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  Lyle looked sad. He understood my grief maybe, or was trying to. It was more than I could say for anyone else. “Vern said something interesting the other day,” he said. He paused. He shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you.”

  I clasped his arm. I could smell Perd’s deodorant, metallic and peppery. “I’m a woman,” I told him, confident this time, my voice steady.

  “Something’s going to take this town over, and it’s bigger than all of us combined. It might take time for everyone to get it, to really understand it, but once they do, the gifts will know no bounds.”

  “What could be more powerful than when Vern brought the rain?”

  “It’ll be bigger than that. But people are afraid of power when it comes down to it.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, wishing it were true.

  Then Lyle hugged me. I was stiff at first but then I softened into it. We stood there like that, and the skin of my stomach brushed against the hot button on his Levi’s. I didn’t know what to do with my feet so I left them their natural way, toes turned in.

  When he kissed me on the forehead I held very still.

  It was nothing, I decided later in the craft room, sleep nowhere to be found. But for a reason I wasn’t sure of, this nothing seemed like something to keep to myself, so I did.

  Chapter 6

  Sunday morning rushed me like a pack of wild-eating dogs, and Grandma Cherry tried to do me a kindness. She brought out one of my mother’s pageant dresses, laid it across the bed, and patted it like a prize.

  It was an off-the-shoulder tangerine organza gown with sheer sleeves, points that looped onto the middle fingers, tight through the bodice and poufed at the hips. It was the dress my mother had worn when she’d won the Miss Peaches Supreme pageant when she was just a few years older than me. She had qualified to Miss California but by then was craving cinnamon rolls and pork rinds, performing, against her hopes and dreams, the ordinary burden of pregnancy.

  “It’s perfect for your first day back,” Cherry said. “A real showstopper.”

  I didn’t want to stand out today. I wanted to blend into the walls, to reappear so slowly no one would remember I had ever gone. But I saw she was sincere and I felt seriously if I didn’t wear the dress I would pay for all eternity. More fly duty. More coddling her and feeding her bologna sandwiches while she crooned melancholy. The dress hit midcalf, a strange length for such a gown, like my mother had caught a wild hare and chopped off the bottom to run through the crops. Maybe she did, I thought. But she had never told me such fabulous stories.

  IN THE CHURCH parking lot Cherry looked into the sun. “Land burning right up on account of your mother.”

  But I stopped hearing her, because there it was: my mother’s car, sitting where she’d left it.

  The tires had been slashed and the body of the Rabbit laid down dead in the dirt. Red and black crosses had been painted on the hood, the windows were smashed in, and I wanted to reach through the shards to grab at her hairbrush on the seat. I remembered the way she used to drive through town in the months before she left, a plastic cup full of iced beer that she liked to pretend was soda between her knees, how she’d bring the coldness to her forehead and say she would die of the heat and at that time I didn’t think a person could die from heat but now I was beginning to think different.

  The Bible study girls rushed over, putting their fingertips lightly upon my arms like I could be anything, a girl, a mirage. I saw Denay glancing behind us to see everyone watching. Her smile shone brighter with an audience. “You’re back from the shadow of your whore mother’s sin!”

  Taffy tilted her head up weakly at me, like we’d never met before. I wanted to reach out and shake her, but they guided me from the car and toward Vern. When he saw me he hugged himself.

  “Welcome back, dear one,” he said. “We’ve been preparing for your return.”

  My heart filled my throat. Daughter to father, my body pulled itself close to him and I pressed my head to his chest. I felt there must be endless truth and wisdom with which he could cover me. He would say something about my mother that would bring it all into clearness. Part of me wondered if my mother would be brought back into the light by me simply standing in our kingdom, returning to me with the same dark magic that had made her disappear. But my mind flashed then to the sin I had steeped myself in since she’d been gone, and shame vibrated within me. Of course I’d need to convince Vern of my worth again, all the tawdry books I’d been reading, all my spooling doubt. “Bless me,” I said.

  He put a hand on my head and breathed in. “Faith wavering, full of sinful wondering.”

  I felt his body shift away from me. His head craned to the side and his gaze fell to the next member. I stood still. “Can you bless her return?” I asked.

  “She was banished,” he said through a locked smile, waving to the Body. The crowd pushed me and our connection was broken.

  “Sorry for your loss,” said one of the choir women. She wore a large wooden cross around her neck, her eyes bugged out and her smile was sloped from a stroke she’d had a few years before. She came in close to my ear. “My own mother died when I was a girl. I was never the same.”

  “My mother’s not dead.”

  “My mother never found Vern,” she went on. “I can feel her soul burning in here.” She placed a hand on her chest. “It’s not heartburn, either. It’s my mother’s soul.”

  “Mother’s soul my foot,” Cherry said, rolling her eyes as she led me on and into our same pew where we always sat, now without my mother.

  Vern walked past us toward the stage. He seemed smaller somehow and his hands were nervous, pulling at his blue cape. His curls were stale, frizz flying from them as if he’d just woken up. I closed my eyes and opened them again, wondering if I was seeing things.

  “Church,” Vern said. A smile broke over his face. His hands went up to summon the Lord and a burst of gold God glitter rained down upon us. “I had a vision last night. God told me it was finally time to tell you the next unfolding of our plan to save Peaches from destitution. See, I knew I couldn’t do it alone. I knew I would need each of you to remain steadfast in your assignments. And I knew, like any great leader, that I would need a solid group of young men to be a power force among us. A new brethren to pull us through this trying time.”

  Lyle emerged from the back of the church and down the center aisle holding a foot-long bejeweled wooden cross out in front of him. The rest of the boy’s club followed in their robes of shiny red. Under the robes I knew most wore dungarees or coveralls, white holey shirts with high-hitched jeans, but the robes covered all that and made them into other men. They moved in unison like a marching band, forming a tight line on the stage, matching pinned lips. Their presence all together like that was unnerving.

  Vern put his hands on Lyle’s shoulders and more glitter floated down from the ceiling. Cherry stuck her tongue out to catch some. I looked into the rafters and thought for a moment I caught a glimpse of Trinity Prism, Vern’s teenage daughter, with her hand thrust out. But it couldn’t be.

  “These young men are humble servants,” Vern said. “Obedient and watchful, keeping their sisters and fellow men on God’s track. They will bring GOTS into a new age with new rules and new ways. Are you all ready?”

  New sounded wonderful. New sounded different. And different was what any of us wanted. We wanted to be the Raisin Capital of the World like we were before, but now we wanted even more. I remembered the Sun-Maid men inspecting Grampa Jackie’s vines, shaking his hand and signing money promises to paper. I’m sure he was rich, but farmer rich is different. He and Cherry still reused paper towels, spread their jam finely. Now we wanted life to be as gold as God glitter.

  It seemed there would be no mention of my mother during the sermon, or me, and I relaxed a bit. I let my eyes blur over the cherub in the stained glass, wondered where my mother was at this moment. She was in new places with people I had never met. I liked to imagine she had beg
ged the Turquoise Cowboy to wait for me, but they were too reckless. My mother could be that way but usually she would remember I existed at some point. Maybe as they’d driven away she imagined she was taking a vacation.

  I started to think of all the exotic places she might be, the things she was wearing, but Cherry nudged me out of my fantasy. Lyle was standing before me, hand out. “Be baptized again,” he said. I took his hand and let him lead me to the stage. Baptism was always a relief to me. A way to start over. In the past when there was water it was a way to pretend I was swimming, but there was no bathtub filled with water now. Not even soda today. There was nothing but Lyle and me.

  He produced a small lighter from his robe and held it up so the Body could see. It was the same kind Sapphire Earrings bought every time he went to the Wine Baron to get his cigarettes. Because of him our apartment had one in every drawer, fallen from the pockets of his jeans left on the floor. I saw Lyle’s hand shake.

  He brought the lighter to the bottom of my mother’s organza dress and made a flame. Nothing happened. I gathered the hem up in my arms.

  “What are you doing?” I said to him.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  I looked to Vern, who was sitting cross-legged on his dog bed at the far side of the stage. He wanted Lyle to perform a wonder. I thought of the time Vern had brought in a rattlesnake to handle and when he opened the cage it slithered away down the aisle and disappeared, never to be seen again. I could still hear the sound the rattler made.

  “Lacey,” Vern said, reprimanding me with just my name.

  I wanted to do the right thing. I looked to Cherry, who would surely call it, come to the stage to get me. Perhaps this was a test of her devotion to me as her granddaughter. All possibilities swam in my head other than what was suddenly happening, a flame licking my leg and the organza blooming with fire.

  The flame crawled up the dress bodice and I screamed. I threw myself on the ground and beat the fire with my hands. The Body cheered. Am I hurt? I wondered. My panic had numbed me. Then I was wet. Brown liquid came from above.

  I patted the dress, its once-floaty skirt a brown mush now, ruined. The Bible study girls gathered around, hugging me and praising God. I felt rays of joy and heaven being sent toward me, and my face contorted of its own volition into what felt like a crazed smile. It sent the Body into spirit song and my skin tingled with their light. “Home,” Vern said, standing over me. Home. The Body wanted me, I could see. I was so highly prized. I had never been called to the stage before for such a demonstration. I had always been in the crowd, watching on as people transformed in loud dramatic displays. At one time my mother would have been proud of me up here like this, but now I imagined her embarrassed by me, above us all, a luxurious movie star, probably in at least one commercial at this point. I wished both things could be true, our faith and my mother’s wandering, but they could not. I pushed my mother away.

  “Go ahead and heal her burn,” Vern said to Lyle.

  I looked down at my exposed thigh where there was a red mark, but it was a scrape that had already been there and no longer hurt. Lyle covered it with his hand and said a low garbled prayer. Vern announced me healed.

  “Do you feel foolish for your doubt?” Vern asked, reaching down to help me up. I nodded, looking into his eyes. We all knew he could read us so clearly, he could pull truth from any of us with a glance. I looked away. I did feel foolish. But over what, I was still trying to understand.

  Chapter 7

  Mother here, Mother gone. Lyle the old way, Lyle the new way.

  I SAT ACROSS from him in the shed and tried to concentrate on my Bible though I was hungry and thirsty. I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm—my great army that I sent among you.

  “Why bother sending the army on us if He’s only going to repay us in the end?” I said.

  Lyle looked up as if I’d shaken him from a deep fog. There was something especially restless about him today. “You can thank your sister Eve,” he said. “We could all be living in paradise if it wasn’t for her.” He looked around the shed. “Where’s that Cherry?”

  “Probably stroking her mice, looking out over that nice green grass.”

  He smiled. I figured he was thinking about the lawn. Maybe he’d ask how it came to be, and I could tell him about the strange lawn painter just to feel my voice consider the whole encounter out loud. I wouldn’t tell him that I felt proud of that green grass like I had earned it somehow, or that the image of the man’s tattooed arm hanging from his truck window had caused a rush to where the bikini bottom pressed, a clear slick left on the fabric like evidence.

  “I think you’re ready, Lacey,” Lyle said, and for a moment I thought he meant ready to speak of the lawn painter.

  “I’ve been thinking day and night how to tell you,” he said. “But I finally decided it’s not something I can explain with words.” A red flush cropped up on the skin of his neck and I realized he wasn’t restless, he was nervous. I had never seen him quite this way, but suddenly it was as obvious as the heat. He was here to tell me my mother had been found dead somewhere. Surely there would be no right words to tell a girl her mother was dead, surely a person would look as nervous as this.

  “Lie down” is what he said, but I was busy thinking, she’s dead, she’s dead. In my mother’s romances the characters always asked if the person was sitting down for bad news. How the town sheriff would arrive at the door to report a gone and loved soldier and the woman would faint into his arms. Let’s get you lying down, the sheriff would say.

  He got me lying down. My body tingled all over. I waited for the news to crush me. The light shifted under the door, the light shifted over the skylight Grampa Jackie had put in years before.

  Lyle swung a leg over me and sat across my hips and his face was kindly but his knees worked to pin me down. “Vern says I have a perfect holiness inside me and it’s time I give it to you.”

  “How did it happen?” I said, stupid heart still set on my mother.

  “Are you faithful?” he asked.

  And before I could answer, Lyle’s lips landed on mine hard and dry. He pulled back and paused, waited for me to do something, I think, but I didn’t do anything. My first kiss was over. I hadn’t known it could happen like this, happen to me.

  I tried to sit up but he held me down again.

  “It’s fine,” he said as he unzipped his pants. Flesh and fur sprang out. It reminded me of one of Cherry’s squirrels for a moment, my mind a flurry of familiar objects trying to make sense of this new one before me, this eye-scalding thing I was never supposed to see but was now so close to I could smell. It was risen, pressed to his stomach. The tip was wet. “Don’t worry,” he said as he pulled my bikini to the side. He paused for a moment. “It’s my assignment, too.” He sounded almost sorry.

  I remembered my mother telling me that sex hurt the first time, that it was a pinch, a sharp pain and sometimes there was blood. I felt nothing as he pushed inside me. Good, I thought. Then this must not be sex.

  I turned my head to the side and watched my hand shift on the blanket as he moved over me. I stretched it out and touched the back of my fingers to the dirt floor. Part of me was off the blanket. My hand was doing what it wanted. I made a fist then released, fist then release. I floated around and saw Lyle from the ceiling, saw him speed up, heard his breath run fast and then stop. Run again, and then he collapsed on top of me like he’d been hit from behind in a car crash.

  “Done,” he said into my neck. No kisses now. No looking at me now. He leaned on my hair as he got up, pulling it. He zipped, combed his fingers through his own smooth hair, the same color as mine. I saw a coat of shame wrap around him. He rushed to collect his things.

  “This is just for us to know,” he said, as he walked out. “At least for now.”

  My assignment, my assignment. All this wondering, when my assignment was just ly
ing down. Something anyone could have done. Something people did all the time. I couldn’t help but think I’d been tricked. That maybe I had dreamed it, or perhaps I was being tested. All the prayers I’d prayed to be useful to my church, all that was needed was this. What would become of Lyle’s holiness now that he had given it to me? I pictured a glimmering gem coming out of him and passing into my place, going up up up inside me, making my faith perfect, too.

  As the light in the shed shifted dim, I got up and paced as if there was something to be done. A thick drool of clearish white dripped down my thigh. I squatted over the quilt and watched it fall out of me. There was no gem. This was sticky and in the heat it smelled like the bleach I used to kill the fly larvae. I screamed into my hand.

  Where did women go when this happened?

  Chapter 8

  The body always knows.

  I ran the land and felt the valley consume me, push me far, far down Old Canal Road. Barefooted in the bikini, hair blazing out behind me, my hips sharp in the night air. The valley floor sank thirteen inches this past year . . . pulling water from underground aquifer ducts . . . the ground is deflating like a leaky air mattress. The newscaster called the cause of the sinking subsidence. Vern called it wrath.

  The Stam family came roaring up the road behind me, then slowed. Wiley rolled his window down, a toothpick hanging from his bottom lip. “Hey, girl,” he said, his eyes consuming me. He didn’t offer a ride or anything useful. In fact, his presence seemed solely to make me uncomfortable or to prompt me to offer him something, of which I had nothing to offer. I nodded in return. Sharon sat in the backseat next to her brother, staring at me openmouthed, like she could read what had just happened. But they could not look at me and know. My body had enclosed what happened somewhere inside.

  My feet ached but it didn’t matter. What did matter now? I wondered. Either I had acted in complete faith and would be well blessed and forever a bounty would cover the land, hearty kale and globes of citrus, the grapes of faith, jobs would return, the raisin parade would fill the streets, and we’d live in God’s paradise once more. Or I had committed an unspeakable sin. Both would change everything.