it, even when she was hiding in that rickety tree house in the woods behind the Spiveys’ trailer. The smell would just float on up there and shoot right into her nose, making her throat close up and her eyes water.
In her opinion, it smelled like cat pee and fingernail-polish remover mixed together with the rusty-red dirt that was everywhere you looked in this county. The stink got in her hair and clothes, the grass, the creek that ran out behind the barn, and the fast food her daddy would bring back for her to eat. Even Daddy himself had smelled like it.
Bobo had smelled like it too, before Great-granny Gladys threw him in the wash with bleach. Fern lifted the stuffed rabbit from her bed and ran her fingertips over the places where Gladys had sewn him up. He had only one eye now. He was missing a foot. It didn’t matter.
Fern put his fluffiness up to her nose and inhaled, wrapping him tight in her arms. Bobo the Bunny was the only thing her mother had ever given her—or at least the only thing she could remember her mother giving her. It was the only thing Fern could call her own, that was for sure. And he didn’t smell like that awful place anymore. The smell was gone. Her daddy was gone, too. The truth was, she didn’t miss him much.
She stared at the ceiling, remembering the day the big DEA agent grabbed her and shoved her into a car, telling her to stay down on the floor until he told her it was safe to climb up into the seat. He must have been driving a hundred on the mountain roads. He’d been a good driver, even if he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box. “Were you aware that your father was engaged in illegal methamphetamine production?” Oh, God. How dumb could a dude get?
She’d never see her daddy again. By the next day he was dead, killed in the county jail. The police said he’d been “executed” by the drug cartel to keep him from talking, but she knew that was just a fancy word for murder.
Fern pressed her eyes into Bobo’s fur. Oh, how she’d hated her daddy for dragging her all the way across the state to that place. For telling her all those lies. Like how they were moving back to the mountains so they could be close to her mama’s people, where Fern could be around family who would take care of her while her daddy started his big, fancy new job. Of course, none of that had happened. Her daddy’s fancy new job was standing over a metal countertop in an old barn mixing meth, and all Fern ever got was boredom, loneliness, a sore throat from the stink, and sleeping in a falling-down trailer even worse than the Spiveys’, if that were possible.
At least one lie had come true. She was now being taken care of by family. No one she’d ever met before, but apparently Gladys was family—her mama’s mama’s mama. That’s what the social workers had said, anyway.
Fern lay on her back on Granny Gladys’s clean bedspread, breathing deep over and over, sucking in the smell of laundry detergent and shampoo and new-to-her clothes. And dinner. It was true that Gladys was crazier than a hoot owl and dressed awful slutty for a really old lady, but Fern loved the clean smells that were everywhere in this house. And the soft bed she got to sleep in. And the food—real food like mashed potatoes not from a box and cheese sauce that didn’t start out as bright orange powder. She got to drink all the chocolate milk she wanted, too!
It almost made up for the nightmares. At least once a week since her daddy died, the Fat Man’s face would float into Fern’s brain while she was sleeping, and she’d wake up all cold and shaky. She’d only seen him a few times out at the Spivey compound, but it was enough to know the man had her daddy and everyone else by the short hairs. At first, the Fat Man had made her laugh. Here was this chubby guy in a shirt and ugly tie with his hair all greased back using language worse than even Bobby Ray Spivey. But Fern had stopped laughing when the Fat Man pulled out a knife and threatened to slit her daddy’s throat! Holy shit! She couldn’t believe it! From