dipping in between her breasts. The only makeup she wears is dark lipstick, and her toenails match. Her skin is dead-girl white. Tricia and Trina are wearing batiked sarongs like their mother’s. Allie would have said,
The girls stay downstairs in the junk room, sipping lukewarm Lone Stars. That’s when they see the neighbor girl across the field, dancing with a sparkler. She moves in waves, making ribbons with the sparks. Allie is the one who stands up and calls to her.
“Brandy, Brandy! Come here. We have beer!”
Brandy motions for them to come to her, waving that sparkler around and around.
The way Melanie taught them in the car, it goes like this:
They are clapping, laughing. Tricia loves the way her mother takes to the freeways, speeding, passing, changing lanes with ease. She never curses at the other drivers, and she talks her way out of tickets. One trip, she’d blinked her eyes and said, “My little girl is sick.” Trina leaned over the seat and shivered. That officer wanted to give them a police escort to the hospital. Later, they’d laughed, and Melanie bought them all-what were they called back then? Blizzards?-at the DQ. She’d dared Grace to finish it, knowing full well she would. The things they got her to do, just to see if she would. It seems wrong, now, looking back on that, a grown woman getting a little girl to guzzle down something so big and sweet it made her puke.
The two weeks they spent on Crystal Beach in the summer of 1982 are broken bits in Tricia’s head.
When they get to Galveston, David asks, “Why are there all these motels without windows?”
“Oh,” Tricia answers, happy he is talking, “it’s because of the storms. It’s cheaper.”
“Why would you come to a beach and stay in a motel without windows?”
“Well, but you could spend a lot of time outside. And like I said, it’s cheaper.”
Murdoch’s is still there. Audrey is awake, and her father carries her on his shoulders out to the pier and back. They build a castle; well, Audrey and Tricia build it. They search for shells and bits of broken glass. It isn’t safe for a three-year-old to carry broken beer bottles but Tricia wants to show her how to make a castle sparkle. “Don’t pick up the glass yourself. Just show Mommy when you find one.” Tricia’s lost track of the years it’s been since she’s seen a beach, any beach. Everything feels high and bright and washed out. Audrey grows bored with the castles and wants to swim. “Not today,” Tricia tells her. She thought that the ocean might frighten Audrey, but as soon as she saw it, her girl wanted to cross it. The ships, bigger than castles, the way the sky seems so much higher than it does at home-it’s Tricia that feels small and afraid.
Allie Saenz was a tall, leggy girl. Her neck seemed long for her body, but she might have grown up to become a great beauty. It was always women who had something unexpected-Audrey Hepburn’s long neck, for example, or Angelina Jolie’s big, soft lips-that were so beautiful they unnerved. Allie would have been an imposing woman. Not like Melanie, who was soft and white, and she could wear anything and seem naked. There was nothing predatory about Melanie’s prettiness.
The strange new girl, Brandy, takes them behind the dunes and whispers stories. “Your mother likes to fuck,” she says. The way she says
“Yes,” the twins answer together.
“She’ll do anything.”
“It’s a lie,” Allie says. Trina is crying. But Grace is very still, alert. When they walk back, Allie whispers, “She’s like a cat in the dark, your mother.”
And they listen to the Fleetwood Mac song on the boom box, out on the balcony.
The adults are going to be up all night, out by the bonfire, drinking, dancing. People spill over from the broken house and the girls watch them. These are guys who get their muscles from working, not working out. Brandy is with them, and the way she stands in the firelight, she seems older. Maybe she’s a teenager like Sylvia. She is wearing cutoffs and cowgirl boots, her long hair gathered up at her neck in a banana clip.
“Look at her,” Grace whispers, “I think she’s sixteen.”
Brandy and Melanie dance together in the firelight, one shimmery and white, the other all golden, glinting lights. Melanie’s small hand rests gently in the curve of the younger woman’s-girl’s-waist, and for a few moments the laughter is muffled. Everyone is watching.
It’s their father who ends it, laughing, calling them all to come inside.
Sunday, the men go back to their jobs, and Sylvia leaves. Melanie makes daiquiris and lies out on the balcony, sleeping, while the girls dig a hole behind the dunes. “Just one thing, girls,” she says. “Stay away from that girl.”
“You mean Brandy?”
“Yes, that one.”
“Why?” Trina asks.
“Well, she’s kind of trashy. I know that’s not a nice thing to say. But I don’t think she even goes to school.”
“You were dancing with her,” Allie says, and catches her eye.
“Oh, that…” Melanie’s voice trails off. “Well, I’m a grown-up. You girls have fun.”
A few minutes later, the girls all sit with Brandy beneath her shanty house, looking out at the bright water. It’s noon, and the sand is a bright white, bright enough to make Allie close her eyes against it. Brandy’s house is right up on the beach.
“Don’t you worry it’ll get destroyed in one of the storms?” Trina asks.
Brandy shrugs. She’s back to looking like one of them, a girl.
“Our mother says we shouldn’t play with you,” Tricia says.
“Why?”
“Well… because.”
“That don’t make sense. She brought Allie here, and Allie’s a Mexican, right Alejandra?” She says the
“She thinks you’re trash,” Allie says.
“She don’t want to get caught, that’s all,” Brandy says.
The girls lie on their backs, looking up at the broken beams under the stilts.
“Where’s your family?” Tricia asks.
“Oh, my Uncle Cody? He’s gone on his errands.”
“Was he out there last night?” the girls want to know.
“Cody? I have a lot of uncles. They all like Melanie. Everyone likes Melanie.”
Tricia’s father died a few summers later. Or was he their father? He worked a lot. When he was home, his
