have a feel of a baby cat and I was already holding the tiny kitten in my hand when I realized it was not moving, not breathing. The feeling of a dead thing in the hand is unmistakable. On reflex I tossed the body to the ground and it hit the floor with a thud. On the way home, after I had stopped crying, my mother said it wasn’t at all strange that the cat had done that, how Goldie was too young to have all those babies, just a baby herself.
“Help me call now,” Cherry told me, so I stood next to her.
Her hand trembled, gripping the cane. Her voice shook as she projected it as far as she could.
“Goldie!” I called with her. “Goldie, come on home!”
But Goldie didn’t come on home. The dead don’t come back.
THAT NIGHT I sweated until my hair was wet and I dreamed of fat black flies in my sweet tea, in my mouth.
I LEARNED BY my second week at Cherry’s that I had to guard my own pleasures when I could, before I was sentenced to fly duty or any number of other Cherry-care chores she wanted me to perform on her—waxing the fuzz that grew on her legs, tweezing the corkscrews that sprouted on her chin, combing and plaiting her long hair while I sang whatever hymn she was craving. Quality time, she called it.
THAT MORNING I settled into my new favorite pleasure. I snuck a romance called Cowboys and Angels, about a poor feed-store-worker girl and a traveling bank robber turned lovers, into Cherry’s bathroom and I stripped naked. I sat on the toilet and read until my legs ached, wayward from gazing into worlds where men held women in soft caresses, where they were hard with muscle but their insides were made of sweet taffy. The men voiced their love feelings loud. The women dipped their heads back, necks arced and pale. They loved the love and it showered them. They returned from the love cleaner than before and wore it like aura, a pastel rainbow above soft curls. The books described women feeling a pulse come over them, a great wash of heat and light. The women would touch themselves sometimes imagining their lovers. I breathed hard. I could not look away. If this was sin it had me in its grasp.
Pussy, pussy, I could still hear my mother say, and here was the word all the time. Pussy pulse, wet pussy, slippery puss, hot pussy, even gorgeous pussy. I myself had only ever felt the special pulsing accidentally—in a bumpy car ride, climbing the rope at gym class—but now I was finding I could feel it when I read if I moved just right. And when I moved just right I was in nowhereland, not here at Cherry’s, not even in Peaches. I only wished the feeling would last longer, that divine forgetting.
I had my hand working overtime when Cherry thunked around on the other side of the door, cursing the day. “Blasted devil’s ways!” she shouted. I held still. “Time for consequence!” The doorknob rattled. I threw my sundress over my head, kicked the romance behind the toilet. I knew she was going to take the pleasures from me. She’d beat me until I’d never read another romance again.
But she wasn’t on about the romances. She was on about clearing out my mother’s things from our apartment.
“I’m not going,” I said.
“All right then. We’ll just burn it all.”
I DIDN’T LIKE going places with Cherry because she didn’t have a car, she had a magenta hearse, and not just any. It was the hearse that had held Grampa Jackie’s coffin and within that, his body, and she loved it and sang to it and still wiped it down with one of his old shirts most every day. After his service, she had insisted on riding along with the driver, who was young and quiet and she distrusted him immediately based on the dopey way he held his face, his slight underbite. Halfway to the fields where Grampa was to be buried, Cherry demanded the driver stop, and she pushed him out and threw a wad of bills at him before she sped off. We saw it happen, my mother and I, for we had been driving behind the big pink thing, my mother nervously laughing about how much Grampa would have hated it. The driver collected the bills off the ground and began a solemn walk back