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  It was a familiar place to me, but somehow I had never noticed that from Tent City you could see the red Diviner house in the far-off distance where Peaches ended and turned into Fresno County.

  Cherry watched me and lit another Sweet Dream. Clucked her tongue. “Don’t even think about it.”

  THE DRIVE HOME in Perd’s truck was quiet. I was happy for it. I felt if I spoke I would cry and I didn’t want to offer that up to any of them. Before I got out of the truck Lyle leaned over and handed me a plastic bag with something light in it. “Thought you might want it.” He smiled gently, like he understood that my mother and I were not monsters.

  I waited until I was safe in Cherry’s bathroom with the door locked before I opened it. My mother’s yellow bikini. Lyle had saved it for me. I smelled it. Chlorine, something salty, a little mold. The elastic had lost its strength, but she still loved it. The high waist of the bottom covered her belly button, the one part of her that wasn’t perfect. My fault. I had pushed it out when I was in her stomach, she said. Made it ugly. The top had wires that crammed her boobs together, made two half moons of flesh rise up toward her collarbones.

  Before Vern she had always talked about taking me to the sea, to let me hear the ocean. It wasn’t even that far away, she told me. A few hours’ drive. She’d been there once with Cherry and Grampa Jackie and Pearl when she was a child. She had kept it close to her, the memory of eating hot clam chowder under the smudge of overcast sky, how they had all shared one bread bowl because they didn’t want to spend money and how my mother wanted a kite like the other kids but buried her toes in the sand and looked out over the crashing blue instead and was still content. She said she had seen her whole imagination right there in that water, glimmering out toward the endless horizon line. Once she became a believer, she said, she realized what she had seen was God.

  Chapter 5

  Loneliness. That’s what this feeling was, the wiry crawl under my skin telling me something was about to go very wrong all the time, making me jump at the slightest noise, imagining the Turquoise Cowboy’s car out front, him giving my mother thirty seconds to find me and if she didn’t he would take her away forever and it would be my fault, so stupid I was, busy daydreaming. I was on high alert even in sleep, my body an electric wire waiting for the contact of another, but no one ever came. Who can say, until it is gone, how much you will miss the warm body that sleeps next to you?

  IN THE SHED I hid from fly duty. I looked around at Grampa Jackie’s things, hammers of every size, tin boxes full of nuts and bolts. A chain saw leaned in the corner, a shotgun hung high on the wall. My second blood had colored my underwear in the night and I folded one of Grampa’s old hankies into a pad and put it in the bikini bottom. I had my current romance and some of my mother’s things from the apartment I had jammed into my pockets. With her deodorant and a few of the crystals she’d amassed during her assignment work, I set up a little altar and tried to pray for her return. I touched the crystals lightly for I feared they harbored dark spirits, but they were too beautiful to be truly afraid of.

  I knelt and whispered mercy, mercy to God, and when neither He nor my mother appeared, a wish came over me that my mother was dead. It seemed I was on a course of evil, thinking like that, but I wondered if it would be better somehow. Having a mother gone by a Godstricken force rather than a perfectly alive mother who simply chose another life. But while I wanted my hatred of her to cover me, to harden my skin to scales and become me, the opposite happened. I only loved her more.

  AS I WALKED back from the shed to the house, I saw old Officer Geary sitting with Cherry on the porch, drinking sweet tea, long white braid down his back and a white suede Stetson on his head.

  I hid just along the side of the house and listened. Geary tapped at a clipboard.

  “It’s a formality,” he said to Cherry. “Her mother ain’t here to sign her off to you, but if anyone came around poking, they ain’t gonna know that. Looks close enough to her signature, don’t it? Just says in the case of her absence you’re the guardian. You decide what the what is. You know.”

  “Mmhmm,” Cherry said. I heard the scratch of pen on paper.

  Officer Geary was a sort of half-retired sheriff who occasionally tried to keep Peaches matters under control so the Fresno police didn’t have to come out. He was a good GOTS believer and said his main job was policing for sin. I had never been on the wrong side of it so I’d never cared, but had seen him thwack the legs of the shoplifting infidel boys behind the Pac with a long rod. Heard him call a waitress my mother used to work with a bitch when she gave him his bill and hadn’t comped it. I’d seen the stares he’d given my mother any chance he’d gotten, the way he liked to pull her in for a long long hug each and every time he saw her as if they were lost lovers reunited after shipwreck.

  “I don’t like the way it makes the church look,” he said. “Some strange man just showing up for her, clearly not even from here. It’s all people can talk about. Just how’d she get herself in a mess like that?”

  “We was without Vern for a long time. And now who’s paying the price? Cherry is.”

  “Well, Cherry, we need Lacey here to stay in line. To listen to the brethren.”

  I stepped up onto the sagging porch. “Sir, I’ll inform you my mother is coming back.”

  “Hush up, child,” Cherry said.

  Child. I hated that word. Nothing could feel further from the truth. “I’m no child,” I said under my breath.

  “Speak up now,” Cherry said. “If you’re going to be a smart aleck, give it to us loud and clear.”

  My heart fluttered. I felt my legs brace. “I’m a woman,” I said. It rang out high and false, my voice not my own.

  “A woman?” Geary said. “Well, I should hope so.”

  “Blood and all,” Cherry said, half smiling.

  “We’ll see just how useful you’ll prove to be,” Geary said. He stood and got close to me. If he tried to hug me like he’d done my mother I’d sock him in the gut. He took Cherry’s hand and gave it a kiss. She blushed. “Good day, ladies.”

  After he drove off Cherry lit a vanilla Sweet Dream. Clutched the bull penis cane.

  “Don’t you care where she is?” I said to Cherry. “She’s your daughter. We should make a missing person’s report.” I knew that this was standard protocol from watching America’s Most Wanted as a young child, one of my favorite shows before I was saved.

  She put the Sweet Dream between her teeth and held her hand to the sky, clenched her eyes for a vision. “She’s still breathing out there. I wouldn’t get my knickers in a twist yet.”

  I HADN’T BEEN out in public since my mother had left, but now my loneliness pulled me to the Wine Baron. As I got closer, I saw it was dark inside, the shelves empty. Bob was nowhere. Even the little TV in the corner was gone. A piece of paper was taped to the door: Runned out of here in the name of GOD! It was signed Gifts of the Spirit and the handwriting was clumsy and rushed. The note was a tag, some kind of claim, perhaps an assignment complete, I thought. Maybe they had tried to convert him and he refused. But where had Bob gone? It frightened me that he could be here one day and then every trace of him wiped clear.

  Gone the liquor and the naughties. Gone my mother, too. I walked back toward the main strip and sat on a bench in front of the Ag One hardware store, which was still open, a few old farmer men milling about inside. On the bench sweat poured under my dress. I kept my nose in my Bible but inside the Bible was a romance. I didn’t want to talk to anyone exactly but I wanted them to talk to me. I thought perhaps my mother had been in town all along, moving from store to store in a trance, looking for me and all the while I’d been sequestered away at Cherry’s. I wanted a strange angel to come sit next to me and put her arms around me. I wanted God then in physical form. I wanted His body with me and over me and around me. Instead I looked up and there was Lyle.

  “Caught you,” he said, snatching the romance from the thin tissue pages of the Bible.
He held it up away from me, opened it, and read. “Dolores reached around and pulled Simeon to her by the throat. She kissed him long and hard until the rock of him strained his jeans.” He threw it on the bench next to me like it was stupid but I saw his cheeks flush.

  “They were my mother’s,” I said. “I was just reading them to see if I could find any clues.”

  “The main clue here is that your mother had a natural disposition toward sin.”

  I thought of Lyle’s mother, Pearl, how she sipped wine from a mug all day and was probably just as bad as my mother, but managed to hide it better.

  “Thanks for the bathing suit,” I said.

  Lyle smiled and looked at his feet. I wondered if he’d had a crush on my mother. It didn’t seem strange to me if he did. I assumed most men had a baseline crush on her, something that was just a fact because of how she looked, something that wasn’t really a choice for them.

  “Well, see ya around,” I said.

  “See ya at church,” he corrected.

  “Vern say it was time for me to come back?” I asked.

  He nodded. “God is good, all the time.”

  I RAN BACK to Cherry’s. I couldn’t wait to tell her I’d been summoned, but I stopped short in the doorway. There she was, tummy down on the floor of the living room, surrounded by the stuffed rodents I’d seen in the craft room closet. She was making them talk to one another, chirping and clicking like a young child playing dollies. They were in various states of fine dress, corduroy pinafores around little mouse bodies, tiny hats and bibs on baby rats, and leather slippers on an old man possum. Their tails were stiff and curled, their chins raised in thought. One wore glasses. I got a sarsaparilla from the fridge and watched as Cherry got off the floor and entered into some sort of exercise regimen. She sat on her stool spread-legged, toes planted, two of the mice in her hands like tiny barbells. She pivoted half circles, strengthening calves, did biceps curls with the mice, rewarding them with a pecking kiss each time she lifted. Out came the petroleum jelly, and she glossed her forearms with it, between her fingers, landscaping cuticles. Then she did her neck. Pulled on the skin and said gobble gobble softly to herself.

  “Gotta keep the body tight for any sort of spiritual rapture,” she said, winded, when she finally noticed me staring. “These guys keep me company.”

  I knelt down and touched one of the hard-bodied animals. “They’re so real.”

  She clicked the remote. “My babies’ commercial comes on every five minutes, just have you a wait.”

  Sure enough, an older magician-looking man in a suit of green velveteen appeared on the small TV screen showing off the stiff animals on his palm, a squirrel duct-taped to his shoulder. “Don’t ever be alone,” he said. “Adopt a companion today!” He held out an empty palm and suddenly a tuft of fur with a face appeared in it, a twinkle in its eye. Cherry ogled the screen like a gambler.

  I saw why she was entertained by the man—he was entrancing and different—but total amazement overcame me the next day when I stood by Cherry as the green velveteen man himself unloaded her new order on the front porch. His suit, upon close examination, was not two separate pieces but a onesie.

  Cherry invited him in for a feast of pastries, but he declined. She practically pulled him by the arm, and he stopped her.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m not getting paid to be foolish.”

  His rejection made her testy and so a few hours later she placed an even larger order, what she called on the phone an emergency.

  But to Cherry’s dismay, when the emergency order came a few days later, it wasn’t the older magician man, but a scrawny someone wearing the green velveteen, but his long skinniness didn’t suit it, didn’t fill it out proper, and instead of evoking otherworldliness I saw it for what it was: a Christmas elf suit from the Dollar Disco. He tossed the package of mice on the porch with no ceremony at all. The box nearly landed on my toe. Cherry said, “Where’s Eugene?”

  He turned. “My uncle’s setting up to retire. All’s you get today is me. I can paint your lawn if you want me to, though. That’s my very own business.” He pointed to his sky-blue truck, where he had handwritten in thick black marker, Central Cali Valley Lawn Painting. Under the words, a smiling orange garden snake poked its head up from a lush patch of grass.

  Cherry snorted and pushed the boxes toward the door with her cane. “Painting lawns. Boy, I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “One hundred dollars for bright green grass. Grass that looks like nature but better. Grass that looks like there wasn’t ever no drought. I’m telling you, God couldn’t even make grass this nice. The only thing that’ll ruin it is rain, and rain ain’t gonna happen.”

  “You wouldn’t know God if he bit your ass and called you Sally,” Cherry said, and shuffled inside.

  The man shrugged, looked at me. “Crazy bat,” he said, and winked.

  Never pay mind to a man who winks, my mother always said, even though hadn’t all of her beat-down boyfriends been winkers? The man spat on our dead blond weeds and walked slowly back to his truck, twirling keys on one finger. He got in and reached his arm out the window, patted the outside of the door like giddy up. I watched him from the porch squinting against the sun. He wasn’t like any man I knew from church, that was for sure. I looked down and saw one of the packages had a different address, for a Haggard Wayne down in Kerman. I picked up the box. “Hey!” I yelled. He took his sunglasses off. I started to skip but then walked instead with no rush, the package against my hip. I was some other girl walking then, jaw clenched. I realized only when I was almost to the truck that I was wearing the yellow bikini and nothing else. No matter. I stood, holding the box just out of his reach.

  “Well, hello, savior,” he said to me.

  “You’re not from Peaches,” I said.

  He scanned me toes to tits. “And you aren’t from Peaches either, little girl, or you would have said ain’t just now.”

  “I’m no hillbilly,” I said.

  “No hills around here.” He pretended to scan the distant flatness. “Me, I’m from Popcorn, Indiana, population forty-two—well, forty-one now that I’m gone, unless one of them broads had another kid, as broads will do. Just landed here a few months back, ready to start anew, and lawn painting is where the money is. You wait and see, I’m gonna have every house in Peaches back to a state of glory.”

  It was like the world had contracted and opened back up new and distorted. He didn’t scare me even though up so close I realized that he was older than I’d first noticed. I didn’t feel my throat get tight like I usually did when a man talked to me. Perhaps I had entered the place where the Diviner house was, where my romances existed, and now, I thought, where I was a body who stood talking casual-like to strange men in trucks.

  “You a believer of God?” I asked.

  “My name’s Stringy.” He reached his hand out to me and I gripped it hard. He winced and pretended I’d hurt him. I giggled in a way that would have embarrassed me to high heaven had I heard it come from my mother, but here I was laughing just like her, as natural as sin. He pulled me close to the truck and snatched the package like a trick.

  I waited for him to ask my name, but he didn’t.

  He peeled out lifting a hurricane of dust around me. Lacey May Herd, I should have told him. Pleased to meet you. I watched him drive away as the dirt settled on my mother’s bikini, and I felt something strange happen inside me, or perhaps it was in the atmosphere—like the air I had always breathed had shifted into something unfamiliar. That by breathing it, I was now an unfamiliar kind of girl.

  I THOUGHT OF that lawn painter the rest of the day and into the night and by next morning I saw he’d been thinking of me too. Cherry’s grass was a neon green wash, loud and alive with color. I could hardly look at it directly, it was so bright.

  Cherry thought the green grass was a sign from God and not a sign of admiration from the lawn painter. She called me into the bathroom, her home waxing
kit hot and ready, and wanted me to get at her pits. She wanted someone to photograph her on the lawn, arms raised in praise, and send it to a newspaper somewhere far away. She wanted the headline to read: Most blessed believer receives sign of rain to come!

  I waxed one pit but the stink of her, the layers of unwashed skin and sweat, got to me. I walked out onto the porch to stare at my grass in peace but there was Lyle sitting on the rocker holding a Bible.

  “Let’s go somewhere Cherry won’t interrupt,” he said.

  I thought of Cherry, sweating and waiting for me to service her, and I nodded toward the shed. Lyle pushed the door open and set his Bible down on Grampa’s workbench. One of his knees was bloody—from playing pickup baseball in the rock dirt fields behind the church, he said, and his white shirt was now yellowed and ripped. I was wearing the bikini again, a new skin, my breasts indecipherable under the bag of the unfilled cups. I moved the strap to the side to see the pale flesh under it and peeled a shred of burned skin off my shoulder. I had no idea how I looked to anyone else. I was accustomed to people focusing on my mother’s appearance out loud, telling her she was beautiful, affirming what she knew as fact. My body felt like a new thing to me without her next to it.

  I sat on the workbench. Put my hand on his Bible. It was tattered with notes and folded pages. “God’s testing me,” I said.