If You Find Me(25)

Like silver brushes would make me fit.

“Fake it through until you make it true,” Mama also said, for all of the one month she went into town for meetings. She’d been one of many who looked old before their years.

“For the first time, I wasn’t the only woman missin teethI” she says, her cackle leechin into a long, hackin’ cough.

“Was it a good meetin’?”

“We chain-smoked, drank free tea, and exchanged hard-knock tales, if that’s what you mean. I even made me a new meth connection.”

I vow to follow Mama’s slogan, which sounds very smart to me. Jenessa will have to do the same. Fake it through until we make it true. Be modern girls, normal girls, girls with a second chance.

“Fifteen minutes!” says Melissa with another rap on the door. I hear a softer, lower rap, and I know she has Nessa in tow.

I brush my hair down my back, pulling it over my shoulder to brush the furry ends. I fold my towel in half, sad to see it go, and hang it neatly over the bar on the bathroom wall.

If I don’t want to use a length of rope for a belt, then I only have one viable pair of jeans, the ones I’ve been wearing three days now. Melissa’s already washed our other clothes, but I haven’t been able to part with these jeans, not even for a twelve-minute wash cycle, and even if the clothesline is viewable from my bedroom window.

I sniff the material, the familiar wood smoke filling my nose. But then again, I don’t want to stink. Unsure, I pour a handful of baby powder into my hand and rub it into the crotch, inside, where no one can see.

My only other T-shirt has a peace sign on the front, like the sixties, Mama said, although I don’t know what that means. Sixty apples? Sixty elephants? Sixty peace signs?

On further thought, I grab up my undershirts in a big ball and throw those in the garbage, too. They tower on top of the rest, but I don’t care. I pull on a tank top instead and pull my T-shirt over that, which smells okay—like pine scent and fake sunshine. “Fabric softener,” Melissa called it. I pull on clean socks and exit my room with my cowboy boots in tow, careful not to jostle mud onto the clean floor.

In the hallway, I applaud Ness in her pink-and-yellow T-shirt with an orange puppet on the front. Mama called the puppet “Elmo.” On her feet are blue Keds, an old pair of Delaney’s. They fit perfectly, and almost look new. My sister’s blond curls shine, gathered off her forehead with a pink ribbon Melissa tied into a bow at one side.

“You look beautiful,” I say, my eyes welling.

Jenessa runs over and hugs my legs, and we stand there for a moment, clutching each other. I take her hand and follow Melissa downstairs.

“Thanks, Mel. The girls looks great,” my father says, grinning. “Everyone ready?”

He reaches out and touches one of Jenessa’s curls. She burrows her head into his hand, and my father blinks, his voice gruff.

“You’re a little lovebug, aren’t you?”

Ness breaks away and runs out the door when she sees Shorty chewing a bone on the front porch. He abandons it for her, and she hugs him close, her face buried in his fur.

“I still can’t get over it. Two peas in a pod, those two,” my father says, shaking his head.

“The only animals we had were for dinner,” I tell him, and he stares at me, his grin receding like the mountains during some of the worst storms, the ones where the roof leaked into rusty metal pots while we huddled together on the cot for warmth, our toes and lips blue.

Jenessa reappears and tugs on my father’s hand, pulling him out the door. I note the emotions that play across his face—happiness, sadness, shock, regret—before he tears his eyes from mine.

Gravel crunches under the tires as we bounce down the driveway. Nessa kneels backward on the seat, waving at Melissa on the porch until we can no longer see her.

“Turn around, Ness, so I can do the seat belt.”

[page]First, I plop each of her feet on my thigh and tie her shoes— the laces are always coming loose—making bunny ears with the laces.

“Where did you learn to do that?” my father asks, astonishment in his voice.

“You,” I say quietly as another memory slips into place, like a puzzle piece that knows where it belongs even before I do.

I see myself, a little girl from another world, riding in the truck with her daddy.

“Oh no. My soos are bwoken.”

I pout, wavin my feet in the air from my car seat in the back.

“Want me to make you bunny ears?”

“Bunny eawrs! Bunny eawrs!”

My father keeps his eyes on the road, his knuckles yellow-white as he grips the wheel.

Mama’s voice scratches through my mind, too.

“That son of a bitch left us to fend for ourselves.”

“But you said we left him.”

Her swift backhand knocks me off my feet.

“Don’t you sass me.”

“Sorry, Mama.”

My nine-year-old voice is tinier than a chipmunk’s chirp as I clutch my cheek, tears stingin’ my eyes.

“Damn right we left him. I had to save my girl.”

“I know, Mama.”

“And don’t you be tellin no strangers our b’ness. Family b’ness don’t leave this family.”

I nod vigorously, her viselike grip dentin’ my upper arm.