her arms crossed. “They did it in the night,” she said. “Broke in and replaced every ungodly thing with them Bibles.” She waved a hand toward them. “I flipped through. That ain’t the Bible. I read the Bible before when I was a little kid and that ain’t it. But I ain’t moving them. I don’t want to know how they might replace me. I watched that rapture movie on the TV. People’s silver teeth left on their car seats and all that.”
“Of course it’s the Bible,” I said. “What else could it be?”
“The real Bible don’t talk about Vern specific. What are you, a dummy? Vern’s name is in this shitty book like a thousand times.”
My face burned. I searched for an explanation, something to make the Bibles legitimate. I changed the subject. “You got any pregnancy magazines somewhere in the back?”
She looked around like there was someone watching. “We. Ain’t. Got. No. Magazines,” she said loud and slow. Then she leaned over and whispered: “I saw them on the security camera. All them teenage boys like a gang of thieves.”
WILEY HAD SAID only believers couldn’t leave. Florin and Daisy weren’t believers, I reasoned on my way to the red house later that day. They wouldn’t be stopped.
All my calls were sad sappy scenarios. Daisy said it had to do with Mercury retrograde, just making everyone off and a bit crazy, but I wasn’t sure. It just seemed like my own bad luck, these men wanting me to do so much reassuring of their worth and their kindness. I would have given anything to talk about a penis, some tits.
By the end of the shift, I thought of telling Florin that I’d gotten an address from the Turquoise Cowboy. I wanted to ask if they would take me there to get my mother. The magenta hearse had been a bad idea, but I could be concealed in their car. I stood by Florin’s desk, the address sweaty in my palm. But she threw down a stack of books she had checked out from the Fresno County Library. On the cover of one of them was a baby’s face descending from space. Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, it said. I forgot the address in my hand. I forgot my mother. I hugged the book to me.
BACK AT CHERRY’S I read and read the books and the thing inside me began to become a real thing, an artichoke-sized being who was gearing up to be able to hear me, be someone I should sing a song to. I learned I had a perineum that could and should be massaged. Some of the information in the books was startling, especially the fuzzy photos of bobbing fetuses and the explanation of birth itself, how the fetus was supposed to twirl through the canal and emerge face down and the uterus was doing the work despite the woman and her pain or her fear. One book had three women on the cover dressed in colorless smocks like sad townspeople in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. It said that a woman could not bother pushing at all and her body would take over and her strong amazing all-powerful uterus would expel the baby. They said red-faced pushing was something invented by impatient white men who had entered the art of birthing in a rush, trying to make money and rob women of the one thing we were physically made to do that had nothing at all to do with them. So they screamed at women to push and push and took away their animal knowledge and then when it didn’t go well the woman would give up under the weight of all that naysaying, and the doctor would save the day by cutting the baby out in the nick of time, always in the name of emergency.
I looked deeply into the open caverns of these birthing women—a few of the books showed everything—and at first I could not look at the images directly. I had to squint my eyes and then slowly let them return to focus. The pictures were so powerful it felt like if I didn’t pay them the respect they deserved the women in their sweat and toil could come off the page and incinerate me.
One of the books was called Your Pregnancy Week by Week. It said, “20 weeks: You might find out the sex this week. Are you dreaming of pink bows or blue trucks?” The truth was I’d