things girls wear today. Just like they don’t care about the fine bodies God done give ’em. Like they want every man to turn into a dog and start sniffin’ up their cooters. In my day we wore gingham up to our eyelids and the boys wished they could have a look.” She pecked her face in closer to me. “But they couldn’t. And that’s why they wanted to marry us.”
I looked around at the broad-shouldered clothing. My mother never shopped here. She called it the Sad Lady store. I put on a beaded necklace and a pair of sunglasses and looked in the mirror. Behind me Pearl held up a rail-stripe coverall, large and straight in its dimensions with buttons from the crotch up to its collared neck. It looked like a jail suit. “This is perfect for every day and’ll keep you of singular mind.”
“Keep the wrong boys away,” Ms. Crenshaw said, nodding.
“Tell me,” I said to Ms. Crenshaw, holding the suit up against my form. “Why you never married if you wore so much gingham?”
Ms. Crenshaw pursed her lips. “Some’s called into singleness. Your mama was clearly meant to be one of them, but I guess she couldn’t hold down such a commitment.”
I gripped the rail-stripe canvas. I decided I would cut the sleeves off and the legs off and tie a jump rope around the middle like a sunsuit. “I love this,” I said to Pearl. “I want it.”
“That was fast,” Pearl said. “Your mother would have taken hours and tried everything on before deciding. She would have twirled around the store waiting for compliments. Maybe there is some hope in you.”
“My mother,” I said, looking at Ms. Crenshaw, “wouldn’t have touched this place with a ten-foot pole.”
I imagined turning and telling them both what Lyle had done. But I stopped. I wouldn’t be a fool. To tell them about Lyle would only be telling them about myself.
VERN LIVED WITH his wife, Derndra, and their daughter, Trinity Prism, in a white stone house on the edge of church property. On each stone of the house was a Bible verse written in thin-point marker giving the effect of marbled stone from far away. They were not home as far as I could tell; no activity outside in the dead field surrounding the house, no rustle of a window curtain. But their car was in the driveway, a tan sedan stamped with personalized bumper stickers: Remember who brought the rains and If you were on trial for following Vern, would there be enough evidence to convict you? The hood was covered in silver glitter with a black cross painted on it, flashy.
Trinity Prism and Derndra could rarely be seen about town, the two of them claiming allergies to the sun. If they came out you could find them with white parasols spinning over their shoulders, covered in floor-length dresses, tattered and thin like they’d been cut angrily from sheets. Their eyes seemed to have a pinkish hue to them, hay fever perhaps, and once my mother had commented that they reminded her of twitching white rabbits. You don’t ever want to be compared to a rabbit, trust me.
Trinity Prism didn’t speak to the Body much, but moved in a whispering orbit around her mother, and they both wore pinched faces like someone was slapping them but they had decided to endure it. Trinity was not one of the Bible study girls. Instead she was set apart as what Vern called his angel helper, a role that would live and die with her alone. It seemed to me the pastor’s daughter should be involved in all number of church activities, but it wasn’t so.
I knocked on the door but nothing. I edged around to the backyard and unhooked the side gate. Nothing there either but then my eyes adjusted. What I saw, I didn’t know. My eye had forgotten how to take in a verdant green, the healthy leaf of a plant thriving under morning sun. But before me stood a lush vine in the middle of an otherwise barren backyard, clearly alive, and on it, heaving pale green muscats. I was panting, I realized, looking at them. The perfection of their roundness. How they might feel in my palm, the burst of juice down my chin at first bite. I could pick a bunch and run. I could fill a basket and take them home to Cherry and she might let me off fly duty for at least