“I’m just saying I hope I’m doing the right thing letting you go,” she said. “The color’s gone to your face like you got a fever. Anything you put on’s going to be sweat in you’re so excited.”
“You think I want to hear I’m going to sweat in what I got on?”
Mum shook her head and said, “Whatever’s got you worked up so you shout at your own mum that way is Satan’s doing.”
“I’m sorry, Mum. Can’t I be excited?”
“Excited’s one thing and sassy is another thing.”
“I’m just a little amazed. Calls me up and says some dumb thing about we ought to know where Willard Peyton is, then says want to go out to The Sweet Mouth?”
“And you says yes without permission. That’s the killer.”
“Oh, Mum, that’s not a killer. I got a date. That’s not a killer.” I went over and put my arms around her from behind and she patted my hands. Then she swallowed hard and come to the real point, I guess.
“You don’t know much about boys, sweetheart. Boys and cars.”
“He’s a P.K., that’s what he calls himself. A preacher’s kid.”
“Your daddy’s a preacher’s kid, too. Don’t mean they’re not human. Honey, boys can’t help themselves, see? Boys got a different makeup.”
“I know the facts of life, Mum. I took health two years ago.”
“Well, health might not have taught you boys and cars is a bad mix.”
“We’re going to The Sweet Mouth, Mum.” I sat down on my bed to get my breath.
“In a car,” Mum said, and the color was to her own face then. “Don’t let nothing happen in that car, you hear me? He stops that car, you get out, tell him you want to take a walk. A parked car off somewheres in the woods carries three passengers—a boy, a girl, and Satan.”
“Mum, are you going to put your shoes on before he comes?”
“Don’t change the subject, Opal Ringer. I never met a guest at the door in my bare feet yet, and you know it.”
“I don’t know it. No one ever came to the door for me.”
“I got time to put on my shoes and you got time to hear me out.”
“I’m listening,” I said. I hugged my arms in my underwear, heart pounding.
“Oh honey lamb, I want this to be a nice time. He’s a nice boy, too. It isn’t that. It isn’t that.”
“Guy Pegler’s son’s gotta be saved. All Daddy said was make sure he’s saved.”
“Satan tempts the saved more often than the unsaved, honey. The unsaved’s already in his camp, don’t you see? He’s a nice boy, couldn’t wish nicer for you if we’d ordered it from the Lord, but I’m just telling you be on your guard. Satan loves a setup, honey.”
“Well I’m no setup.”
“I’m talking about a boy and a car, honey. That’s a setup. You just remember something my own mum told me. Promise?”
“I promise.”
“You just remember no one’s going to buy the cow if he can get the milk free.”
Remember the first time I ever came into The Sweet Mouth Soda Shoppe with him?
It was this sweet summer night with a wind so soft and warm, felt like a kitten crawling past you an inch from your face, just barely brushing by your skin, and the moon beginning yellow in the deep-blue sky, stars starting to pop out, a plane flying through them you watched to be sure was a plane and not a felling star to wish on.
He held open the door for me and I just stood there, so you probably saw that, and he said, “Go ahead,” and I did.
Every single one of you was in there, it seemed like.
I know all your faces so well.
Look what the cat dragged in, I think you were saying. Get a load of who just waltzed in with who.
Not a one of your knees ever shook the way mine shook that June night, and under my arms I’d already soaked though so I kept my elbows pinned to my waist, my heart ready to tear through my skin and take off on its own if I’d let it.
He said, “All the booths are taken. Do you mind sitting at the counter?”
I do secret things to make things more, like fixing in my head the song playing when we came in, wrote it down when I got home in the back of my Bible.
Wrote: Baby, the Rain Must Fall.
Under it, the date, and S. Mouth. S. Shoppe.
That was the night no one there spoke to me. “Hi” to Jesse; to Jesse, “Hello!” “How’s it going?”
But my eyes were not met.
You think I don’t remember that?
I still do.
I guess that was the night he told me about getting Yellow from the animal shelter the next day, and giving him to V. Chicken.
Half of what he said I heard, and half I didn’t, and some of what he said I only heard the tail end of.
I was trying to pick up my glass of cherry Coke without letting the sweat smell get out from under my armpit. I was trying to watch the ones in the booths when they couldn’t tell I was watching them. I could probably still sit down and write out what every girl in that place was wearing. I was working out ways to get the glass to my lips without the rim hitting my teeth, beating out a tattoo. I was trying to curl my fingers under and hide my nails so he wouldn’t see they were short, not like theirs so long and pointed, and mine had no moons, was the first time I’d even known I didn’t have them, made a vow then and there to get them.
When the little balls of fire started up toward the ceiling, Jesse asked me, “Did you ever do that, Opal?”
“What are they?”
Everyone was laughing and pointing at them.
Jesse passed me a little wad of tissue from a bowl on the counter.
Across the tissue in blue writing was
