tree in her tenth month of pregnancy was a good idea. Her judgment had to be looked at with suspicion.
Nearly everyone, it seemed to me, believed that coming into the world in any manner that could be seen as out of the ordinary was a bad omen. People never said, “Congratulations on managing to deliver a healthy baby while you were stuck in that rowboat in the middle of the lake.” They just shook their heads and whispered to each other that the child would surely drown one day. No one ever said, “Aren’t you a brave little thing, having your baby all alone in a chicken coop.” They just said that the child would turn out to have bird shit for brains and then went on to treat the child that way even if the kid was clearly a tiny genius. Like the doomed child born on the water and the dummy arriving among fowl, I was born in a sycamore tree and would never have the good sense to know when to run scared.
Not knowing any better, I listened to what I was told about myself and grew up convinced I was a little brown warrior. I stomped my way through life like I was the Queen of the Amazons. I got in fights with grown men who were twice as big as and ten times meaner than me. I did things that got me talked about pretty bad and then went back and did them again. And that morning I first saw my dead mother in my kitchen, I accepted that I had inherited a strange legacy and visited with her over a bowl of grapes instead of screaming and heading for the hills.
I know the truth about myself, though. I have never been fearless. If I ever believed such a thing, motherhood banished that myth but quick. Still, whenever logic told me it was time to run, a little voice whispered in my ear, “You were born in a sycamore tree.” And, for good or ill, the sound of that voice always made me stand my ground.
Chapter 3
Clarice and Richmond Baker claimed seats at opposite ends of the window table at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat and waited for their four friends to arrive. The restaurant was an easy walk from Calvary Baptist and they were always first to show up for after-church supper. Odette and James Henry’s little country church, Holy Family Baptist, was farthest from the All-You-Can-Eat, but James was a fast driver and, being a cop, unafraid of getting speeding tickets. So they usually arrived next. Barbara Jean and Lester Maxberry were members of grand First Baptist, the rich people’s church. It looked down on Plainview from its perch on Main Street and was closest to the restaurant, but Lester was twenty-five years older than the rest of the group and he often moved slowly.
Clarice caught her reflection in the window glass and imagined that she and Richmond must resemble a luminous peacock and his drab mate. She was hidden, neck to kneecaps, beneath a modest, well-tailored beige linen dress. Richmond, leaning back in his chair and waving hello to friends seated at other tables around the room, demanded attention in the pale gray summer suit Clarice had set out for him the night before along with his favorite shirt, a cotton button-down that was the vivid ultramarine of aquarium rocks.
He had always worn bold colors. Richmond had such a Ken-doll handsomeness about him that the women in his life, first his mother and then Clarice, couldn’t resist the urge to dress him in bright hues and show him off. On the occasion of Richmond’s first date with Clarice, his mother had adorned her teenage son in a peach jacket with white rope trim ornamenting the lapels. A getup like that would have gotten any other boy in town ridiculed and called a sissy—it was still the 1960s, after all. But Richmond Baker sauntered up Clarice’s front walk and managed to make that outfit look as masculine as a rack of antlers. Clarice often pictured that loose, powerful way he walked back then before the surgeries stiffened him. It was as if he were constructed entirely of lean muscle strung together with taut rubber bands.
By coincidence, Clarice had chosen a peach skirt for that first date. Her skirt matched Richmond’s prissy jacket so perfectly that everyone who saw them out on the town later assumed they had planned it that way. Clarice and her mother had