didn’t want Artichoke to have this memory in her cells.
“I’m a good man,” he said, shoulders softening. His thumbs hooked into his pants pockets and he changed personalities, became timid. “Didja see that dog outside? I walk that thing every single night, midnight sharp, I take it out for my speed walk to get my exercise and let it pee and I care for it. And I love my girls as much as that dog.”
I hadn’t remembered seeing any dog on my way in.
“Maybe you can introduce me to the girls and I’ll feel better,” I said.
“You girls like to stick together, don’t you? I don’t care as long as it don’t affect your work. And you’ll have a lot of work ahead of you, but I’ll let you meet ’em, sure. I’m a nice guy. All the girls are kept in here. Now some’s ain’t performers. Some’s retired and Rowena’s just my sister. Think of her as your talent manager.”
“Where do the girls come from?” I said. I imagined twenty or thirty women behind the door in an orphanage situation sleeping in twin beds, wearing matching nightdresses.
“Once they get here they can’t remember.” He let out a growl of a laugh.
He unlocked the door at the back of the hall from the outside and threw it open. A small wash of sunlight came in under metal blinds, and the glow of the television shifted from dark to light. A rowdy talk show was playing where one woman was gripping another woman by the hair, screaming to show her the paternity test. My eyes focused on the room and at first I saw only a small child-sized woman in a high chair, beating her tray with a wooden spoon. She was elfin and seemed on the cusp of old age, grayish hair twisting out of loose pigtails. When Rick flipped the light on she went wild with the spoon. “It’s Lacey May! It’s Lacey May!”
He looked at me and confusion spread over him. “You all running something against me?” he asked.
“Oh, relax,” said a woman with large low breasts left loose in a bejeweled halter top. Juicy, it said across the front. I thought maybe this was her name. She spoke in a deep rasp from a beanbag chair in the corner. “We’ve seen her picture a hundred times.” I didn’t know my mother had taken a picture of me with her. I felt a small comfort in the fact that she did.
Rick pushed me into the room and I fell hard to my knees. My stomach almost hit the floor. “Seen her? What do you mean seen her?” he barked.
“That’s Lou’s daughter,” the Juicy woman said.
But I didn’t hear the Turquoise Cowboy anymore because I saw her then, in too-big black carpenter’s pants and a ratty oversized T-shirt with a Tweety Bird across the front. She sat in a lawn chair, a cigarette simmering between her fingers. She squinted across the room at me. Her hair was lank with grease and her skin broken out, her cheeks ruddy, covered in a shade of blush that wasn’t made for her. Her frame was tiny, skeletal like I’d never seen, and the light in her face was out.
“What are you wearing?” I marveled. I walked to her, and kneeled by the lawn chair. My mother, who would never have been caught dead in an ensemble like this, who even at her most hungover managed to get a dress on.
Her hand went straight to my chopped hair. She looked at it sadly. “This is a terrible look on you.”
“I know,” I said. “The worst.”
“Of course Lou gets visitors,” the Juicy woman said, narrating her own misery. She lit a cigarette and scratched her head with long pointed nails, moving a crisp nest of hair around.
I hadn’t factored an audience into my fantasy of begging. I gathered my strength and tried to focus only on my mother. “I’ve got a car out there and Daisy’s here and everything.”
But she looked at Rick instead of me.
“Mom,” I said. I took her hands and pressed them to my stomach. “Lyle did this, Mom. This is what’s happened since you’ve left. You left me and this is what happened.”
“Now stop it,” Rick said. He stepped between us. “This is just what I was saying your family would try to do. Derail your chance at your dreams.”
“You know you could have called first,” the Juicy woman said. “I would have cleaned up Rowena.” She pointed her cigarette