There’s a soft rap on the door, and Melissa’s voice floats like a ghost through the wood.
“Your sister is squeaky-clean. She’s picking out some clothes. We have half an hour, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There’s a brush and a comb for you, Carey, in the top drawer.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
I hear her pass, and I turn to the sink, opening the drawer below the basin. Looking inside, I find an antique silver brush and comb set with my initials engraved into the metal: C. V. B.
Carey Violet Blackburn named after my gran.
“Let me comb your hair, cookie.”
“Okay, Gran.”
“Come sit here on the footstool. That’s a good child. A cookie for my cookie, when we’re through.”
“I love you, Gran“
“And I love you, cookie-girl“
Gran had a set just like this. Jenessa, a real girlie girl, is going to go nuts when she sees it.
I think of the old horse brush we’d been using the past few years and the comb with more gaps than teeth left. I’d wither and die if Delaney or Melissa saw them. Not wasting a minute, I stride into my bedroom and pull out the brush and comb hidden under my T-shirts and bury the items at the bottom of the bin in the bathroom. I go to Jenessa’s room, grab the two garbage bags from the bottom drawer of her bureau, and arrange them on top of the rest brush and comb, for good measure.
I stand there, staring at the garbage. Once again, the heat creeps up my neck and into my cheeks.
“You’re a square peg“ Mama says, none too kindly, “bent on shovin yourself into a knothole“
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.