be, except that one night after a Jansson wedding at the firehouse and a couple of whiskey sours when she had talked about how all through high school she had gone out with an older boy named George who had gone away to the state university. “That one had a high opinion of himself,” my father had said. The next day I asked Ruth if she remembered a boy named George that my mother had dated. “Of course,” Ruth said. “That was a time.” And she wouldn’t say more, which for Ruth was saying a lot.
My mother’s finger tapped my name in the paper. She had made my father buy extra copies. “You’re a smart girl,” she added. “Don’t waste it.”
That’s who I was by then: the smart girl. But it was hard. When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they’re the hard times a girl has, not the hard times of a woman, with grief and loss and real hardship. “I might come to visit this summer,” Donald had written on his last postcard (a picture of the Hollywood Bowl) but I wasn’t going to count on it again. I figured it was what Ruth called wishful thinking.
LaRhonda and I had never been a perfect fit as friends, which my mother and Aunt Ruth and even Cissy Langer had told me more than once, but sometimes, I’ve found there are people you get to be friends with accidentally and then stay friends with because you’ve always been friends. But I only saw LaRhonda now when she didn’t have anything better to do. After she’d come back from the ranch she seemed a lot older than I did, and for the hour or two that we’d been at her kitchen table, eating fried chicken from the diner that her mother warmed up in the oven, I figured that it was because she’d learned a lot from the other girls there. Once Mrs. Venti went to work, leaving us with a banana cream pie and a pitcher of iced tea, I’d found out what was really going on.
“I’ve accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior,” LaRhonda had said solemnly, clutching at the neck of her blouse and finally pulling a gold cross on a chain from underneath.
I’d seen a lot of that growing up, from Mrs. Bascomb, who spoke in tongues at a church that held its services under a tent in a used car lot, to Donald’s grandfather, who had once told him that he’d been traveling a dark dark road before the Lord lifted him up. For LaRhonda finding Jesus took a different form. She became friends with a group of girls in our high school class who had all found Jesus, too, and who all spent a lot of time on the phone each night planning the outfits they would be wearing next day. They also managed to incorporate gossip and meanness into their religious tradition, like this: “I’m praying on Cheryl because I hear she drank six beers after the football game and puked in the bushes outside Cathy Barry’s house.”
There’s a particular kind of way I’ve noticed people, women mostly, act with one another when they’re pretending to be nice but they really don’t like each other. That’s how those girls were with me. They were town girls, and it was like they could smell the farm on me, or maybe they made me smell it on myself. For a while I hung around the edges of all this, but there was a girl who kept saying she was praying on Callie because of Clifton, and I thought Callie needed a second pair of hands and a job that paid more than minimum wage a lot more than prayers, and at one point I said so, and although LaRhonda said she had told the group I was expecting a visit from Aunt Flo—which I wasn’t—they were concerned about the state of my soul.
Even Tommy wasn’t Tommy anymore. When he finally came home on a visit it was like he was someone else again, jacked-up and hard. He’d let his hair grow down the back of his neck and refused to shave, and he and my father had a fight about it. “I’m waiting for a gook bullet through my skull and you’re worried about hair?” he’d said. He had a tough little barking laugh he laughed now, a mean second cousin to a