Читать книгу Godshot - Chelsea Bieker - Страница 10

Chapter 2

I waited for the click of the door, the jangle of keys, the sound of our broke-down Rabbit sputtering and fading down the road. I put on one of my mother’s dresses, floaty and white, one that made her look like a dream of man. Cocked a sun hat low on my brow.

Gifts of the Spirit church was a one-mile walk from our apartment complex. The Lakes, it was called, though there was not a single lake around, or any body of water for that matter. After Vern’s first miracle things were better for a time. The rain returned and the winters cooled and deepened and fog settled over us when it was supposed to and the grasses shone each morning with dew. The spring skies released heavy downpours and it seemed each time we got itchy again, worried again, just a little prayer could shift the clouds, Vern’s goodness enough to earn the land’s potential. But slowly as the years passed, Peaches crept back to the dry. Vern couldn’t do it alone forever. He was only one man atoning for all our sin, he said. He needed our sacrifice now.

For now the reservoirs and canals were empty basins, home to deflated soccer balls and broken glass bottles and the skeletons of birds that I imagined had died in flight, too hot and thirsty to go on. I passed where the row crops and orchards used to be, now a flat brown stretch, vegetation nowhere. Then came Old Canal Road, our main street, where every year there was a raisin parade to celebrate our bounty. Men in huge raisin costumes pumped their white-gloved hands, their chunky gold cross necklaces moving in the sun as they danced to praise pop, gleefully handing out foil-wrapped tri-tip sandwiches on seeded buns from Mike’s Meat Market. I had heard talk that this year there wouldn’t be a parade because who wanted to rejoice over a failed harvest? But we of Gifts knew better. As long as Vern was around there was always something to celebrate. Always reason to hold out. Don’t quit before the miracle, we liked to say to one another, easy as a greeting.

If my dead grampa Jackie had just held on a few more months all those years ago, he too could have found Vern. He could have stood in the middle of his fields, mouth opened to the falling water, and been converted. I didn’t like to think of Grampa Jackie in hell, so I tried not to. I tried to work out a way perhaps he had slipped into heaven instead, but it was true he had a filthy mouth and a hankering for single malt, and Grandma Cherry said sometimes he’d pretend she was a ghost and withhold words and love from her for weeks on end until she started to wonder if she had really died and truly was a ghost. But still he had the best eyebrows, a severe arch to them that made him seem playful, and he treated me the same as my boy cousin Lyle and let me get my hands dirty. Grampa Jackie made it so I understood the love of the land, the love of grapes lying perfect on trays plumping in the Godkissed sun.

This, he would say, looking out over his vineyard. Press my hand to soil. This is the perfect climate for raisins.

SO EVEN NOW, drought upon us again like disease, I believed Peaches was the most blessed town there ever was, capable of providing the world’s food, Godkissed and set apart. Everyone I passed, nearly everyone I knew, was sovereign to Vern and if they weren’t they could be spotted with ease, trudging through town, heads dipped lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut. Like Quince at the Pac N’ Save, who never came to church on Sundays and we all tried to save her but she stuck her middle finger in our faces. She had taken to wearing a pentagram necklace and black lipstick for theatrics but I didn’t sense any true evil coming from her, just stupidity, which could be worked with. A few teachers at the junior high and high schools who drove in from Fresno would not disclose their religious whereabouts to us no matter how we pressed, which is of course how we knew they were bound for damnation. We left small Bibles on their desks and never followed prompts, but wrote papers about God and created collages of the Second Coming when Vern would meld with God’s golden beam. We painted beautiful portrayals of our pastor kneeling in rain-drenched vineyards that only a heartless person could look away from without provocation. We would get to them eventually and when we did they would shriek with gratitude.

But the most unholy sin of sins in Peaches was the Diviners: A Lady on the Line. It was a phone sex business housed in a leaning red Victorian mansion filled with pale witches no one ever saw come or go. They were the unreachables, rumored to have snakes for hair, eyes of fire, and poisoned nethers that could strike a fool man dead. Most days I forgot about them. Nothing in my mind could compute how someone could have sex over the phone, practically speaking, and I held my breath if I ever passed near the house, which wasn’t often, because it stood exactly on the opposite end of town as the church, where the canal went on and became Fresno, another county entirely.

BY THE TIME I arrived at Gifts of the Spirit, my mother’s dress was wet against my back. The pad in my briefs felt heavy and I wanted it off. A thicker heat swept over me. There had never been air-conditioning, never even a swamp cooler. If God brought the heat we were meant to be hot.

In the emptiness, the space seemed smaller. By some impossible magic the whole Body fit here every Sunday. In the center of the groaning floor the tired wood drooped and made the church a shallow bowl. There was a fine layer of God glitter permanently on it like a varnish for there was no need to sweep away a physical wonder of the spirit. The pews were built by the hands of men when Vern’s father was a young pastor. The ceiling was high with rafters surrounding it, and a single stained-glass window loomed behind the pulpit, featuring a pack of fearful flying cherubs. The light filtered orange through the stained glass and below it, on the wall, hung a portrait of Jesus with a bloody and beaten face, a reminder of the horrors He’d gone through. Next to it was a portrait of Vern in imitation of Jesus, his own face woeful, smeared with what I assumed was fake blood and makeup, but it looked so real I didn’t know for sure. Vern wanted us to be reminded that our sin hurt our pastor in the same way it had hurt Jesus and God—likely more.

Vern was always here throughout the week, preparing sermons in his small office in the loft like a full-time job, sometimes rehearsing them on the stage, I’d been told, but had never seen myself. We weren’t to disrupt him unless it was an emergency, and now here, the confidence I had felt on my walk over faltered. I could still leave, I considered. I could go back home, maybe talk it over with my mother again when she returned from her assignment, when she would be a little tired, heat-beaten to a sweetness and willing to agree to anything to stop my badgering. I stepped back toward the doorway.

But then a voice from above. “You have something for me,” Vern said from the top of the stairwell, a blue shiny cape fastened around his neck. His hair shone and his cheeks were covered in gold sparkling God glitter. It was a sign he had been with the Father transcribing a message. I’d interrupted.

He held his arms out and his face broke into a smile. I felt myself exhale. I ran up the narrow stairs and he folded me into a hug. I thought for the slightest moment I smelled cigarette smoke on his cape, but he would never smoke. He was above humanly desires, he told us, and smoking was just a way to fill a God-sized hole. “I knew I’d have a visitor today,” he said, ushering me into the small office. My worry fell away then. Nothing was better than aligning with one of Vern’s messages from God.

The wall behind his wooden desk was covered in crosses but no crucifix. Christ didn’t stay on the cross, he always told us, just as Vern himself also would not have tolerated hanging there, bleeding out. Vern likened himself to Jesus often, saw himself as an equal or even a superior to Him, so we didn’t really worship Jesus because Vern was also God’s chosen son, just in current times. Every so often when the need was great, God would decide on a son, and Vern was it now, and Jesus was like Vern’s retired spirit brother, and was mostly left out of things. “Let Him rest,” Vern had told us from the first sermon I had ever heard him preach. “He is tired, but I am powerful.”

We sat across from each other and he looked at his hands, eyes closed. I could see the shaved Spirit Hole on top of his head, the little spiky regrowth. I closed my eyes, too, and imagined my assignment. I secretly hoped it would be something people could see me doing. I wanted to be stationed somewhere, in the Pac N’ Save maybe, bringing people to faith in the soap aisle. I would summon the God glitter and even Quince would not be able to resist my good news.

I looked up and Vern was staring at me, face a calm pool. I realized I mostly saw him in motion, whirring across the stage of the church. But here, in the silence, so up close to him, he could have passed for one of my mother’s men, sort of ruddy-faced, a bit dark under the eyes. He had blackheads on his nose and I felt my breath catch a little. I wondered why he didn’t get rid of them, or ask God to. Then I felt ridiculous for my vain fixations. Vern was dealing with more important things than blackheads. “What brings you?” he said.

I had wanted him to pull the truth from me on his own so I could remain innocent—not having betrayed my mother, and not having betrayed him. But I knew in a true faith there was no such thing as both, so I chose.

I pulled out a piece of bloodied toilet paper I’d carried with me in my purse. I set it on the desk between us. Here was the proof, and it would talk for me. I could even get creative and tell my mother that Vern saw me walking through town, blood on the back of her white dress.

He pressed the stained toilet paper between his fingers, lifted it close to his eye. I prepared for him to jump up from his seat, maybe enclose me in another hug. But he straightened his shoulders. Let the red paper flutter to the floor. “This could have come from anything,” he said. He picked up a pencil and began to write something in his sermon notes as if I wasn’t even there.

I scooted back in the chair. I just had to get through this part and then I could have my assignment. But how did he want me to do it? I pulled my mother’s dress up a little. I started to raise a foot to his desk.

“Please.” He tapped my foot with the pencil and I put it down. “We’ve been waiting on your blood for a while now. Forgive me for taking this seriously.”

The way he was talking tripped me up. Was he implying I wasn’t taking it seriously? Nothing could be more serious to me. It was like he was scolding and praising at the same time, and suddenly the office felt too hot, too small.

I thought of my mother, how I’d been annoyed with her but perhaps I’d missed something. Now it was too late.

“My mother didn’t want me to tell you.” These words came from my mouth easily.

He leaned back in his chair, let his head fall to one side. This was the soft Vern, the hugging sort, back again. “You’re lucky coming to me so early in your life. Your mother sinned for a long time and I’ve washed the marks of her sin but I can still see the scars.”

My mother never liked to talk about how she was before her transformation. After my father left, her drinking had taken her over like flames through a house. I remembered feeling scared for us sometimes, when she drove down the road swerving and braking late. When she would close herself in our room for days, silent, and I’d sleep on the couch watching television late into the night, M.A.S.H. and I Love Lucy. For a while she’d had a boyfriend who didn’t wear pants around our apartment and I could see his flesh poking out from under his T-shirts. His eyes were always bleary, and he gave me sapphire earrings one night while my mother was passed out. He had pulled me close to him so he could put them on me, only to find I didn’t have pierced ears.

He bent me over his lap that night. He pierced them with the dull poke of the earrings themselves while I called out for my mother and she never came. What a pretty little girl I was, he said, when it was over. And now, looking at Pastor Vern, my heart surged with affection thinking of that time, for it was he who had delivered us out of it.

The conditions of deliverance were these: one, that my mother never drink again; two, that she remain chaste, a bride to the church. Vern had held her to his chest and my mother got starry-eyed. Yearning for something good, she agreed.

“So what do I do?” I asked him now. He put his hand on top of mine, and in a rush, the pounding heat, the sweat on my skin, seemed to cool like a broken fever.

“Each member of the Body needs to be in a place of trust with their fellow brother. The men of this church have been appointed to lead. It’s the holy structure . . .” He released my hand and wiped his nose, which had begun to drip. “Hay fever,” he said. “No trees blooming, no grass, but still, allergies.”

I wanted to ask why God hadn’t healed his allergies but he kept talking. “I’ll ask that you trust this structure with every piece of yourself.”

But my mother wasn’t just waiting around and trusting. She was going somewhere every day like a job.

“Everyone’s assignment will look different,” Vern went on. “Each person has their own gifts within God’s army.” He leaned forward and kissed my forehead with dry lips. I smelled the sun on his skin, intoxicating. Tears welled in my eyes. This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d wanted to leave with a notebook full of instructions.

“How is your mother?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell him that along with spring’s arrival, beers had appeared in strange places around the apartment, in the back of the nightstand drawer, behind our collection of canned beans. That she kept them in brown paper bags, drank several each evening standing before our sliding glass window looking out at the parking lot filled with half-broke-down Fifth Avenues and Novas. That her eyes had changed from ambitious to roving. Toward what I still didn’t know.

“Blessed,” I said. He smiled wide and I saw a shine of silver fillings in his molars. The devil came over me and I imagined his silent wife, Derndra, kissing his mouth, reaching her tongue back during her wifely demonstration and touching those hidden gems.

“Don’t overdo it in this heat,” he said, but I was used to the heat by now, the heat that never set on us, that only maintained through the night, beckoning me from sleep, the damp sheet kicked off onto the floor.

ON MY WALK home through the dead fields, I thought of my mother in the hot breeze of afternoon when I was five years old, just before the beginning of that first bad drought. A patch of watermelons had sprouted up in the small square of dirt under the second-story stairs of our apartment and she was on her hands and knees marveling at their strong vines, the big green leaves and the basketball-sized melons. She patted them and laughed. She brought me close so I could see.

“I threw seeds down here forever ago,” she said. “Who knew all this time they were growing right up?”

The melons were bright and healthy. They were beautiful and ripe. How had we not seen them before?

She talked all night about them. The sapphire-earrings boyfriend grew more and more agitated with her adoration of something that wasn’t him. He didn’t like her when she was up. “Acting like you’ve never seen a fuckin’ watermelon before,” he said. He slurped Bud Light all night. My mother was oblivious to his growing anger. I wished she would just shut up. I knew what happened when she kept on pushing his buttons, but she didn’t seem to have that awareness, not then, not ever. She couldn’t believe the watermelons were there and she was taking it as a good sign. She didn’t want us to eat one just yet. She called Grampa Jackie, who had been predicting the coming drought, could taste it in the air and had taken on a low demeanor of dread. She laughed like we’d been struck by great fortune, tried to cheer him. “You always said the land was a gift, Daddy,” she said. “It still is!” She didn’t drink that night and Sapphire Earrings slammed out of the apartment and didn’t return until early morning, when he shoved me out of my mother’s bed and onto the floor and took my place.

When my mother woke up, we raced out to check on the melons, to pet and encourage them, but someone had smashed them all. Ripped them from their vines and thrown them against the sidewalk. Their pink insides reeked a sickening perfume. She let me miss school and we sat on the steps while she drank brandy out of one of my old plastic baby bottles, waiting for the killer to return to the scene.

But the killer was in the apartment. It was clear as day that Sapphire Earrings was responsible, but she didn’t seem to understand that at all.

“I’m sad sometimes,” she’d said to me as the sun had left us.

How I’d wanted to fix it for her. How I wanted the world to be good enough so she wouldn’t have to feel its rough edges. If someone could just see her when she was at her best, the way she was in the morning back then, getting ready for the day, dancing and singing, the soft dander of her cheek. The way her neck looked when she tilted it back in the car and sang “Great American Cowboy” along with the Sons of the San Joaquin. I didn’t know what to say to fix it, to make her eyes go clear, to make her steps sure and straight, her breath her own without the bite of alcohol on it. “I’m hungry,” I said instead, and she sighed, went back inside, and got drunk enough for the sadness to reset itself to happiness, only to go back to sadness again.

MY MOTHER RETURNED home that evening with a small cake to celebrate. A reward, probably, for keeping my first blood as our secret, though she didn’t say that. I lay in the bed we shared, feigning cramps though all I really felt was a small ache in my lower back that radiated into my hips. I could have gone to school with the thick pad in my underwear and been fine, but I had wanted to be alone all day with my sinful lies, the impure vision I’d had of Vern, pray for forgiveness, and wait for my mother.

“Meet sugar, your new best friend.”

She opened the packaged coconut cake, forked off a hunk and brought it to my lips. I swallowed the stale piece nearly whole. I hated coconut, would have preferred chocolate, but I didn’t tell her that. It felt near to the time she forgot my sixth birthday. The next day, when she’d remembered, she had gone to the Wine Baron and filled a brown bag with lemon Laffy Taffy, a random candy I had never shown affection for. I smiled then too.

“It hurts.”

“Get used to it,” she said. “Women have a long history of suffering.”

She lay next to me. Sighed. I smelled the familiar yeast and it turned my stomach. “Do you know there are people in this world who put gingerroot up their heinies?” she asked. “For fun?”

“Mom.”

“It’s called figging,” she said, matter of fact.

I could barely admit this to myself, but sometimes I was thrilled by her new crass talk. It made me feel alive in an unknown way, but I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. That was the design of sin: to be the most attractive thing in the room.

She got up, walked to the kitchen. I heard a can open.

“Most people call a woman’s holy place a vagina,” she said, “but the vagina’s the part up in there, and what they’re meaning is the vulva. So really just saying pussy brings it all together.” She drank so deeply I could hear her gulp from the bedroom. There was the sound of a second can cracking open. “Now that you’re a woman you ought to know.”

Pussy. Pussy. The word sparked and hissed. I should have asked her what was giving her such strange thoughts, but instead I asked her about the beers, and if she’d been praying over them. Surely she hadn’t been taking these sinful thoughts to her weekly women’s Bible study. But as soon as I thought this, I realized I wasn’t even sure if she was still going.

She looked at the can in her hand. Shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “And I woke up to another hot and thirsty day all the same.”

VERN SEPARATED THE girls by blood. Girls who had it and were under the marrying age of eighteen were ready for the true mission, and were set apart. Not yet knitted to an earthly husband, able to offer the church a singular focus, these girls were special, and now I was one of them. I understood that being in this group normally meant a deeper study of the Bible alongside Vern’s wife, Derndra, or perhaps hours of door-to-door proselytizing and rigorous chastity. By the time a girl was eighteen, marriage seemed the most exciting endeavor there could be in a life, if only because of the possibility of newness, possibility of pleasure, even pain. But drought times were different, and the girls of blood would be particularly useful now, Vern had said, though none of us knew what that meant, exactly.

I felt lucky to have gotten my blood at such a perfect time, when it would matter most. I suppose I had strange dreams of glory, that the things I would do as a useful woman would be preserved somewhere, that they would make some difference to dirt and seed and stalk. We were bloody, but around the church we were known simply as the Bible study girls.

Denay and Taffy were my best friends and had already had their bloods for months, walking the church with prim proud smiles, full of use. Now I was in the club. I put my hand between my legs and held myself, looking for the calm it usually brought. My mother’s sleeping back rose and fell next to me. The smell of beer hung around us like a net. I remembered how before she’d been saved, when we were poor, very poor, she’d drink anything—Listerine, lemon extract, cough syrup she’d steal from Cherry’s cabinets, the Pac. The beer at least was a drink meant for drinking.

“Tell me where beer is in the Bible, Lacey May,” she’d said a few months ago after she started drinking again, when I had held the phone and threatened to call Grandma Cherry and report her sin.

“You don’t want to make that call, little girl,” she’d said. “You want your mama around, and you know it.”

She was right, and now the secret had roped around us, including me in its grip, sickening me from sun up to down. I was trapped. I felt a little crazed by it.

MY FIRST BLOOD dried up within days. I missed the alarm of color waiting for me on the toilet paper when I wiped. On the way to church, I saw someone had plastered signs all down Old Canal Road—SAVE PEACHES! BRING WATER HERE NOW!

Over another sign—PRAY FOR PEACHES!—someone had written, It’s Global Warming Fools!

“What’s global warming?” I asked my mother as she peeled into a parking spot, creating a cloud of dirt around the Rabbit.

“I’ve heard of that a few times too,” she replied. “Maybe we should be a little more curious.”

But I knew I wouldn’t mention it again, and my mother would never bring it up. Curiosity was the first rung on the ladder down to hell.

WE FILED INTO the pew next to Grandma Cherry, who liked to sit smack in the middle of the church to feel the highest holy vibration. It had been nearly a week since I’d told Pastor Vern the news of my blood, and I’d relaxed a bit, stopped looking for signs that my mother could sense the betrayal. She was distracted anyhow, concerned with outfits. Today she wore new clear plastic high heels with stars floating in them. A white dress that buttoned all the way down the front and pressed her cleavage up. It was tight and gave the impression that at any moment the buttons could give way, that private places of rose-smelling skin, shimmery and lotioned, could spring forth and be free. The dress and the shoes were not secondhand. Lately she had been ordering things from catalogues that featured women on the front with huge boobs and tiny tank tops held together barely by strings, wearing shorts so short it appeared their butts were eating them. She had been making out checks and signing them fancy, a star dotting the i in Louise. I had asked her where the extra money had come from and she said, “Doing God’s work all day doesn’t mean you have to be poor. Don’t you see what I’m wearing?” She had held out her arms so I could admire her new green halter top. “Green attracts abundance,” she explained.

Today her legs were slick with tanner and sweat. Lips red and her blond hair thrown to one side. Her wrists were a jangle of beaded bracelets, and Cherry eyed them. Cherry herself was the opposite of my mother, wearing a boring and faded black shift that was tight over her barrel of a middle, her chicken-skinny arms and legs sticking out of it, no grace. Her long white hair was in a single braid down her back. She reached over and snapped one of the bracelets. “Awful flashy, aren’t we?”

“God loves a sparkler,” my mother said. I’d noticed she’d taken to talking down into her chest to mask her breath. I rested my hand on the bracelets, lightly touching them. She could make anything look special and stylish. Something about the angles of her body and the way they held things up.

I scanned the pews as they filled. Everyone generally sat with family before breaking off into smaller groups. Vern liked to be sure we were all in the same place at the same time once a week. It built community, he said. I could see the women drooling at my mother’s new clothes as they walked by, jealous and hoping what she wore would find its way to the Goodwill bins sooner than later, where most everyone got everything. Nearly all the women wore worn simple dresses that came down past their knees but we were free to wear what we wanted within reason. I wasn’t sure my mother’s new clothes were within reason, but I was proud of her. She was working hard in her assignment and God was rewarding her. Having a beautiful mother was both a jewel in my crown and a curse. Beauty attracted the wrong sorts of things and people all the time. Her beauty was safe and enjoyable only as long as it was confined to the church.

Vern took to the pulpit, his eyes pulled down in woe. Sometimes he would weep openly under the weight of God’s unending love and it would cause us to weep along with him, blissed out from the cleansing sting of tears on cheek. After the weeping we would sing while Vern twirled around the church like a dervish, his glimmering robes a flame behind him.

Sometimes he read from the scroll of Fears and Reasons, things we should and shouldn’t do that week, advice brought on by his Saturday night visions. Don’t patron the Ag One, there’s a demon in the basement. Venture to Tent City and pray over the infidels in groups of five. The burger at the Grape Tray is ripe with listeria, AVOID.

But he didn’t pull out the scroll today. “I have an announcement to make,” he said. Looked at me. “Lacey May Herd, please stand.”

I felt myself rise slowly, as if lifted by an invisible string. I kept my eyes on him. Everyone turned and stared, and my legs went soft. I chewed my thumbnail like a baby, not wanting to look at my mother. I knew she was staring at me, mouth open, betrayed. I smelled her beer. It was like another person in the room.

“Lacey May was anointed with her woman’s blood,” he said. He began to clap. Everyone joined in. “She’s the last of my expected, a true blessing. This will rocket our intentions to the next level. God fulfills!”

The boys’ club, scattered around the church, stood and cheered louder than the rest. They were fourteen years and over, unmarried, the future godly men and leaders of the church. One boy let out a whoop and lassoed his arm in the air. To have a room cheer for you and only you is a strange treasure. It felt like everyone liked me more than I had ever known and I was unwrapping their affection for the first time like a gift.

A burst of gold God glitter drifted down slowly upon us from the heavens, coating our sweaty shoulders in the finest gleam. We dropped our kneelers to pray but my mother stayed still. I thought once she saw how wonderful everything was, she would join in. She would see it was good I had gone ahead and told him. But no. The second Vern said Amen she pulled me out of the church in a rush to the car, buckled my seat belt for me like she never had when I was a child. She steered the Rabbit with her knees.

“Heat makes people crazy.” She pressed the accelerator. The Rabbit choked and tried its best to be fast. “I guess that must be why you went ahead and told him. Went and did the one thing I said not to do.”

She blew a stop sign and then another.

“Didn’t you see how happy everyone was?” I said, small and low.

“I was suffocating in that church.”

“Forgive her, God in Vern.”

“They were hot in there, too,” she said.

“Don’t be mad at me.”

“I used to think I was going to be a movie star,” she said. “It’s like I’ve forgotten that part of me for years and lately it’s coming over me, banging my head like a bag of bricks. All the things I never did. But you know what? I can still do those things. I ain’t dead.”

It was like she wanted to wreck the car. We careened into the parking lot of the Wine Baron, tires squealing. “It’s hard sometimes when God doesn’t answer your prayers.”

“You mean the rain?”

She put the Rabbit in park, squinted like she was just remembering where we were. I could tell her mind was switching to a different track.

“You think it’s possible to fall in love with someone you’ve never met?” she asked. She looked me in the eyes. She really wanted to know. I had wanted to talk about me for a second, my blood and what it might mean. I even liked that she was mad at me, that I had her attention. But now her voice was dreamy again, back in her otherworld.

“No,” I said sharply.

Her shoulders drooped and she let out a big tired sigh. “Hmm,” she said. “You’re probably right.” She seemed disappointed by me, by my lack of creativity, of fun.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe.” I thought of God then. I had fallen in love with Him, hadn’t I? We had certainly never met in the traditional sense. “Maybe you can.”

I knew nothing of love.

She perked up and smiled at this admission, but then her eyes attached to a man who was idling on his motorcycle next to the Rabbit. He was tall and covered in leather, a ruddy bush that curled over his top lip. He wore dark glasses. My mother got out of the Rabbit and slammed the door, cocked her hip into the mean sun. The man’s jacket said Valley Fine on it. He was just her type.

“Want some fairy dust?” he said, and she stepped up close to him like they were familiar, threw her leg over his seat, wrapped her arms around his waist.

“Just the ride.”

He revved the engine. She looked at me blankly, not a worry in the world as they rolled away.

I ran inside the Wine Baron. From the back came Bob, an Indian man with a thickness of white hair and a tunic that buttoned to his neck. He was a nice man. He must have considered us regulars by now, I realized.

“My mom’s on a motorcycle,” I said.

“Television,” he said, offering the word like a consolation prize, gesturing to the small screen mounted above the Slurpee machine that no longer housed Slurpee.

I took a palm-sized green Bible, small enough to fit in a pocket, so convenient, from my purse and set it on the counter. “You open to Vern’s work in your life, sir?” I said.

He looked at the Bible but didn’t touch it. “Mom likes beer” was all he said.

“I wish you would pretend to be out of stock when she comes.”

He slid a pack of watermelon gum across the counter. “I can give you candy and that’s all I can do. Don’t ask me for cigarettes.”

What would it be like if Bob were my father? I could spend my days working at the Wine Baron, saving all the patrons who came in for their fix. We could fill the bottles of whiskey with food coloring water and my mother could be in love and we could bring Bob to Vern and Vern would convince Bob to make her not drink anymore. I wanted to ask if he was married, but then I saw myself through his eyes and knew he would not want a daughter like me, grease-haired and begging for help in a quickie mart, a wife driving drunk through town, getting on trashy men’s motorcycles for no reason.

“You should get rid of those dirties you got back there,” I said. I pointed to the adult entertainment aisle where I’d accidentally lifted the yellow plastic cover off one of the magazines the week before and not understood, not entirely, what I’d seen. All the flesh pressed together sent a shock through me, the slick shaved skin, the faces of the women painted and hard.

“I sell what people want,” he said. “And everyone wants that.”

I left Bob to tend his cigarettes and waited for what felt like hours outside the Wine Baron. I spat on the ground between my feet. I wondered if I’d have to walk home. If the motorcycle man would be with her when they finally showed up and, if so, if he’d never leave. What would he need from me? I was older now and the thought scared me.

But then she came: my mother, like a mirage, back from the ride, her voice high-pitched, carefree, a performance for the man. She looked revived, cheeks red, clutching him like they’d known each other for years. “You have to do it, Lacey! It’s amazing.”

“Better make room on that motorcycle for God,” I said.

The man said, “Come on, little country girl, when you gonna get to ride a hog like this again?” There was a laugh in his eyes but I knew the quick underside of it would be a violent hand.

“Feel this motor!” my mother squealed like the dumbest person alive.

I looked at her. “Tell me where you go,” I said. “Or I’ll tell everyone you’ve been sinning.”

She smiled. “You don’t know what I’ve been dealing with, little girl.”

“Take me with you, then.”

The man grunted, bored. He needed my mother’s attention. “She’s got baggage,” I said to him.

“Come on, Lacey, be nice,” she said sweetly, but the man guided her roughly off the bike by her arm and pulled out of the parking lot. I knew we’d never see him again.

On the drive home I wanted her to say it was all a joke, that she wasn’t pulling us into that same hole we’d lived in before our conversion. But she didn’t, and I felt us falling and falling and fear filled me, for I knew the hole we were going down would be darker than ever now that we’d been living in the light.