Florin’s shoulder. “She feels she has a tragic life but I tell her it will only make her less simple, which of course is a good thing. No one wants to be simple.”
“I’m here,” I said.
Daisy nodded like she knew all about it, like she knew I had lain with a man unmarried, that I had read the pornography of the romances and craved them and I had touched myself so many times I couldn’t count. That I had lied to my mother about my first blood and now here I was, one sin leading to the next like a knotted rope I’d hang myself with when I reached the end of it.
I would do anything to find my mother. I was here and I’d do anything.
The phone rang. Florin looked at the caller ID. “It’s Forne,” she said. “Tractor supply guy out of Sanger. He likes to feel adored and then he likes you to detail how you’d tie him up and put him in the trunk of his own car and drive him around town past his wife’s salon and past his kid’s soccer practice. Then you untie him and tell him everything’s going to be okay while he weeps like a willow. That’s basically it. Then you pretend you have some insider knowledge of his wife coming up the drive and he’ll hang up on you in the world’s biggest rush.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Daisy said. “We all have fantasies. We’re just happy these men can unload the lifetime of shit they’ve been fed their whole lives and be vulnerable while keeping to themselves.”
“Otherwise they get out of hand,” Florin added.
They talked about men like they were dumb dogs that needed to be herded around but were still big and strong so you had to be careful with them. My mother always hated dogs—she said don’t ever trust someone with a dog who thinks it won’t eat their throat if it’s hungry.
“So it’s a deal,” I said. “I work and you give me the number.”
“I guess we’ll see how you do,” Daisy said.
“What else do I need to know?”
“Well, how’s your imagination?” She knocked on my head. “You read books?”
Did I ever. I nodded.
“You’ll be fine, then.”
INSIDE MY MOTHER’S call room the air hung with her presence as if she’d only just stepped out moments before. I smelled her rosewater, saw her hairs clinging to the back of the chair. On her desk, a framed picture of the two of us. It was taken the year before outside the church. We wore matching dresses on an Easter Sunday when I couldn’t have imagined what was to come.
“She was a beauty you don’t see every day, I have to say,” Daisy said.
I set the frame on its face and put my mother’s headset on. Looked to Daisy, who was wringing her hands. Did she want to stop me? Her own daughter didn’t seem to take calls. But I wasn’t her daughter. “You’re in control here,” she said. “Not them. One of the few places in the world that’s true, far as I know.”
I nodded, eyes on my knees. She backed away from me and stood in the doorway. I was in it now, fallen from ship into wild swelling seas. I would be different after the call just as I was different after Lyle, just as I was different after each of my mother’s boyfriends had swept our lives into their own and spat us back out. I thought of Vern’s sermons of purity, how the worst thing a girl could do was hand her godly husband a flower with all the petals plucked off. How each time you were touched it stripped you of something vital, of your very worth. I saw myself a trim stalk, colorless in the sun. I didn’t understand how women could be reduced to those petals. No, it didn’t seem right. But who could know what the real truth was? At one time the petal talk had seemed like the most logical, surest way to live I’d ever heard. A safe system of dividing girls good from bad. Something about that simplicity had felt good at the time. Order where before there had been none. Rules to keep a girl whole.
I looked to Daisy. “Stay with me,” I said to her, and she nodded at the red blinking call button. I could have gotten up and walked away. I could have saved what was left of my flower, but