The Patron Saint of Butterflies(44)

“People who are writing stuff about God being a slob are already nuts,” I retort.

“And doomed, I guess,” Honey says, rolling her eyes.

“Yes. They’re definitely doomed.”

No one says anything for a minute. Then Honey turns around, as if someone has flipped a switch in her back. “Do you really want to go through the rest of your life thinking like a robot?”

I turn my head. “No,” I say calmly. “I want to go through the rest of my life thinking like a saint.”

“But you’re not a saint!” Honey roars. “Even the saints, when they were alive, busy leading their lives, weren’t saints, you moron! And you have to be dead for at least a hundred years before you can even be a saint! Is that what you want, Agnes? You want to live a life full of restrictions and punishments and whippings so that when you die—a hundred years after you die—someone will call you a saint?”

I stare at the cuticles on Benny’s good fingers, white and curved like small crescent moons. “If that’s what God requires of us, I do.” My voice is shaky. “It’s not up to us to question his ways.”

Honey’s face, bright with perspiration, deflates like a pink balloon. “Man, you sound just like Emmanuel,” she says, turning back around slowly.

I stare at the back of her neck. “Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Well, then you’re an idiot. It was meant to be an insult.”

My mouth feels cold. “I don’t even remember asking for your opinion.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t be offering it anymore.”

Just outside of Emmitsburg, Maryland, Nana Pete pulls into a wide parking lot and parks the car in front of a building that says WAL-MART.

“What’re we doing?” Honey asks. Nana Pete opens the door and stretches.

“Y’all are going to need a few necessities for the rest of the trip. And there ain’t nothin’ you can’t find in a Wal-Mart.”

Wal-Mart is so big inside that for a moment when we step through yet another set of automatic doors, I wonder if it is an actual city disguised as a store. The smell of stale popcorn hangs in the air and people are everywhere, pushing carts filled with blue jeans and coffee and sneakers across the shiny white floor. We arrange Benny in the back of one of the carts, piled on top of his blankets, and push him through the aisles.

“This place is awesome!” Honey says.

Nana Pete leads us down an aisle filled with backpacks and chooses three of them in different colors. “Fill ’em up,” she says, handing me a dark blue one edged in silver. “Toothpaste, soap, hairbrushes, whatever. Throw in anything you see that you think you might need in the next few days or so.” She points to a larger section of the store behind the backpacks, filled with shoes. “I’m going to go look at some sneakers. Right over there. Come over when you’re done.”

I push Benny down the large aisle across from the backpacks while Honey walks in front of us. One side is filled with hundreds of different types of toothpaste; the other is a sea of multicolored toothbrushes.

“I guess we’ll need toothpaste,” I say quietly.

Honey scans the shelves quickly and grabs a box of Orange Mango Anticavity Fluoride paste. She grabs a neon-yellow toothbrush and tosses it carelessly in her bag. “I’ll be in the next aisle,” she says over her shoulder. “We need shampoo.”

I take my time, deliberating for a while between two toothpastes called Vanilla Mint, and Superwhitening. The Vanilla Mint is bound to taste better, but will the Superwhitening make my teeth look better? Are my teeth not white enough? I can’t decide. Finally, I hold them both up in front of Benny. “Which one, Benny?”

Benny points to the Vanilla Mint with a shaky finger.

I smile. “Good. That’s the one I wanted, too.”


We do the same thing with several toothbrushes before settling on a light purple one with blue stripes running down the bristles for me and a blue one with a lightning bolt across the stem for Benny. I didn’t know toothbrushes came in colors other than white. Benny points and nods his head again, instead of answering. I wonder if the anesthesia in the hospital has made it hard for him to talk.

The next aisle has so many different kinds of shampoos that I start to feel light-headed looking at all of them. There are bright green bottles with names like Clarifying Fruit Acid Rinse and square purple ones called Coconut-Freesia Detangler. Honey has already thrown two bottles in her bag.

“I’ll be right over there with Nana Pete,” she says, pointing. Nana Pete is in view at the end of the aisle, trying to cram her feet into a pair of blue shoes. Honey looks back over her shoulder. “There’s hair ties and stuff, too, at the end of the aisle. Make sure you get a few.”

Benny stares through the slats of the shopping cart, examining the rows of hair ornaments, while I start uncapping and smelling the different shampoos. I am beginning to feel as giddy as a bumblebee flying from flower to flower. They all smell so delicious! I settle finally on a bottle of Mandarin-Mint Deep Conditioning Shampoo for dry, undernourished hair. It has promised to transform my dull, lackluster locks into a shiny, bouncy head of hair. I am just about to put it in the cart when, at the very bottom of the shelf, I notice a small, clear bottle filled with orange liquid. As I kneel down to look more closely, the inside of my lungs compress, as if filling with water. The little teardrop sticker says Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo. It’s the only shampoo we have ever used at Mount Blessing. My heart pangs for Mom, who, just two weeks earlier, soaped up my hair in the sink when I was too sick to take a shower.