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Mockingbird Excerpt

Chapter One

When you get down to the bottom of the bottle, as Momma used to say, this is a story about being pregnant. I want that clear right from the start. There are no car chases and no gun battles. Now, it's true that mine was not a completely ordinary pregnancy. There was some magic mixed up in there, and a few hundred million dollars in oilfield speculation, and a natural disater, and some people who died, and some others who wouldn't stay quite dead. It would be lying to pretend there wasn't prophecy involved, and an exorcism, and a hurricane, and I refuse to lie. But at its heart, this is a story about how I became a mother.

It starts the day we buried Momma.

It is embarrassing to admit that your mother can see the future, read minds, perform miracles, and raise the dead. It was something I held against her for a long time, this agonizing moment when a kid on my baseball team or a high school classmate would ask me if the stories were really true, and I would have to say yes. It would have been easier--and safer--to say No, to say that Momma was a bit eccentric but had no special powers. But I was always a willfully, rudely honest little girl. If someone asked me point blank, I had to admit that my mother was a witch, and the little gods who ruled her were real.

When I told folks what Momma could do they figured I was fibbing, or that my sister and I suffered from delusions brought on by too much drinking, blows to the head, or the repressed memories of incest or devil worship. Now, it is true my mother was a liar. It is true she drank too much and she slapped me more than once when I was growing up. But I promise you, worshipping the riders was the farthest thing from her mind. They were Life's collection agents. When Momma drew too much on her gifts, the riders would take their due. Unless you worship the IRS, drop the whole idea that Momma loved her gods.

Momma's magic was real. When she predicted IBM stock would go up, it went up, and the money her investors made was real too. Once I even saw Momma resurrect the dead, although that went so badly that we all agreed, even her, never to do it again.

It wasn't exactly a person that Momma raised from the grave. Actually, it was Geronimo the frog.

I better explain that.

The chief feature of my parents' house in Houston, Texas, was the glorious garden in our back yard. Momma left the patio doors open constantly, so it was hard to tell where the garden ended and our kitchen began. My little sister Candy and I spent a lot of time in the garden, hiding from Momma and catching frogs. Now, the early '70s in Texas were a doll-crazy time for little girls. Besides a legion of Barbies, I had a bunch of Kiddles, little weensy dolls whose clothes would fit a good-sized frog just right. I still have Polaroids of Geronimo in a pink doll tutu that is to die for. At first Geronimo didn't like being caught and dressed up, but he seemed to get used to it. After we had been acquainted a while, he would come squat on our hands and let us dress him up, as long as we bribed him with meal worms and doodlebugs .

Just after my eleventh birthday I found Geronimo dead, floating in the little concrete pond under the banana tree. Candy and I were inconsolable. At first Momma was sympathetic, but soon our whining and sniveling commenced to aggravate her. I was a sulky girl at the best of times, and made life miserable for everyone with my moping. Finally Momma took the frog over to the cabinet where she kept her gods and stuffed him in The Preacher's cubby and lit a candle and told us to get out of the room. Then she did something she had seen in New Orleans when she was younger. I never knew the details, but the next morning we found Geronimo in the garden again, shouldering his way heavily through the leriope and monkey grass.

But he wasn't really alive. He never ate, he never sang. He just staggered after us as if hungry for our warmth. He was worse than dead: he was a Zombie Frog, a horrible pathetic remnant of himself. Candy, who was only seven, started screaming whenever he came near. Finally I squashed Geronimo flat with a shovel from the garden shed, which I then stood on, pinning him to the flagstone path, while Candy ran and got an empty milk carton. I could feel the shovel jerking and trembling under my foot as Geronimo tried to get away. When Candy got back I opened the spout end of the carton and shoved Geronimo inside. Then I held it closed with my foot while Candy got the big stapler off Daddy's desk. Together we stapled the end of the milk carton shut and then we crept out of the yard and ran to the storm drain at the end of the block and stuffed the milk carton into its big dark mouth, with poor Geronimo still bumping and hopping inside.

It was an awful episode. I mention it as an example of exactly how real Momma's magic was, though it wasn't always that ghastly. Still, I have to admit I as they lowered Momma's coffin into her grave I wasn't crying and grieving like Candy was. I was listening for the sound of Momma bumping and knocking against the lid, trying to get out.

My name is Antoinette Beauchamp, pronounced BEECH-um, and I am my mother's daughter only in DNA. I have a degree in mathematics from Rice University and am a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries. I hate lying. Leave the prayers and possessions and the riders in the wardrobe, the stories of Sugar and the Widow and the Little Lost Girl--leave all that buried with Momma, along with the tears and the scenes and the Bloody Marys. Buried with her where they belong.

---

Even in death my mother was a schemer. Somehow she got herself planted in Glenwood, Houston's most exclusive cemetery; I do not doubt it gave her great satisfaction to be buried beyond her means.

Momma should have been stashed at Cherryhurst, or stuck under a few feet of sod at the old Confederate cemetery on Memorial Drive. Or she could have been cremated, that would have been like her; her ashes sprinkled into the sea at Galveston, or worked into a clay sculpture and stuck in the garden, or mixed up with lime juice and tequila and consumed at a wake where shadow-eyed Zydeco gypsies with cat familiars would play on sweat-stained accordions with mother-of-pearl buttons and cracked ivory keys. Or she could have disappeared, no body left to find: vanished into the jungle in Costa Rica, or fallen off a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico, or plucked up by a tornado; one pointy-toed witch's boot, size 7, left standing in the field below.

Any of those endings would have made sense.

But for her to die of cancer and be buried in Glenwood: that was a travesty. Glenwood is the cemetery of Houston's Establishment, chock full of Hoffheinzes, Holcombes, Cullens, and Friedrichs's; a little Greek Revival village of white marble cenotaphs chiseled with the same names you see in the lobbies of the city's museums and theaters and hospitals. Howard Hughes is buried in Glenwood. Cardinal Richelieu probably should be, along with Lorenzo di Medici and Vasco de Gama. But my mother has no business there.

Usually I am careful and scrupulous and I pay attention to things. But in the week after Momma died, my focus seemed to slip away. Funeral plans and insurance forms and calls to relatives fluttered over and around me, half-noticed, like birds passing through a garden. I wasn't sad, not for a minute. Candy was. Candy cried and cried. But I felt no grief. Just that lack of focus, and a tightness in my chest almost like anger.

The first few days of being dead are very rushed. When old Mr. Friesen offered to take care of things, I made the mistake of letting him. I had been dreading what Candy would suggest: hair fetishes, voodoo, St. Anthony's candles at the reception, midnight masses--God knew what kind of spookery. At the time, it seemed easier to let Bill Friesen handle it.

My mistake. Never, never, never be beholden to anyone.

By the time I realized Mr. Friesen meant to plant Momma in Houston's most exclusive neighborhood--you can't depart more dearly than at Glenwood--it was too late to make other arrangements. So Glenwood it was, on a glorious November afternoon. The gulf coast breeze blew softly through the ash and the towering white-barked sycamores, the massive live-oaks and the tremendous lanky pines whose limbs branched upward like green ball lightning. The grave was a long black gash of turned earth amid the sweet grass. Leaf-shadow trembled over it from a live oak so old its limbs were furred with moss and ferns that had rooted in its ancient bark.

William Friesen stood before us, reminiscing at the grave-head, white-haired and misty-eyed. "In 1958 I saw a pretty girl at the counter of the House of Pies," he said. "I didn't think much about women at the time, I was working long hours at the office, but suddenly there she was, and there I was, with my nice suit and my pretty smile. I reckoned I had a chance. So I walked over to her stool and asked if I could buy her a piece of pie."

We had all heard this story many times.

"She turned to me and said, 'I'm not the woman you will marry, so don't get your hopes up. But if you still care to buy me that slice of pie, I b'lieve I'll try the pecan.'" Bill laughed. "Well, she had me there, didn't she? I couldn't back out after that. I ordered the pie and tried to keep up my end. 'Why be so sure we won't be married, little lady? This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.'

"'Oh yes, we'll be friends,' this gal said. 'But your wife will be a blond, five foot four, with small hands and a pretty face.' Well my jaw dropped at that, and dropped again one week later when I met the woman she had described." Bill Friesen looked fondly at his wife Penny, who stood beside him at the grave head.

I am fifteen. I have just applied for a summer temp job at Friesen Investments and Bill Sr. has told this story to me during my job interview. Momma is driving me home. "Expurgated old turd," she laughs. "What I really said was, 'Your wife will have small hands, cold feet, little breasts that turn up at the nipples, and lots and lots of money.' Lord but he blushed. Though I dare say he doesn't remember it that way now. He's very good at forgetting things, Bill is. Too bad for poor Penny."

But in the end it was poor Penny standing at the side of the grave, while Momma lay at the bottom of it.

"Well," Bill Sr. went on, "Elena Beauchamp was right about my wife, and over the years she was right about a lot of other things. She had a rare talent, a God-given gift. I learned to listen carefully to what she had to say. My family has always been the better for it." This was certainly true. It was Momma's advice that made the Friesen's rich. Unfortunately, Momma was even better at spending money than she was at making it, and we never did prosper nearly so well as Bill Sr. had. There's probably a parable in there somewhere. Momma could have found it. She had a story for everything.

At the front of Momma's plot, beyond the newly turned earth, stood her headstone, black marble with steel letters inset:

Two weeks earlier the hospital had sent her home to die with a day nurse and a supply of morphine. The weather had been beautiful beyond hope. We moved a chaise lounge from the first floor into the garden and Momma lay on it all day amid the monkey grass and hibiscus, watching the lizards scoot across the stone paths and listening to the mockingbirds.

After an hour or so she asked me to bring her a glass of ice tea with a wedge of lime in it and a shot of vodka. She also asked for a notebook and a pen, but she was too weak to use them. I held her glass and let her take the tea in little sips, lips working, head shaking, bald from the radiation therapy. Then she made me write down that epitaph and read it back to her, twice, and promise to call the stone-cutter so the headstone would be ready for her funeral. The epitaph was a message meant for me, I know that, but Momma wouldn't come out and say so, and I wouldn't ask.

She died the afternoon they called to say the stone was ready. Houston is a refinery town, covered in a hazy blanket of industrial hydrocarbons of the sort the make a sky beautiful, and that day the sunset was magnificent; long halls and galleries of cloud turning peach in the tall sky, then bright breathing gold, then smoldering down and going out in a sky darkly blue and luminous, like the sea.

---

My mother could see the future. My mother said 'give me some sugar' when she wanted our kisses, which she required like a Roman empress, and like tribute we surrendered them. My mother made Bloody Marys and drank them in the afternoons, walking around our tile floors in her stocking feet with her hips sashaying. There was a hole in my mother's life that she never talked about, stretching from the time she quit high school to the day she met Bill Friesen. My mother knew a hundred ways to cry. My mother once broke every mirror in our house, smashing them with the heel of one white pump. She must have slapped me a hundred times and twice she cut my cheek with the diamond wedding ring my father bought her in New Orleans. I still remember every color of her nail polish: pearl, pink, carmine, true red, scarlet, and gold too and silver, like the black girls wear. My mother took an hour to put her make-up on and I will remember the smell of her hairspray always. My mother wanted to go to Paris, she had boxes of oil pastels and watercolors and she painted me the most beautiful birthday cards in the world, great blooming hydrangeas or sand-colored starfish or fine watercolor horses, bay, chestnut, dapple and palomino. My mother lied and lied and lied, to me and everybody.

There are some gifts which may not be refused.

I refuse.

---

After the burial Daddy and Candy and I went back to the house to wait for our condolence visits. I meant to mop the tile floors and order some food in, at least muffins and coffee...but instead I wandered through the kitchen, where pots of thyme and sage and sweet basil rested along the window ledge, along with two bushy mints Momma kept to flavor her iced tea. Overhead, wire baskets full of onions and garlic hung next to ropes of dried peppers: red and yellow chilis, green Anaheim peppers, and the darker, rounder, hotter poblano peppers that make the best chili rellenos; and also jalapeños and firecracker peppers and explosive habaneros that looked like cherry bombs and blew up in your mouth.

Leaving the kitchen I wandered by the long farmhouse table and the french doors that open into the garden. Finally I turned to face the tall cabinet where Momma kept her Riders.

All her life, my mother was afflicted by possessions. Days might go by, or weeks, or even months in which she was only herself; but sooner or later she would pull out that cursed magic Gold Card and ring up a purchase against her talent. She would ask the riders for help, which they would give—at a price. In exchange for their services, they would come into her head, banishing her God knows where, and for an hour or two these small gods could walk the earth.

After a rider left and Momma came back, she would be confused, shocky and shaking with exhaustion. She never had any memory of what the rider had done or said while in her head. It was terrible, as a child, to see my mother torn up and thrown away by these little gods who mounted her, and then to watch her struggle to put herself back together like Humpty Dumpty from the fragments left behind. When you saw her go through that hideous ordeal time after time, you could never doubt her strength. "Takes more than birdshot to bring me down," she used to say, and she was right.

There were six riders, plus the Little Lost Girl. Each of them wanted different things. Daddy had built the cabinet, which Momma called a chiffarobe, at Momma's request. Behind its polished cherry-wood doors were three tiers of two cubby holes each. In each cubby Momma had put a doll representing one rider, along with a few gifts or knick-knacks. Sacrifices, you might call them.

The top cubby on the left belonged to the Mockingbird, represented by a hand-puppet, a long leather glove with the skins of two mockingbirds sewn to it. Momma's index finger made the beak; when she opened and closed her hand, the wings flapped.

A mockingbird isn't much to look at. She's bigger than a wren and smaller than a crow, with flashing, white-barred wings, and of all God's creatures she has the loveliest songs. She will sing the calls of other birds more beautifully than they can do it themselves. When she tires of that, she can make a song out of a creaking gate or a door slamming or wash flapping in the wind.

When the Mockingbird was riding Momma, she became many people, changing her song every few minutes. She might be Daddy first, telling road stories he had collected on his last swing through Louisiana or Oklahoma as a travelling rep for American Express. The next minute she might be old Mr. Friesen, talking to one of his brokers over the intercom. Then Momma would be back, laughing and making herself a Bloody Mary and lighting a cigarette. Then it would be her friend Mary Jo, or Greg, the boy who lived across the street, or Mr. MacReady, our neighbor next door who had opened a convenience store in his garage. There were dozens of other voices too, many we girls didn't recognize.

The Mockingbird was a terrible copycat, and Candy used to strike up conversations with her just for the fun of seeing herself reflected, as if in a living mirror. Even I had done it a few times. The Mockingbird was never dangerous, and it was rather delicious to hear my thoughts and opinions coming out of Momma's mouth. Daddy thought this was disrespectful, though, so we never did it if he was around.

The right-hand cupboard on the top shelf was for The Preacher. His doll was a cross made from two lengths of sawn broom handle lashed together, a white dog's skull on top, a child's black Sunday coat hanging from the cross-brace like a scarecrow's jacket. On top of the skull sat an old collection plate like they pass around at the Baptist church, turned upside down and worn like a hat. The Preacher was a fearsome rider, very hard. He smelled like old books. He was a scourge on the vanities of this world, a grim man who spoke only bitter truths. Candy learned to hide her make-ups after the day The Preacher came into our bedroom when she was twelve and without a word snapped all her eyebrow pencils, washed her nail polish down the sink, crushed her lipsticks under his foot and then threw the crumpled tubes away.

Momma never put anything in the bottom of The Preacher's cubby but a black leather Bible.

(By the time we were five we understood that Momma and the riders were quite different beings, with no overlap between them. When a rider was in Momma's head, she was completely gone. Even though The Preacher was in a woman's body, he was still the Preacher, and a man, cold and hard.)

Beneath the Mockingbird, on the middle shelf, sat Sugar. Sugar loved to be flattered, and would always flirt with the loveliest person in the room (man or woman; she wasn't fussy). She was my favorite, even though she ignored me whenever pretty Candy was around. She didn't look scary, and also, when Momma told the rider stories, Sugar was the kindest to the Little Lost Girl. Sugar's fetish was like a regular doll, only she had pointed cat's ears and eyes made from green marbles. She wore a short dress made of black lace and red patent leather shoes, and she smelled of peaches.

After each time Sugar mounted her, Momma went out and bought one new piece of clothing for the goddess to try on next time she came. I used to think this was just Momma's way of spending money on filmy underwear, but she was very scrupulous about never messing with the stuff in any of the cubbies herself, nor were we allowed to. Sugar's cubby was a clutter of lipticks and perfumes, which even The Preacher wouldn't touch, though the sight of them always made him sour. Candy tried to stash some of her make-ups there once to keep them safe from The Preacher. Momma saw that directly and blacked her eye for it. Neither of us touched anything in the chiffarobe after that.

Beneath The Preacher sat Pierrot. He was the only store-bought doll; Momma had found him in the French Quarter in New Orleans. He had white clown cheeks with red circles on them, a sharp pointeed nose and sharp pointed chin, and a long pointed cap that leaned down in front of his eyes. He was very funny and very alone. Some days he would leave you breathless with laughter, but he could be cruel, too, like the time Candy's period left a stain on her pants and he made jokes about it to the boys in the mall we were in. He could juggle and breathe fire and he smelled of lighter fluid.

On the bottom row, beneath Sugar, was the Widow, whose body was a long stoppered test-tube filled with dried-up spiders. Her head was a red pincushion, her eyes were glossy black buttons, and her hair was made of needles and pins. The Widow smelled of scorched cloth and silver polish; a dry, burnt, dizzy smell. Of all the riders, we saw her the least, maybe only three or four times that I could remember, but I hated her the most. She took a particular and immediate interest in our family. She gave orders and we followed them, but I never once felt she loved us. If our family was a farm, she was the farmer, and would mow, seed, or slaughter us as she saw fit. She did not care about me as a person, or Candy, or even Momma. She was the one that twisted money out of Daddy like water from a rag to send me to Rice for my degree, when I could have gone to UT at Austin for far less, and gotten away from home into the bargain.

Last, beside the Widow, came Mr. Copper. Momma had carved him from hickory wood and polished him until he gleamed. His body was narrow and tremendously thin, like a primitive African statue. Around his shoulders hung a cloak made from squares of snakeskin she had sewn together. In his hand he held a long bone spear, its head made from a rattlesnake's rattle. Mr. Copper came with a smell of dust and gasoline and he was very good with money. He loved calculation, and would demand to play bridge or dominos with anyone good enough to give him a game, although he never lost. Mr. Copper was a user, a creature of pure power; as the old saying goes, he knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. In his cabinet Momma always kept a pack of cards, a pair of bone dice, and a set of ivory dominos in a snakeskin case.

There never was a doll for the Little Lost Girl, nor did she have a cupboard of her own, though Momma said that if you listened very closely you could hear her walking through our house in the middle of the night.

The day they buried Momma I stood in front of the staring riders for a long time. Then, fearfully, I reached out for the tall chiffarobe doors, and swung them shut. The moment Momma's gods could no longer see me, a wonderful lightness came into my heart and head, making me giddy. Like a schoolgirl cutting class I abandoned my chores and snuck out to the garden instead.

As I came through the patio doors the sound of birds assaulted me. Every November I could remember, Houston's skies had filled with birds, more of them every year. Many settled in for the winter; many more were just passing through, all on the wing from where you live, the dark countries, the cold places where Winter comes. The day we buried Momma the live oaks that lined our street were boiling with birds: bluejays, cardinals, redbirds and mockingbirds, and grackles and grackles and yet more grackles; the females olive-chested and poised, the men raucus, each the shiny blue-black of polished coal: eight of them perched along the neck of each streetlamp, leering down like drunken magistrates in their black coats.

Most houses have yards, but Candy and I grew up in a garden, with a cranky white stucco house thrown in as an afterthought. The house had once belonged to Clark Gable's rich first wife back in the 1920's. It was laid out in the old spanish style, one room per floor. Candy and I were stuck on the top, to broil in the summer heat. Momma and Daddy slept underneath us. Both upper floors had long balconies with rust-spotted wrought-iron railings that squeaked and swayed when me and Candy swung on them.

The garden had crowded the house into the very corner of the lot, and was constantly attempting the spill into the ground floor, whose whole east wall was french doors. Momma loved to have all those doors open, so inside melted into outside, tile floor giving way to the stone-flagged patio and paths set in the foliage. Leaving our doors and windows open put the whole family on an intimate footing with ants, tree roaches, green anoles and mosquitoes, but Momma believed it was worth it.

The afternoon we buried Momma it was 76 degrees out, according to the thermometer hanging from the patio roof. My sister Candy was waiting for me at the wrought iron table under the banana tree. "How's Daddy?" she asked.

"Watching basketball in their room. Not so good, I guess."

In her plain black funeral dress Candy looked like a young Mexican widow, with her dark eyes and pale skin and her hair pinned up se–ora style. Candy pointed to two shot glasses on the patio table, each with three fingers of some Dr. Pepper-colored fluid, a deep red-brown so dark as to be nearly black. Between the glasses stood one of mother's recycled liquor bottles; the paper label on the front had 'Mockingbird Cordial' written in her florid hand. The cap was off. "Momma told me to break this out when she was safely underground." Candy's eyes were red and the make-up on her cheeks was smudged with tear tracks.

I picked up the shotglass on my side of the table. The drink had the strangest fragrance, half-floral, half-industrial, like flowers and hot steel. "No thanks."

"I didn't make it, honest. I don't even know what's in it."

"There's a recommendation."

"For Christ's sake, Toni."

"No. Un-unh. I did my deathbed scene with Mom. She may not reach out from beyond the grave and make me do another one."

"Why do you have to hate her so much?"

"I do not hate her."

"Yes you do! You've been stomping around in a fury since the moment she died. For Christ's sake, Toni! She's gone, our Momma is gone, god bless her." Candy wiped another tear off her cheek with the back of her hand. "Why can't you leave her alone?"

I said, "You get what you pay for."

"God you're a vindictive bitch."

"You swear too much."

"Fuck off." Candy's fabulous breasts rose as she took a deep breath. "Please, Toni. I don't dare cross her. She can't get to you like she can get to me."

This was true enough. Candy is the one who inherited Mom's touch of magic. In Candy the gift was more direct, but less flexible. None of the riders had ever mounted her. She could see the future sometimes, in dreams and visions, but with one curious qualifier: she only ever saw happy things.

I picked up my glass and tipped a little of the Mockingbird Cordial into my mouth. It bit like a copperhead snake: rum, vanilla flowers; the feeling you get on the tip of your tongue when you touch it to a battery. The taste of pennies in your mouth when you were a child. I swallowed and Candy followed suit. "Thanks," she said.

"How long ago did you know she was going to die?"

"Maybe a year. I just...stopped dreaming about her any more."

"How many happy dreams of her did you ever have?" I swirled another few drops of the Cordial around my mouth and swallowed. "This stuff surely burns. Candy, are you all right? About Momma, I mean."

"No. —Are you?"

"I'm all right."

Momma always liked Candy. Right from a baby Candy was smiley and huggable. A great relief, as I had been colicky and a cross-patch from day one. "When I was having you, you were that set to come out sideways," Momma told me. "The doctor had to get in there and haul you out with forceps. Imagine those things: big as a pair of steel salad forks...and cold! Like to have killed me," she would say, and laugh. I was horrified.

When she was in a good mood Momma called me ornery but durable. She liked that word: durable. To endure, which she pronounced with no j sound: en-doo-er. When she cried, which was often, I was a poor baby, for having to be so tough so little, but it was good I was tough because in this life that's what you had to be. When she was angry I was mean, or hateful, or sometimes the hatefulest child that ever was.

"I'm all right," I said. "You two were always closer ."

Candy choked and laughed. "The funny part is that you actually believe that."

"It's true!"

"Uh-huh."

I raised my glass. "To Mother. May I never be like her." Birds hopped and flittered among the branches overhead. The liquor ran down into my center and bloomed there, like flowers opening.

Candy stretched her legs out and crossed them at the ankles. "That bastard Carlos should have come to the funeral."

Carlos was Candy's current boyfriend, a tex-mex car detailer who lived at some weird intersection between mexican folk magic and Low Rider gang membership. Carlos himself was small and lean and soft-spoken, a wonderful mechanic and something of a sorceror who had lost part of one ear in a gang fight years before, but despite his angular face and tattoos and small black goatee no-one had ever heard him cross his mother. I once saw him drink a shot-glass full of 10W-40 motor oil to win a bet.

Candy had dated a lot of weird men.

Actually, I thought they made a good couple: Carlos was pretty serious-minded, which she needed, and she was able to take the fact that he would occasionally visit with the spirits of the dead pretty much in stride. The most noticeable thing about Carlos was his car, a reconditioned hearse that he had turned into a rolling shrine. "Can you imagine Carlos bringing the Muertomobile into Glenwood? The security guards would have gunned him down in the driveway. Be reasonable. I'm sure he'll cruise by this afternoon."

"Probably La Hag Gonzales didn't want him seen with me in public."

"If I had a son, I wouldn't let him date you either." I found I could take the Cordial down in bigger swallows, now that I was used to it. I emptied my glass. "You know, of all Momma's potions, I think this is the best she ever made."

Candy sloshed another shot into my glass. "Do you think Daddy was happy with her?"

"Does it matter?" I was beginning to feel light-headed; my thoughts, like clouds, pulling softly apart in the gulf breeze. It was not an unpleasant sensation; drifty, but not at all drowsy. Tender autumn sunshine dappled the garden. Not the destroying stare of summer, but a more uncertain light, diffusely golden and unsteady, ruffled by treelimbs creaking in the warm south wind, leaves shifting, the wheeling birds—the sweet, elusive light that comes at the end of days, and seasons.

I blinked, realizing my thoughts had pulled apart again. Empty spaces yawned between them. Something about the emptiness scared me. "Momma wasn't the sort who made you happy," I said. "Daddy was not bored, I guarantee you. And he didn't kill her." Another empty space began to open between my thoughts but I fought it back. "He got what he paid for."

Candy sipped from her glass. "Well I've about had it with Carlos and La Hag Gonzales. Cut another notch on the barrel. Time for this chica to move on."

A concrete-colored Ford Explorer rolled slowly down the street. Birds swirled up like leaves in the wind of its passing, birds doubled by their shadows, swooping and whirling, birds in flight from the cold; passing to some warm, unnamed, blessed country of the South, where winter never comes.

With a little start of terror I realized I had been caught in one of those empty places between my thoughts. There was a whiteness in my head that seemed to keep me from thinking straight; like when you stare at the sun and afterwards there's a bright circle that dazzles you wherever you look. Only this whiteness was behind my eyes, back in my head, and it was cold.

"C-C-Can? C-C-?"

I felt a hand close over my hand. "Toni? Are you okay?" Candy's voice sounded tiny and distant, as if coming through a telephone receiver in another room. A cloud must have passed overhead, for the light in the garden got suddenly dimmer. Silence fell over the world. I could see birds with their beaks working, but no songs came. Acorns fell into the pond without splashing.

"Unh!" I stood up clumsily, knocking my chair over backwards behind me. Where was the sound of the iron chair clattering on the stone?

Then I smelled the Widow smells, of silver polish and scorched cloth, and I knew what was happening.

I stepped back to keep my balance. My right foot came down and froze. A line of cold whiteness ran up past my knee. I cried out and pulled the leg up and the whiteness drained down a bit..

"Toni! Toni, what's wrong!"

I staggered. As soon as my right foot came down on the stone flags it froze again, and I was pinned to the garden path. The whiteness raced up my leg and flowered in my head like fire eating through a piece of paper. I tried to scream but no noise came out. I went mad with fear and ran senselessly around in my head but there was too much whiteness everywhere. From a long way off, I heard Candy whisper, "Oh my God. I can smell her, Toni."

Then the whiteness exploded in my head and The Widow came.

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