the window and looked out. Sandy’s blinds were closed and whenever I went to her duplex, which I did every few hours, Eddie came to the door in his pajamas and told me she was still asleep.

The next morning, just after Sandy had left for work and Eddie and my brother had gone off to their hooch in the woods, a van pulled up and parked in her driveway. It was still raining. Two men, one short with a fringe of hair around the side of his head and the other a surly-looking high school kid, used a key to open the door of her duplex. At first I thought Sonny, in an effort to make up, had sent guys over to paint her place. In a few minutes, though, the men carried her couch out to their truck.

I ran down in the rain to get Mr. Ananais.

I told him what was happening at Sandy’s and he followed me up the hill. I stood by the doorway while he talked to the older man, who showed him a pink slip of paper.

“Are they breaking in?” I asked when he came out.

He shook his head.

“They have Sonny’s keys,” he said. “The lease is in his name.”

“What about the furniture?”

We watched them carry the geometrical print down the driveway and slide it into the truck.

“It’s all Sonny’s,” he said. “What kind of a man would take away a woman’s furniture?”

The younger man carried the afghan that Sandy kept on the back of the couch and the wicker fan that had hung over the television. I knew for a fact that one of the residents in the nursing home had crocheted the blanket for her.

“That’s Sandy’s,” I said.

He stopped and turned his head.

“It’s on the list,” he said flatly.

“Well it’s not Sonny’s,” I said, grabbing it out of his hands.

“Hey,” he said, “give that back.”

“It’s OK,” the older guy said, coming up behind us carrying a lamp in each hand. “Let her keep it.”

Mr. Ananais pulled me away.

“You have to calm down, koukla,” he said. “The ladies in Bent Tree are sometimes a little crazy. I had a girl come out of her unit naked and go around door to door asking for a cheese sandwich. These ladies will have arguments about anything, how to cook a chicken, or if rain is rain or if it’s drizzle.”

We watched the movers pull the metal door of the truck shut. I copied the number off the license plate and Mr. Ananais went down to his duplex to call Sandy at work. He promised me he wouldn’t evict her, that he’d give Sandy a chance to pay her rent herself. After the movers drove off, I sat on the curb in front of her duplex under my black umbrella with the blanket over my lap. The light faded like a lamp being dimmed by slow degrees. The sky was green, then white, the air smoky with raindrops and the trees on the mountains darkening. When the rain stopped, steam came up off the asphalt and the cicadas started to pulse.

My dad came out to talk to me. I could tell my mom had sent him. His beard had grown in and he’d lost weight; his hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Before we got kicked out of the rectory my dad would have told me not to worry, Sandy was a child of God. He’d insist that all people and animals, even snakes and crocodiles, were connected at the root, a solid blob of life. At the end too, when we died, we’d be connected once again. It was only in life that we seemed like separate beings.

But now he wasn’t sure what to say.

“I guess you’re not hungry?”

“No.”

I thought he might point to the trees swaying in the soft wind and expect me to get all goose-pimply, because the Holy Spirit was moving in the world. He used to do it all the time, and while now it was rare, he sometimes still held his hand up, out of habit, to show that the spirits’ enchantments were not completely dead.

Instead he pulled a cookie wrapped in a napkin out of his pocket.

“Just in case,” he said, setting it beside me on the curb.

I watched him walk back into the duplex. I was mad at him. Without God to protect us, I had to watch over Sandy and help her the best I could. I saw my mother doing the dishes at the sink through the kitchen window and I knew Phillip and Eddie were inside watching television. It got darker. The streetlight came on and moths beat against the glass. Clouds blew sideways and a few stars came out. I was afraid that when Sandy came back, she’d see her empty apartment and swallow a whole jar of aspirin. If I didn’t wait up for her, she might not make it through the night.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Darcey Steinke is the author of the memoir Easter Everywhere (Bloomsbury 2007, A New York Times Notable book) and the novels Milk (Bloomsbury 2005), Jesus Saves (Grove/Atlantic, 1997), Suicide Blonde (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992), and Up Through the Water (Doubleday, 1989, A New York Times Notable book.) Her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, will come out in Fall 2014 from Tin House. With Rick Moody, she edited Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (Little, Brown 1997). Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Review, Vogue, Spin Magazine, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Guardian. Her web-story “Blindspot” was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been both a Henry Hoyns and a Stegner Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, and has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, The American University of Paris, and Princeton.