all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin, her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T come. And when she didn’t, Daisy was infuriated. “Did she know I was with you?” she kept asking. “If she knows I’m with you and she doesn’t even care, I swear. How dare she make us wait out here like idiots.”
We squealed out of the Pony Club parking lot and soon we were back in front of Rick’s. Daisy took the gun from the glove compartment. “I’ve had it,” she said. There was no trace of the zen-energy past-life-affirmation reciter now. Florin and I watched as Daisy got out of the car and held the gun to the sky, smacked her hand against Rick’s door. The door opened and the gun went off.
I’d seen an animal be shot and gutted. I’d smelled the hot blood and I’d heard saw against bone. But it was different to see a man shot. Rick fell down in the doorway and clutched his leg and Daisy simply stepped over him. I stopped before his body and stared. He might spit on me if I were down like this. But I was better. “Excuse me,” I said as I stepped over him and into the apartment.
Inside Daisy waved the gun around, ordering my mother to the car.
But my mother ran to Rick, held him, and screamed. Juicy took Rick’s shoe off and wrapped the blooming redness on his calf in brown towels. They fluttered around him like nursemaids. Grampa Jackie had loved to tell the tale of his teenage years when his alcoholic uncle had shot him in the foot. It had always sounded so entertaining, adventurous even. This was nothing like that. No gunshot wound could be. I understood now Grampa Jackie had created a version of his own story he could live with.
“How could you do this?” my mother said over and over. I watched her grasp him, I watched her feel sad for him, and I hated her. This was our chance and she was squandering it. She had never planned to come meet me. I pulled her arm. I tugged at her like a little child.
“Look at your daughter,” Daisy said. She pointed the gun at Rick again.
“Call nine-one-one,” my mother said.
“Look at her,” Daisy screamed. The gun fired and I thought Daisy had finished Rick off, or shot my mother. But then plaster rained down on us and we all quieted for a moment and shielded our eyes. The dust landed on our sweaty skin just like God glitter.
“Come with us right now,” I said, “or this is it.”
“Get out,” my mother said to Daisy.
“Mom,” I cried.
Daisy grabbed my hand. “This girl’s too good for you,” she said to my mother.
We walked outside. Daisy herded me to the car. The moment was so many things at once. It remains hard to recall. It frustrates me endlessly. Some days, it feels like the moment my mother made her final choice, and other days it feels like the moment I made mine.
Daisy steadied her breath, looked at her own two hands on the steering wheel. “We really should go,” she said. “I mean, I just shot a man.”
WE DROVE AND drove and peed in the same Citrus Heights gas station as before and I wanted to tell Daisy all she didn’t know then. That the baby was Lyle’s. That I’d followed along hoping it was the godly thing to do. But what difference would it make? She would never know who I really was. She would never understand the church and all it had meant for us, the places it had forced us into.
“What kind of mother does something like that?” she said heavily, almost to herself. I bowed my head as she drove. What kind of mother? I knew just what kind of mother. Before everything, when Sapphire Earrings gave me those beers and I would sleep sleep sleep, I wasn’t always so asleep. He got lonely, he said, when my mother wasn’t any good, and he needed a nice girl to rub his shoulders. He needed a nice girl and wasn’t I it?
I felt my breath get fast. How I’d pressed it down for so long. How I imagined it would never surface again, would never need to in God’s kingdom. When he bent me over his knee to spank me, or