me to Reno to get my mother so we could all be women together in a car just like this on our way on our way, and she said not to get my hopes up but they were already up up up.
AT HOME THAT evening Cherry was at the stove humming, thwacking her cane around to the beat of an old country crooner crackling through her small radio. Steam rose from a pot. She was heating dark soda to make a syrupy glaze to drizzle over her apricot scones. She liked to make about two dozen scones at one time and eat them all through the night. In the morning there would be no scones left and neither of us would say a word when she made comments about how I’d gone and fattened myself with them.
The kitchen was the biggest area of the house, with a huge pink tiled island. On it, a dirty glass vase full to the brim with raisins from years ago, gray and mummified now. Another one full of misshapen moldy oranges that had turned green then white then become a kind of dust. I remembered just years before, the white wicker fruit basket full of peaches, figs, pears, plums, oranges, tangerines. Not anymore. I snatched a hot soda scone with candied apricots, hard as pebbles, and ate it in two bites. I put another in my back pocket.
I stared at the wall above the sink, where a framed picture of a man wearing a purple shirt falling to his knees hung. Behind him stood Jesus, weary and dirt-smudged with oval holes in his hands. He looked at the fallen man with loving sadness. He was trying to help him stand but his face was forlorn. It struck me that I could not imagine Vern standing behind any of us, holding us up.
“Did I ever tell you about when your mother won Miss Peaches Supreme?” Cherry said.
“One thousand times.”
“She came out dressed as a raisin for the talent portion.”
“Twirling a baton,” I said.
“People figured you couldn’t make sexy out of a raisin but she proved them wrong. I always thought you would grow up right like her with those long bones. When you were little you wouldn’t stop drinking sweet milk drink from your bottle at bedtime. I told your momma, her teeth’s gonna rot out her head, and they did! You ended up silver babies ’cross the front. Shame. Made everyone think you were some kind of white trash. Boy, you are getting thick around the middle. That baby is showing itself.”
An image of Lyle on top of me flashed through my mind, and left. I got hot, then cold.
“Come ’ere,” she said. I could smell her as I got close. Body odor, jelly, and baby powder. “Help me get at this hair,” she said, pulling me into the bathroom. “It’s a trickster. You’ve got to get to the root.” She handed me the tweezers and shone a flashlight on her face. “See it?”
It was there poking out of her makeup. She wore a new matte orange bronzer I had noticed on her bathroom counter. Haitian Vacation. I clamped the hair and then pulled and pulled and finally it came out, wound corkscrew tight, a white stump root. “Here’s the offender,” I said. She opened a tiny velour jewelry box where she stored them and I dropped it in.
“It’s always the same spot,” she said. “Just wait until you get old. God a-mighty, hairs out the chin.”
“By the time I’m old there will be some miracle cream that won’t allow that to happen.”
“You real sure this baby should be that rat boy’s?” Cherry said. “Seen all these girlies around church touched by the light, highly prized. Thought, why can’t my Lacey May be one of them? If you’re running away from God’s plan I feel that’s a right shame. It’s on my heart to tell you so.”
“It’s Stringy’s,” I said.
“Vern didn’t even seem to care I’d brought a regular infidel into the Body. Thought he was going to have some reward for me. Something to say, at least. But he ain’t been saying much of nothing lately. It don’t give me a good feeling. My own daddy used to simmer simmer simmer. Us kids would think everything was fine, going on about our business. One time I dropped my mama’s mixing bowl and it shattered all over the place, but my daddy just smiled. Helped me clean it. Then weeks later I got the