the sea, to let me hear the ocean. It wasn’t even that far away, she told me. A few hours’ drive. She’d been there once with Cherry and Grampa Jackie and Pearl when she was a child. She had kept it close to her, the memory of eating hot clam chowder under the smudge of overcast sky, how they had all shared one bread bowl because they didn’t want to spend money and how my mother wanted a kite like the other kids but buried her toes in the sand and looked out over the crashing blue instead and was still content. She said she had seen her whole imagination right there in that water, glimmering out toward the endless horizon line. Once she became a believer, she said, she realized what she had seen was God.
Chapter 5
Loneliness. That’s what this feeling was, the wiry crawl under my skin telling me something was about to go very wrong all the time, making me jump at the slightest noise, imagining the Turquoise Cowboy’s car out front, him giving my mother thirty seconds to find me and if she didn’t he would take her away forever and it would be my fault, so stupid I was, busy daydreaming. I was on high alert even in sleep, my body an electric wire waiting for the contact of another, but no one ever came. Who can say, until it is gone, how much you will miss the warm body that sleeps next to you?
IN THE SHED I hid from fly duty. I looked around at Grampa Jackie’s things, hammers of every size, tin boxes full of nuts and bolts. A chain saw leaned in the corner, a shotgun hung high on the wall. My second blood had colored my underwear in the night and I folded one of Grampa’s old hankies into a pad and put it in the bikini bottom. I had my current romance and some of my mother’s things from the apartment I had jammed into my pockets. With her deodorant and a few of the crystals she’d amassed during her assignment work, I set up a little altar and tried to pray for her return. I touched the crystals lightly for I feared they harbored dark spirits, but they were too beautiful to be truly afraid of.
I knelt and whispered mercy, mercy to God, and when neither He nor my mother appeared, a wish came over me that my mother was dead. It seemed I was on a course of evil, thinking like that, but I wondered if it would be better somehow. Having a mother gone by a Godstricken force rather than a perfectly alive mother who simply chose another life. But while I wanted my hatred of her to cover me, to harden my skin to scales and become me, the opposite happened. I only loved her more.
AS I WALKED back from the shed to the house, I saw old Officer Geary sitting with Cherry on the porch, drinking sweet tea, long white braid down his back and a white suede Stetson on his head.
I hid just along the side of the house and listened. Geary tapped at a clipboard.
“It’s a formality,” he said to Cherry. “Her mother ain’t here to sign her off to you, but if anyone came around poking, they ain’t gonna know that. Looks close enough to her signature, don’t it? Just says in the case of her absence you’re the guardian. You decide what the what is. You know.”
“Mmhmm,” Cherry said. I heard the scratch of pen on paper.
Officer Geary was a sort of half-retired sheriff who occasionally tried to keep Peaches matters under control so the Fresno police didn’t have to come out. He was a good GOTS believer and said his main job was policing for sin. I had never been on the wrong side of it so I’d never cared, but had seen him thwack the legs of the shoplifting infidel boys behind the Pac with a long rod. Heard him call a waitress my mother used to work with a bitch when she gave him his bill and hadn’t comped it. I’d seen the stares he’d given my mother any chance he’d gotten, the way he liked to pull her in for a long long hug each and every time he saw her as if they were lost lovers reunited after shipwreck.
“I don’t like the way it makes the church look,” he said. “Some strange man just showing up