“Yes, I do. Ouch. My hair’s all snaggy.” She took the comb from Nina and did it herself. “I hate him, and so will you someday. And you’ll hate me too, someday, I suppose.”
“No, I won’t,” Nina whined, scrunching up her nose and chin with offense. “You don’t know.”
Tuesday lifted the torn screen of the window. “Let’s go,” she whispered, and together they crept out onto the lawn as Hud got to an emotional part of the song that involved a kind of pained bellowing. Tuesday lifted Nina into the handlebar basket of her bicycle, hooked the face-painting kit to the back, and rode away, the bike shaky on its wheels. Nina sat high in the basket in her cowgirl suit, the fresh peach cradled in the cup of her two hands.
4.
HIS thumb in a thimble, Ozzie sat on the open tailgate of his pickup. He sewed to distract himself these days, repairing years of tears in old trousers and shirts and moth-eaten sweaters. He had taught himself embroidery from a book, and he stitched a rose into the point of a collar of one of Charlotte’s childhood blouses.
When he had left his house that morning with his few baskets of peaches collected from the tiny orchard in his backyard, Charlotte had yet to come home from the drive-in. Her staying out all night wasn’t all that unusual anymore, but she claimed complete innocence, spoke of all-night prayer meetings and spiritual sweats at midnight and meditation in country ditches. “Junior’s a good boy,” she told him, “not like Gatling.” Charlotte spent most of her late afternoons lying sullen and lanky on the living room sofa, letting Junior kneel beside her and talk in her ear. In a hard whisper, the boy seduced her easily with preaching of biblical catastrophe and plague. She was at an age to be prone to any sort of depravity, Ozzie’s neighbors said. A girl Charlotte’s age, they said from their front porches and window perches, a girl so long without a mother, looks for divine undoing, for the kind of violent, snaky salvation a boy like Junior promises.
Ozzie’s fingers were a bit too big for the delicate embroidery, and he stopped a moment and rested his hands in his lap. Ozzie worked with stained glass, repairing church windows from county to county. His burned and scarred hands, with the grooves in the skin, were lately beginning to resemble his windows of glass shards. He used to be much more careful handling the melted lead for the soldering.
Though the death of Jenny, Charlotte’s mother, three years before, was certainly one of the reasons for Charlotte’s newfound religion and her skanky, psalm-reciting boyfriend, Ozzie recognized his own blame. For years he’d brought Charlotte along to the churches old and new, country and city, to remove the damaged stained-glass windows. As she waited, she stood at the pulpits and pounded her fists, faking blustery sermons, or baptized her rag dolls, dipping their yarn hair into the fonts. Then the windows, for weeks, sat in his studio as he intricately pieced back together a broken glass Jesus or nameless saint. When the sun was at the back windows, the powdery colors filled the room, touching Charlotte’s cheeks and hands as she played on the floor with the cat.
“Charlotte’s on the other side of the square,” said a neighbor as she purchased a sackful of peaches. The neighbor had teenagers of her own and spoke with a conspiratorial hush.
Ozzie poked his needle into the cuff of his shirt and walked through the flea market, scanning the crowd. He found Charlotte, still in her geisha-girl costume and wearing what looked to be pink fangs in her open mouth, lying in the grass and sleeping with her head on Junior’s chest. Junior slept as well, his hand in Charlotte’s hair. Junior was certainly not unlikable. He was as handsome as a drowned-rat kind of a boy could be, with thick black hair greased back. He carried a clarinet around with him, saying that he was teaching himself complicated jazz tunes like “So What” and “Undecided.” Charlotte met him when he worked as an apprentice at an ironworks. Above the garage door of the building was a plaster statue of Christ in an iron cage wrought with curlicues and spikes. Ozzie could just see Charlotte penitent in the doorway watching the boy stand among sparks and blue flame.
Charlotte and Junior slept next to a quilt—for the previous few flea markets, Charlotte had been selling off the stuff of her childhood. All the long-abandoned dolls and books of fairy tales and framed photos of childhood friends had been spread out across the quilt and marked with bottom-barrel prices, and Ozzie had been her best customer—last week he’d bought a tin bird he’d bought for her years before, and some faded candy necklaces. Now, next to the few things she had yet to sell, was a sign that said, “Take whatever you want. It’s all FREE.”
Ozzie recalled the words of Charlotte’s high school guidance counselor, who he had visited one recent afternoon: Don’t worry much, the woman had said, until she starts to give her things away. A sign of suicidal tendencies, it seemed. Ozzie kicked gently at Charlotte’s side—he could almost imagine his daughter and Junior sleepy from poison-spiked Kool-Aid.
“Daddy,” Charlotte said, unalarmed, sitting up to stretch.
Ozzie grabbed the box next to the quilt and collected the few things that remained. “Pickup’s parked over there,” Ozzie said. “We’re going home.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Yates,” Junior said, standing and brushing the dried grass off his jeans. Ozzie saw Junior give Charlotte a wink and a nod, granting her permission to obey her father. The gesture turned Ozzie’s stomach. “I’d like to discuss something with you,” Junior said, his eyes on Charlotte as she walked away.
Though Junior was soft-spoken, Ozzie knew there was no refusing him. Junior had no knives, no gun, and was too slight in build to pose any physical threat. His command of the family was simply the result of Charlotte’s devotion. Charlotte’s fast love for him had turned her feral and easily spooked, and Ozzie was afraid if he made one wrong move, she’d dart.
“Actually, I want to talk to you too,” Ozzie said before Junior spoke again. Ozzie picked up a Slinky from the box and let it coil and uncoil in his hand. “I don’t want you to see my daughter so much anymore.” He looked deeper into the box, his weak demand dropping off. A spark of sunlight glinted off the tip of the boy’s cowboy boot.
“Oh, Mr. Yates,” Junior said, smiling, shrugging. “‘The glory of young men is their strength, and the honor of old men is their gray hair.’”
“I’ll call the authorities,” Ozzie said. He pushed back the bangs of his hair, none of it gray that he had ever noticed. “There’s a thing called statutory rape, and it’s very illegal.”
“I don’t think you will, Mr. Yates.” Junior stepped in and put his hand to the back of Ozzie’s head. He leaned over, whispering, “‘For you bear with anyone if he enslaves you, if he devours you, if he takes advantage of you, if he exalts himself, if he hits you in the face.’” Just the sound of Junior’s voice brought to Ozzie’s mind scratchy black woodcut images of hordes of children, their eyes lidded with pestilence, of screaming angels with burnt wings, of buzzards and dead lions, all of which the boy had described to Charlotte as his picture of the end of the world.
Ozzie looked up again, his eyes only inches from the boy’s. “Don’t you have any words of your own?” he said. But he understood something about Junior. Ozzie had had his own brief bout with religion in the months after Jenny’s death—he’d wanted to sink into the open arms of the church and become disoriented by the archaic recitations of proverbs and creeds. The congregation, their Bibles and hymnals held to their faces, spoke a dark language of rapture and damnation. Ozzie had wanted no ease with the world, or easeful words to speak with. He’d wanted to be ruined for life.
Junior smiled with only half his mouth, a wicked smile, you’d call it, and he snapped a flame from his open Zippo. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and said, “We’re getting married, Mr. Yates. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And don’t go thinking that she’s too young, because she’s not.” He leaned in again, and Ozzie felt his hot breath on his cheek. “‘Her lips drip honey,’” he said. “‘Honey and milk are under her tongue.’” As he slipped