no idea how I looked to anyone else. I was accustomed to people focusing on my mother’s appearance out loud, telling her she was beautiful, affirming what she knew as fact. My body felt like a new thing to me without her next to it.
I sat on the workbench. Put my hand on his Bible. It was tattered with notes and folded pages. “God’s testing me,” I said.
Lyle looked sad. He understood my grief maybe, or was trying to. It was more than I could say for anyone else. “Vern said something interesting the other day,” he said. He paused. He shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you.”
I clasped his arm. I could smell Perd’s deodorant, metallic and peppery. “I’m a woman,” I told him, confident this time, my voice steady.
“Something’s going to take this town over, and it’s bigger than all of us combined. It might take time for everyone to get it, to really understand it, but once they do, the gifts will know no bounds.”
“What could be more powerful than when Vern brought the rain?”
“It’ll be bigger than that. But people are afraid of power when it comes down to it.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, wishing it were true.
Then Lyle hugged me. I was stiff at first but then I softened into it. We stood there like that, and the skin of my stomach brushed against the hot button on his Levi’s. I didn’t know what to do with my feet so I left them their natural way, toes turned in.
When he kissed me on the forehead I held very still.
It was nothing, I decided later in the craft room, sleep nowhere to be found. But for a reason I wasn’t sure of, this nothing seemed like something to keep to myself, so I did.
Chapter 6
Sunday morning rushed me like a pack of wild-eating dogs, and Grandma Cherry tried to do me a kindness. She brought out one of my mother’s pageant dresses, laid it across the bed, and patted it like a prize.
It was an off-the-shoulder tangerine organza gown with sheer sleeves, points that looped onto the middle fingers, tight through the bodice and poufed at the hips. It was the dress my mother had worn when she’d won the Miss Peaches Supreme pageant when she was just a few years older than me. She had qualified to Miss California but by then was craving cinnamon rolls and pork rinds, performing, against her hopes and dreams, the ordinary burden of pregnancy.
“It’s perfect for your first day back,” Cherry said. “A real showstopper.”
I didn’t want to stand out today. I wanted to blend into the walls, to reappear so slowly no one would remember I had ever gone. But I saw she was sincere and I felt seriously if I didn’t wear the dress I would pay for all eternity. More fly duty. More coddling her and feeding her bologna sandwiches while she crooned melancholy. The dress hit midcalf, a strange length for such a gown, like my mother had caught a wild hare and chopped off the bottom to run through the crops. Maybe she did, I thought. But she had never told me such fabulous stories.
IN THE CHURCH parking lot Cherry looked into the sun. “Land burning right up on account of your mother.”
But I stopped hearing her, because there it was: my mother’s car, sitting where she’d left it.
The tires had been slashed and the body of the Rabbit laid down dead in the dirt. Red and black crosses had been painted on the hood, the windows were smashed in, and I wanted to reach through the shards to grab at her hairbrush on the seat. I remembered the way she used to drive through town in the months before she left, a plastic cup full of iced beer that she liked to pretend was soda between her knees, how she’d bring the coldness to her forehead and say she would die of the heat and at that time I didn’t think a person could die from heat but now I was beginning to think different.
The Bible study girls rushed over, putting their fingertips lightly upon my arms like I could be anything, a girl, a mirage. I saw Denay glancing behind us to see everyone watching. Her smile shone brighter with an audience. “You’re back from the shadow of your whore mother’s sin!”
Taffy tilted her head up weakly at me, like we’d never met before. I wanted to reach out and shake