yard wall. A mockingbird, was it? It opened its mouth and let a complicated stream of nonsense flow. There were mockingbirds in her father’s yard in Watsonville, good-sized birds who could snatch a song out of the air and run with it, riff on a melody like a man with a saxophone. Her boy had that in his blood, too. Not just the backyard in Watsonville but the music that motivated Arlyn to pick up his horn and flesh out a tender melody. He had it all, everything she could remember, everything that had happened to her up to his birth, everything Arlyn had given him, all of it running unheard beneath the steady pumping whoosh of his blood as he grew, unaware.
What she would give to see her child.
She turned back to The Mountain. Here’s what she would give: her preference. Until she was released to see him, she would not care what happened to her. She would not let it spawn a reaction, anything the parole board could latch on to as evidence of flawed remorse. She would offer no resistance to their program—their shitty, abominable program of systematic degradation—and they would have no choice but to set her free. That’s all she sought. Earlier, rather than later. Early enough to have some time with her son before he was grown. Lisa Fay sighed. She dropped her shoulders. She said, “No. I don’t believe I do.” And as she watched the dark pupils widen in The Mountain’s eyes, she thought, Go ahead and kill me. I’ll be out of here that much faster.
The Mountain slowly advanced upon her.
“Hey hey hey hey hey!” Delfine aspirated. “This one? She don’t give a flying fork what you believe!” And she insinuated her scrawny little edge-bitten body into the group until she stood just inches from The Mountain. She squared her flimsy shoulders and puffed her little chest.
“Uh,” The Mountain said, a volcanic rumble.
There was a long moment of held breath. No one stood up to The Mountain. She had the power to crush anything in her path. She was large and solid and fatally smart and relentless in her need to subordinate others. She leaned forward slowly, incrementally, toward Delfine. She leaned, Lisa Fay thought stupidly, like an ox that had been bludgeoned but whose bulk has not fully registered the blow. “A flying fork?”
“Yeah,” Delfine whispered. “That too.”
Lisa Fay shut her eyes. The rumble grew. Little Red and Pearlie chimed in with tentative laughter.
Lisa Fay forced herself to look. The Mountain had bent forward far enough to clap her mighty paws around Delfine. She was squeezing her. Delfine was almost absorbed into the bulk of The Mountain’s voluminous breast. And then The Mountain opened her arms and Delfine popped free. The Mountain held something in her hand. She opened her mouth and situated her custom bridgework snug against her gums.
“Me neither,” The Mountain rumbled. Laughter was a seismic event. “Do you, Little Red? Do you, Pearlie?”
No, they answered in tandem, they didn’t give a flying fork either.
Psycho. Freak show. Delfine, you crazy bitch, Lisa Fay thought. You stole her teeth?
She would smuggle Delfine more food tomorrow. She would let her use the toilet first.
But the foot? Not in a million years, Lisa Fay thought. Never again would she let Delfine touch any part of her body, attached or not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Willow stood with one hand on the back door to the farmhouse and listened to the sounds coming out of the kitchen. It was a Saturday morning in January, the sky was a preposterous blue, and Ruth was singing like a cat in heat. She made up raunchy lyrics to accompany the popular tunes she remembered from her youth, and the boy kept time with kitchen utensils. Not quite music, Willow thought. The song ended and she pulled open the door and stepped inside. More like—cheerful noise.
“Hello, radio listeners.” Ruth grabbed a banana and purred into the makeshift microphone. She winked at Willow over the boy’s head. “That was Methyl Ethyl and the Ketones, doing ‘Get Your Hand Out of My Oven.’ ”
Willow snorted. She looked around at the cloud of dust that engulfed them. “What happened?”
It wasn’t dust, it was flour; and Wrecker was poised at the center of it. He knelt on the stool to be tall enough to lean his weight into the sourdough Ruth had flipped onto the counter. He dug his elbows in and pummeled it with his fists. His eyes flashed blue in a sea