toward the small woman in the high chair, who had quieted and narrowed her gaze at me.
But something else caught my eye. There against the wall was a woman lying across a cot so thin it could be an ironing board, her flat gray hair streaming down both sides nearly brushing the floor. The woman wasn’t moving at all.
“Rick’s first wife, Sally,” my mother explained. “Fell down the stairs ten years ago. Certified quadriplegic.”
I thought he said Sally had lived with him only six months. My head swam. “Is she dead?” I asked.
“Not yet,” my mother said, and I thought I saw a flash of her old energy, which could sometimes be biting and awful, but always a little funny to me, especially when nothing was actually funny. She looked at me and smiled in this relaxed way, like nothing was out of the ordinary.
“No more feeding,” Rowena said. “Not even a cracker, no, but I slip her some, I do, and I don’t tell him, no I don’t.” Littered on the ground were boxes and boxes of Chicken in a Biskit crackers. He hadn’t made that up.
“Women are all liars,” Rick said. “You just stay in here until I figure this out.” He slammed the door behind him and I heard a heavy lock shift into place.
“Mom, feed her,” I said.
My mother rubbed her eyes. “Rick wants us to let her phase out. He said he’ll still collect the social security on her.”
“Rowena can see into the souls of people,” Juicy went on, shoving a chicken cracker into the deadish woman’s mouth. “There.” She looked at me. “We ain’t completely fucked up.”
Rowena pointed to my stomach. “She been a bad little kitty,” she said. “Oh, she, oh she bad. She been a bad little kitty.”
“Sees into souls, my foot,” my mother said. “I’ve seen the blessed and she ain’t it.”
I remembered Daisy’s past-life idea from the drive, how my mother and I had traveled for a long time together, and this life was a mere chapter in a much longer history. I thought of my mother as a girl, what I’d seen in pictures. How happy she looked, her sunburned nose, the sort of wild freeness that seemed to jump off the print—always just out of the frame like she was off to someplace else. I imagined that girl by my side now, showing her this room with these women. Saying, someday, this will be your life. I could see the girl’s face, the glimmer of terror, but then disbelief. How she would never be able to imagine a life could come to this, especially not her own. The idea of this girlmother made it difficult for me to accept that my mother was in this room, with this man, one of these women. But at the same time, I knew this room to be the most absolute truth I had ever seen. I knew I would never be able to explain it to another person, and it would haunt me the rest of my days.
“Regular Judas Priest expert she is,” Juicy said, looking at my mother. “Got all kinds of stories about church and speaking holy rolls and glitter falling from the goddamn heavens. Your mother here trying to tell me I’m going to hell and in the same breath telling me her pastor set her up into regular sex work.”
“We’re all going to hell,” my mother said. She looked at me. Shrugged as if to say, Even you, Lacey May. “Everything’s a lie. I figured it out. I ain’t dumb. Vern wanted me to be his other wife, Lacey. You know, be with him. I could have told you that straight to your face and you wouldn’t have believed me. I tried to tell Cherry and she sure didn’t.”
“You told Cherry?” I said. This was new. Cherry seemed completely unaware of how or why my mother had distanced, started drinking again. Had my mother been asking for her help all along? Trying hard to do the right thing? I wanted to beat the walls. I wanted to scream. I was so mad at Cherry, so mad at Vern. But being so mad doesn’t do anything. I knew deep down that I would never be able to fully blame anyone else for any of this. My mother had made choices all along to lead us here. She had said yes when she should have said no. She had gotten in the car with the Turquoise Cowboy. She had