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By Root 1218 0

stories in my head. My cousins loved my stories—especially the ones that featured bloodsuckers who consumed only the freshly butchered bodies of newborn babies, green-faced dwarfs promising untold riches to children who would bring them the hearts of four and forty grown men. Grey told me that I had “a very interesting mind for a girl.” But Aunt Alma came to the porch one day when I was telling one of the boys’ favorites and got so upset she looked like she would piss herself. If she had heard it all she would probably have beaten me harder than Daddy Glen. My stories were full of boys and girls gruesomely raped and murdered, babies cooked in pots of boiling beans, vampires and soldiers and long razor-sharp knives. Witches cut off the heads of children and grown-ups. Gangs of women rode in on motorcycles and set fire to people’s houses. The ground opened and green-black lizard tongues shot up to pull people down. I got to be very popular as a baby-sitter; everyone was quiet and well-behaved while I told stories, their eyes fixed on my face in a way that made me feel like one of my own witches casting a spell.

“Girl,” Cousin Grey told me, “sometimes your face is just scary!”

“Bone’s gotten almost mean-hearted,” Aunt Alma told Mama. “Something’s got to be done.”

Mama started taking me with her to the diner. There I could earn my own money washing dishes, money Mama didn’t make me save for clothes but let me spend as I pleased, mostly on secondhand books from racks at the thrift store that I could then trade in at the paperback exchange. Reese complained that I never played with her anymore, that I was always working or reading or sleeping. When school let out for the summer, I found a hiding place in the woods near Aunt Alma’s where I could camp for hours with a bag of Hershey Kisses and a book. The librarian gave me Black Beauty, Robinson Crusoe, and Tom Sawyer. On my own I found copies of Not as a Stranger, The Naked and the Dead, This Gun for Hire, and Marjorie Morningstar. I climbed up a tree to read the sexy parts over, drank water out of the creek, and only went home at dark.

Mama was still worried about me, I could tell. “Honey, are you all right?” she asked me one morning. I just shrugged and went back to the paperback copy of The Secret Garden I’d never returned to the school library. She pushed the book down and took it away, making me look at her. Her face was thinner, her skin rougher, and there were shadows under her eyes that never went away. People no longer talked about how beautiful she was, but about how beautiful she had been.

“I want you to do something for me.” She looked down at the book in her hands, at her fingers tracing the cracked spine and tape-wrapped cover. I gritted my teeth, afraid of what she might ask.

“Your aunt Ruth isn’t doing well, you know. She’s gotten a lot weaker this summer, Travis says.”

That surprised me. I had thought Mama would want to talk about how withdrawn I had become, how I never watched television with them now, or played with Reese or talked to anybody. Besides, Aunt Ruth had been sick so long everybody took it for granted. Could she really be that much worse?

“Now that Deedee and Butch are gone, Travis worries about Ruth when she’s home alone. He asked me if you might not be willing to stay out there for a while, at least until she’s better.”

Mama opened The Secret Garden to the place where I had slipped my bookmark, a piece of ribbon embossed with the Piggly Wiggly logo. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said automatically. I hadn’t seen Aunt Ruth in a while, not since the day after Christmas, when Mama had taken us over to Aunt Alma’s for dinner with all her sisters. Even then Aunt Ruth had been thin and weak, her fingers blue and swollen where they lay in her lap. What would I do if she got worse while I was with her? What if she were to die?

“Well ...” Mama closed the book and passed it back to me. “I want you to go out there for a while, at least a week or so, while Travis gets a little time for himself.”

I nodded.

“Good.” Mama sighed