“That dumb-ass,” she muttered, and I recognized the voice. It was Lori-Anne, Fisher’s mother. She weaved forward once and then back. The truck started and went zooming away with the lights still off. “I think I’m going to puke.”
I said, “Lori-Anne? Are you crazy?”
“Shut up, Nonny. You snot.” She had both her hands braced on the car, holding herself upright. I hadn’t seen her since Janu-ary, when she’d driven by to drop off a stuffed bear in a Target bag for Fisher’s birthday. She’d left her car parked at the curb with the engine running, and a strange man had been sitting in the passenger seat. Bernese had not asked her to stay. She had gained another twenty or thirty pounds since then, and her face was so puffy that I wasn’t sure she could get her eyes completely open.
“Lori-Anne, you know better! You cannot go crashing around out here, drunk, slashing tires. Your mama keeps guns. Do you think she’ll pause to see who it is that’s messing with her car before she opens fire?”
Lori-Anne bent double and disappeared behind the car again, and I heard the unmistakable sound of someone gagging up a solid quart of liquor. The smell of soured peach schnapps followed in a wave, and I took a step back. A few moments later, Lori-Anne reappeared.
“You caught me,” she said. A string of glossy saliva was hanging down from her lip. Lori-Anne had big eyes, Billy Joel eyes; she always looked sad to me even when she was smiling. Now streaks of smeared mascara accentuated their natural down-tilt, and she was so pale that she practically glowed green in the moonlight. Her hair was matted and frizzed into a high crest that had gone flat on one side.
“What were you thinking?” I asked.
She waved one hand, dismissing me, and then stomped pon-derously out from behind the car, crunching her way down the gravel drive toward the street. She muttered something about “damn nosy bitches” as she lurched past me in her high-heeled boots. I followed her.
“You better come over to Mama and Genny’s place and sleep a little. Or I can drive you home.”
She flapped that hand at me again and kept walking. At the end of the drive, she headed up Grace Street. I followed her.
“What are you going to do? Stagger all the way back to Loganville?”
She looked sideways at me and then briefly stuck out her thumb in hitchhiker position and jerked it back and forth.
“That’s a great idea, hitchhiking, if you want to get raped and killed.”
“Shut up. Run go wake my mother up and tattle on me.”
“Lori-Anne, who was that boy?”
She shrugged. “Just some good ol’ boy I hooked up with at this bar. I went out and got to drinking. I was feeling lowly, and I was telling him about Mama and what all, and he said he knew a way to fix her. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She finally stopped walking, and we stood in the middle of the road, staring each other down.
Of all Bernese’s children, Lori-Anne was the one who looked the most like her. The boys all favored Lou, built slope-shouldered and hippy, just as ginger-haired and diffident as he was. They were spread out all over Georgia, busy leading what Bernese called “productive lives.” By which she meant they were married and working and spawning great herds of ginger-haired, diffident children. But Lori-Anne was female, tall for a Frett, and as black-haired and ornery as her mother.
Her full lower lip began quivering. “Are you going to tell Mama on me?”
“Oh, good God,” I said. “You’re twenty-one years old. I think it’s illegal for you to even think that, much less say it.”
“I don’t feel good,” she said.
“What on earth possessed you?”
She was weaving on her feet again, faintly. “I don’t know. I see Mama and I get crazy in my head and then I do stuff. It’s like she makes me do stuff. Please don’t tell her I was here.”
“When are you going to grow up?” I asked. “You can’t keep acting like a stupid kid. You have a daughter.”
We were almost to the Crabtrees’ parts yard, and she let out an abrupt bray of a laugh. “Naw. I do not.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You have a child, and you should probably know that your mother isn’t doing a great job raising her right now.”
Lori-Anne sat down suddenly and settled onto the curb. “She’s not mine. I guess Mama didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what,” I said.
“Mama termintated my rights,” she slurred, and her smeary raccoon eyes filled up with tears.
“Terminated your— What do you mean? Your parental rights?”
Lori-Anne nodded. “Fisher belongs to Mama now, and I got nothing. That slick lawyer of hers, that Isaac, he sat me down and talked nine kinds of shit in my face, like, ‘Blah, blah, if you can’t take responsibility, at least be responsible enough to admit it.’
Then he made me sign this long thing, and I had to go to a court and admit I’d signed it, so now I don’t have any say in what happens to Fisher. She isn’t mine anymore. So don’t you tell me what I have and don’t have. I don’t have nothin’.”
“Oh, Lori-Anne,” I said helplessly. “When did this happen?”
“Couple weeks ago.”
I sat down beside her on the curb. “I told you when you were pregnant, Jonno and I would have taken her. In a heartbeat. I still would.”
Lori-Anne shook her head. “You know Mama wouldn’t let that happen. She has Fisher squelched down under her thumb so’s I almost feel sorry for the little shit. I lived there my whole life, and she’s never going to get out from under that. She’s as fucked as me, just too dumb and little to know yet. There wasn’t nothing I could do, and then Mama screwed me, Nonny. I gave her my kid, and what did I get? Shit-all, that’s what. And she won’t help me get my bypass. Mama and her lawyer set up this trust for me, but I can’t get at it. It’s my money, she said it would be my money, and I signed his stupid papers. But it comes trickling out in bits, and even the bits go right on past me to pay my apartment and phone and shit. I can’t touch a lick of it, even when it’s going past.
Only Isaac Davids can get at it, even though it’s mine. Mama said no gastric bypass, so he said no bypass, and if I don’t get this bypass, I am going to kill myself. You tell her that.”
It was hard to make out what she was saying through the tears and slurring, but one thing was clear. She’d sold Fisher to Bernese, and it sounded like the only regret she had was that she hadn’t gotten enough money out of it. I stood up and started walking back up the street, afraid that if I stayed beside her, I would start beating her about the head and shoulders.
I stopped a few feet away from her and didn’t look at her at all as I asked, “Does Fisher know?”
Lori-Anne didn’t answer me. But of course Fisher didn’t know.
I would have seen it in her. Fisher took her first bottle lying in my arms, and she learned to say her prayers with me. She whispered her birthday-candle wishes to me and showed me her hiding spots. She brought me every cut and scrape for kissing, circling the spot with a marker to show me the place if it healed before I came. I knew Fisher through and through, and deep in her tough little body, she held a secret longing for her mama. She wanted a mama who swung her up high and called her a dumpling, and these baby hopes were hopelessly pinned on poor Lori-Anne. If Fisher knew, it would break her.
I started walking again.
“Nonny, don’t you tell my mother it was me slashed her tires,”
Lori-Anne called after me.
I hesitated. Part of me wanted nothing more than to go wake Bernese up this moment and drag her in her nightgown and her curlers down to see her shipwrecked daughter on the curb, but I couldn’t. Bernese would lay into Lori-Anne, and that would be satisfying, but tomorrow, when Lori-Anne was back in Loganville, there wouldn’t be anyone to take the blame but Fisher. I saw all too clearly the way things were working in Bernese’s thick head in the aftermath of the sale: Lori-Anne had gained weight, but it was Fisher who was being starved for it.
; “I won’t tell her, Lori-Anne. Just get out of here, okay?”
“Thank you, Nonny,” Lori-Anne said. “You swear?”
“I swear. But don’t thank me. Just go.”
I trailed up the street toward home. I didn’t look back.
Fisher slept with her nose thrust deep into my pillow. I sat beside her and stroked her hair lightly, so as not to wake her.
She had wound herself up in my blanket, and as I touched her, she stirred and turned, unfolding. Her compact body retained some of the swaybacked shape of toddlerhood. She was all belly, with a short, sturdy back and narrow hips. One of her feet was sticking out. She had the Frett feet, so wide that her toes looked slightly splayed. She used to have fat pork chops on the ends of her legs, hopeless things, obviously not made for anything more than being waved around, possibly gummed. But somehow they had changed their basic nature and realigned themselves into perfectly good working feet, without me noticing. And now the process was complete.
CHAPTER 12
THE NEXT TIME I woke up, I could hear Mama and Fisher rattling around in the kitchen, and my cell phone was buzzing like an angry wasp against the leather of my purse. I got up and answered it.
“Is Fisher over there?” Bernese barked before I was halfway through “hello.”
“She’s here,” I said, rubbing at my face.
“Get her butt home.” Bernese hung up.
So she’d seen the tires already, and Fisher would get royally chewed out for taking a night walk. But the lion’s share of the blame, I knew, would land flat-smack on the Crabtrees, and there wasn’t anything I could do to shift her mind. She would never buy that this was random vandalism. The only way she’d absolve the Crabtrees would be if I served up Lori-Anne on a platter. I wouldn’t mind, except right now the Lori-Anne platter came with a side of Fisher, and Fisher was in enough trouble.
I threw myself into some clothes and headed downstairs.
Mama was washing her breakfast dishes, and Fisher was still eating her cereal. Mama was already dressed, her hair in a loose braid over one shoulder. With Genny still in the hospital, Mama didn’t have anyone to do her face. I realized how much the powder softened her strong features and the cheerful lipsticks Genny favored drew the focus away from her cheekbones, still fine and high.
When I asked Mama if she wanted a pain pill, she shook her hand in breezy negation, the movement brisk and sure. They make my brain tired. I took a lot of Motrin, she signed. I want to go see Genny soon. Will they release her today?
I didn’t know, so I called the hospital. Genny was awake and eating breakfast. I assured her that Mama and I would be by to see her as soon as we could get away. She was nerved up, but she swore to me she wasn’t picking.
While I was talking, Fisher brought her bowl to the sink for Mama to wash. She was already dressed in a bright yellow shorts set and sandals, so as soon as Mama put the clean bowl in the drainer, we were ready to go.
The three of us went trooping across the lawn to Bernese’s house. As we passed, I glanced at her car with its three shredded tires. They looked even less salvageable in the butter-cool light of early morning.
As we came in the front door, Bernese slowly came down the stairs to meet us, stomping as if the stairs were covered in tiny Crabtrees she was smashing in effigy. We stopped in the foyer, and I could see Fisher’s face beginning to set in mutinous lines.
Her bottom lip poked out. Her eyes narrowed, and her spine stiffened as if she were bracing herself. I bent down to rub her back and whispered to her, “It’s not you, baby. You need to stop with the night-walking. You know that. But Grandma is mad about something else today.”
Mama folded her cane and put it in her bag, then reached for me, and I gave her my hands so I could interpret for her. Bernese stopped on the second step from the bottom, where she was tall enough to look down on all three of us. Her eyes blazed hot and bright, and I almost expected her to say, “I am Oz! The great and terrible!” I was startled to see her glaring gaze come to rest on Fisher. It was Fisher after all.
“Go upstairs and get your piggy bank,” Bernese said. Fisher stood solidly beside me, clutching the leg of my jeans, and then wrenched away from me and ran up the stairs, flattening herself to avoid touching Bernese as she slid past.
As soon as Fisher was gone, I said, “Good grief ! She was right next door with me and Mama.”
Bernese abandoned her post on the stairs and headed down the hall toward the kitchen. She threw a terse “Follow me” over her shoulder. Mama and I trailed after her, puzzled.
A full laundry basket was sitting on the kitchen table. Bernese rummaged around in it and pulled out a pair of Fisher’s Cin-derella panties. She held them up, stretched between her hands so I could see the picture of the pumpkin-turned-carriage, and then she dramatically flipped them around, showing me the seat.
At the top, along the elastic waistband in Bernese’s square hand, were the letters FFB, for Fisher Frett Baxter. The initials were written in black laundry marker. Under that were long, wavering black lines; the entire seat was covered in uneven stripes and crossbars. It took me a moment to realize the lines were forming huge kindergarten letters. I couldn’t quite read them. I could make out an M or an N, and Fisher’s familiar version of a J, with the top line crossing through the vertical as if it were a lowercase T.
I looked at Bernese and shrugged, trying to describe the panties to Mama at the same time.
“It says, ‘I’m a Jew.’ ” Bernese rummaged in the laundry basket and pulled out another pair, then another and another, flinging them down on the table so I could see the scrawly lines all over each of them. “She has written ‘I’m a Jew’ on the butt of every pair of underpants she owns. Every single pair. And she’s used my Sharpie, which is strictly a forbidden pen, and she knows it. I could wash these underpants in pure bleach from here till Jesus comes, and they would still come out saying ‘I’m a Jew.’ ”
Mama’s mouth dropped open, and her hand fluttered, shaping a fast H to a fast A, laughing. I felt laughter bubbling up in me as well, but one look at Bernese’s face, flushed a hectic red, told me laughing might get me shot. I squelched it, pressing my lips together, my cheeks pinking with the effort. I squeezed Mama’s hand and then shook my hand no at her, signing, Hush, she is going to have a stroke.
“I don’t think this is what you’re really angry about, Bernese,”
I said when I felt I could safely speak.
Bernese’s eyebrows lowered thunderously and she said, “It’s not? What the hell else did Fisher do?”
I realized, horrified, that she had not seen her tires yet. My mouth opened, but nothing came out. At last I said, “Nothing.
Nothing. She night-walked and slept over with us, but you know that.”
Fisher was coming down the hallway, dragging each foot behind her in a funereal march. She was carrying a small, silver-plated pig with a slot in his back. He broke apart in the middle for easy access. I’d given him to her when she was two. Last year Fisher had covered him in scratch-and-sniff Hello Kitty stickers and then scratched and sniffed them relentlessly until they tore and fuzzed over and began to look like a skin disease.
She set the pig silently on the tabletop near Bernese and then stood staring down at her toes.
“Sit down and eat your breakfast,” Bernese said. On a plate at Fisher’s place was a small mound of cottage cheese, a turkey-bacon strip, and half a peach.
“I ate with Aunt Stacia,” Fisher said.
Bernese turned her reddened eyes on Mama. “You fed her? I told you! What did you feed her?”
Mama spelled Loop Fruit, and I staunchly interpreted that for Bernese as “cereal.”
“No! She’s supposed to have protein in the morning. Protein!
Not a bunch of carbs and sugar! You’re going to turn her into a worthless chunk of fat like her mother!”
“Bernese!” I said, and Fisher stared up at her, stricken.
Bernese snatched up the pi
ggy bank and said to Fisher, “We’re buying you all new panties with your—” Then she stopped, puzzled, and stared at Fisher’s leprous pig. She gave him a shake.
Nothing. She popped him open and upended the two halves.
Nothing came out. “Where is your money?”
Fisher shrugged, looking back down at her toes.
“You’ve been saving up your allowance for weeks for that game you wanted. Where is your money?”
Fisher would not meet her eyes. “I put it in the fountain.”
Mama signed, You better stop them, but I wasn’t sure how. Part of me believed Bernese would at any moment revert to her usual self, ruffling Fisher’s hair and saying, “You’d best do better next time.” Surely she could not be as angry as she seemed over some underpants and Fisher’s habitual night walks.
“The fountain? The fountain in the center of the square? Why on earth?”
“For a wish,” Fisher said.
“Maybe you should take a break, Bernese,” I said, but it was as if I hadn’t spoken.
“You put over fifteen dollars into the fountain? Even the bills?”
Bernese’s voice was pig-iron cold.
Fisher nodded again. “It was a big wish.”
“What in God’s green meadows did you wish for that costs fifteen dollars?”
“Okay. That’s it. You really need to stop now,” I said, but Bernese flapped one hand at me, simultaneously dismissing me and telling me to shut up. She never took her eyes off Fisher.
Fisher’s shoulders curved inward in a protective hunch. Her voice was barely audible. “If I tell, it won’t come true.”
“If you don’t tell, a big spanking is about to come true.”
Bernese’s voice stayed low and dangerous, with none of her usual brash good cheer.
There was a breathless pause, and then Fisher’s shoulders straightened again. Her pout flattened into a hard line, and she looked up. The amount of sheer animal will in the room thick-ened the air as their eyes met, but she was barely audible as she said, “I wished you would die. I wished you dead and for my real mommy to come and get me.”
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