one had what she had for miles and miles, though we hadn’t left Peaches since becoming saved, so there was no way of making sure.
Under my towel I reached between my legs and pressed a finger just inside. I wondered where the blood was coming from exactly. I wanted my mother to sense my question and tell me all I would need to know, really fawn over me. But she handed me a pad wrapped in thin pink plastic, no ceremony at all. “Maybe keep this between us for a little while.”
A chill came over me in the still heat of the bathroom, and though I’d never come down with a prophecy before, the prickle that spread from the top of my head to my fingertips felt close to a kind of warning.
“But Mom.”
“Just wait until the next one. It’s not that long to wait.”
I brushed past her and into our bedroom. I left the door open so I could see her finish getting ready. What was it I loved about watching her so? It wasn’t as if I saw myself in her, some future promise. Though I had her honeyed hair down my back, her freckles and water-blue eyes, I carried the blunt nose and jutting chin of my father, a truck driver out of Needles, my mother had told me, someone who left before I could remember, she liked to say.
I knew it wasn’t true. I had memories like floaters in an eye, there one moment, gone the next: his arms throwing my mother’s thin body into a deep dumpster one day, and plates crashing against walls overhead on others. His boots as he kicked her. The sound of a person spitting on another person is a particular shame.
She never mentioned any of that but was quick to recall his one short leg, the way he had mixed up letters when he tried to read and how he took one look at me and said I wasn’t his.
I put the pad into my underwear and angels did not sing. Out the window all was the same, dead grass and paint-peeling apartments. I got back into our bed, the double we’d shared since we were saved and no men came for visits anymore. It was a bent metal frame propping up a mattress that sagged in the middle, a feature I loved because it caused my mother and me to roll into each other in the night, waking each morning with our backs warmed and stuck together. I tried to pray but nothing came. I didn’t want to disobey my mother but I sensed that obeying her by not telling Pastor Vern about the blood might mean something much worse.
She stood in the doorway now. “I am your mother,” she said. A reminder not to me, but to herself.
Chapter 2
I waited for the click of the door, the jangle of keys, the sound of our broke-down Rabbit sputtering and fading down the road. I put on one of my mother’s dresses, floaty and white, one that made her look like a dream of man. Cocked a sun hat low on my brow.
Gifts of the Spirit church was a one-mile walk from our apartment complex. The Lakes, it was called, though there was not a single lake around, or any body of water for that matter. After Vern’s first miracle things were better for a time. The rain returned and the winters cooled and deepened and fog settled over us when it was supposed to and the grasses shone each morning with dew. The spring skies released heavy downpours and it seemed each time we got itchy again, worried again, just a little prayer could shift the clouds, Vern’s goodness enough to earn the land’s potential. But slowly as the years passed, Peaches crept back to the dry. Vern couldn’t do it alone forever. He was only one man atoning for all our sin, he said. He needed our sacrifice now.
For now the reservoirs and canals were empty basins, home to deflated soccer balls and broken glass bottles and the skeletons of birds that I imagined had died in flight, too hot and thirsty to go on. I passed where the row crops and orchards used to be, now a flat brown stretch, vegetation nowhere. Then came Old Canal Road, our main street, where every year there was a raisin parade to celebrate our bounty. Men in huge raisin costumes pumped their white-gloved hands, their chunky gold cross necklaces moving