lifted each drink to her very own mouth. Most of all, she had never, not once, asked me what I needed. Taken me into consideration. The cup of my anger would never empty no matter how many times I poured it all out. She was always refilling it.
My mother put out her cigarette. I hadn’t seen her smoke in a long while, not since I was a little girl and she’d sit on the lap of Sapphire Earrings and cackle in his ear. “Cherry told me to do what the pastor said. She said, ‘Ain’t that life better than the alternative?’ But I didn’t feel it was right in my gut.” She poked her concave stomach. The veins on her arms crossed one another and bulged. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the next inevitable question: How was she able to leave me?
“Is she on drugs?” I asked Juicy, who seemed the most coherent of them all.
“My own mother was a bad alcoholic,” Juicy said. “You know what happens to them at the end? Skin turns soft as a rotten plum. Can poke your finger right through. They empty all out, piss and shit everywhere.”
“Rick’s been giving me pills to keep me awake and some to sleep,” my mother said. “I’m still adjusting. The air’s thinner at this high elevation. That’s why I can barely breathe.”
“Come home,” I said. “There’s a God you don’t know. You can be forgiven. We can go on like this never happened and you can help me with the baby. We can work with Daisy together. Whatever you want.”
“We’re in hell right now,” Rowena said, and then repeated the line again, chirping it over and over like a parrot. “Hell right now. Hell right now.”
I tried to make my mother focus on me. The television was screaming and Rowena was so loud and my mother was lifeless. Finally I said something that surprised me. “Choose me,” I said. My words cut over the noise.
My mother recoiled as if I’d pushed her. She closed her eyes.
“Your mother’s just plumb crazy on her very own accord,” Juicy said. “Talking about how some pastor got her all screwed up. I said, honey, ain’t you ever hear of saying no?”
“I did say no,” my mother said, suddenly clear. “Look where it got me. You know he used to call in to the phone lines and pretend to be other people just to talk to me? I could tell it was him.”
“Mom,” I said, “I believe you.” I did. I believed her.
“All I wanted was a good life for you. A church life. Safe.”
I felt myself turning to dust. I could not withstand this sadness. The thought that safety and a good life was all she wanted and how far away we had landed from that goal was too much. I let myself harden. I had to. She had known Vern had twisted ideas, had a bad feeling about what was to come. And she’d left me alone in the rough waters of it as if I knew how to swim.
My mother held my wrists and I could smell that she hadn’t showered in a long time. “The girls at the Pony Club don’t know about being famous,” she said. “He said I’d meet major producers working there and I haven’t met a one.”
“Mom, please. Please come with me.”
She glanced at the locked door. “I don’t have my things ready.”
“It doesn’t matter, we have everything for you. We’ll get new stuff. We’ll go shopping. We can forget this.”
She leaned into me and I wrapped my arms around her. She was so small against my fullness. The three of us together. Me, Artichoke, my mother. For a moment I closed my eyes and relaxed into it. It was what I’d wanted. She whimpered softly, like she didn’t have the energy to cry, like an animal dying and letting go.
“You need to leave,” she said finally. “I’ll get him to let you go, and you can’t come back.”
“Please come,” I said.
Then she leaned in. Whispered into my ear so no one else could hear. “Give me until tomorrow. Let me talk to him and calm him down. I’ll get my stuff and I’ll meet you.”
“Where? When?”
“Outside the Pony Club. Ten. Like I’m just going to work.”
“Okay, in the morning,” I said. “Ten.”
I watched my mother pull up the half-broken blinds. She looked out through the glass at cracked asphalt. “Lyle did that you?” she asked, reaching out to brush her fingers against