Lyle stopped suddenly and I walked into him, our bodies pressed for a moment. I smelled the back of his neck and felt a sharp remembering. I sat next to the faded flag that marked the spot. In the small moonlight we wiped the dirt off the grave.
“The baby’s the size of a cauliflower.”
He lay down on his back.
“You hear me?” I said.
“I’m not a perfect person,” he said. “But Pearl thinks I am now. And Vern thinks I’m the next big thing. Next pastor after him.”
“What if there was a god who wanted us to ask questions,” I said. I lay down next to him. We didn’t touch. I knew that this way of being with him would never happen just this way, ever again.
“The Birthing Day is going to be bigger and more powerful than anything Peaches has ever seen,” he said. “I don’t know why you can’t just offer that baby up to the church like all the other girls. It’s the easiest way. This is about saving Peaches. This is the ultimate unification. Vern said no one knows the meaning of community anymore. That we’re going to redefine that totally. Isn’t that exciting to you?”
“He could have asked, ‘Hey, girls, do you want to be a part of this divine plan and get pregnant by a family member and then just hand that baby over?’ He never asked. Neither did you.”
He sat up. “Hey. Don’t say that. Don’t make me out to be some kind of bad guy. You and me both know Vern’s orders are the ultimate order. If God sat right here in front of you and said eat your own foot, you’d do it. Vern said girls are too emotional and that less information is easier. You’d make something out of it that wasn’t even real and here you are doing just that, proving him right.”
“If God asked me to eat my own foot I’d hope I’d realize he was no God.”
“If you won’t comply, it might be better for both of us if there just wasn’t a baby at all,” Lyle said, standing.
“Little past that,” I said.
He picked up something heavy. “Maybe not.” He held a rock the size of a grapefruit over me. “Something could happen. An accident.”
“Stop messing around,” I said, sitting up, turning my belly away from him.
“It would be no more shameful than what you’re doing, denying where that baby came from,” he said. His hands quivered and his face screwed up. He dropped the rock to the ground next to me. “Taffy’s didn’t take. That’s on me. But you were shot. Now here you are denying it in front of everyone.”
Taffy. I wanted to tackle Lyle to the ground and beat him senseless. I felt protective over her like a little sister. I could just see her under him, eyes so hopeful, grateful probably. It made me sick.
Lyle groaned, he was in full freak-out. “I wish you didn’t exist,” he said.
But my body did exist and was only growing bigger. I would only keep existing more and more, and then when the baby came she too would exist, angering men and boys all on her own. When did this end? I wondered. “Well, I do.”
“You can’t have this both ways. You can’t be playing for the infidels and thinking you can stay in the fold. You have church property in you now, but as soon as that baby’s out he’ll do away with you and no one will go looking.”
“You think no one will care?”
“Did anyone care when your mother disappeared?”
I knew the answer.
I left him there in the fields, walked back to Cherry’s, dead-bolted the door behind me. I imagined the rock crushing me and I lay there holding the paper with my mother’s address on it. I imagined twenty different ways Florin might be asking Daisy to take me there.
Chapter 20
Florin typed the Turquoise Cowboy’s address on Alibi Drive into her computer and it pulled up not a home but a place. A little square photo at the bottom of the map showing a squat beige building with blacked-out windows with PONY CLUB on the outside in faded green lettering.
“Your mom’s a stripper,” she said.
“What would you do if your mom left you like this?” I said.
“Hate her forever,” Florin answered. “Never speak to her again.”
“But you know that’s not true.”
She bit her nail. Looked at the screen. “Sometimes I don’t know why we care about them at all after the