I could tear her house down to its very foundations and not find it. I do not know my mother well enough to know her hiding places.

"Stay," I tell Gretel again.

I open the front door and stare out into the blackness beyond Parker's porch light. I can't sit here and wait like my good dog for her return. I step out onto the porch and close the door behind me.

I slip through the front gate and close and latch it behind me. My mother can't be that far, but I have no idea what direction she may have taken. Perhaps she is only wandering her neighborhood, walking to clear her head. I head up the street, going from streetlight to streetlight at a fast walk. I have the sidewalk to myself at this hour.

"Mirabelle," I call, walking. Then louder, "Mirabelle?" My pace picks up. "Mirabelle!"

Somewhere a window bangs open and a man yells, "Shut up!" I do not care. I call her name again and again, louder and louder. I am running now. I run all the way up one street, then turn and tear back down another. Somehow without noticing, I have changed words. Now I am yelling for my momma.

I have made this pilgrimage before. The first night she was gone, my daddy came home to find me at the kitchen table, waiting for my snack. We waited there for dinner, which never came.

I said, "Should we call the police?"

"She ain't missing," he said, "She's just gone."

Then my daddy quit waiting and started drinking instead. I waited, though, hours more, sitting in that ladder-back chair, waiting for my mother to come and put me to bed. I believed that if I got up and put myself to bed, then she would not come to do it, but if I waited, she would have to. The chair was hard, and I got so tired, and my daddy pa.s.sed out on the sofa. I left the house and went looking for her, wandering up and down our street, calling her quietly so as not to wake my daddy. I called until I was crying so desperately that I could only call by vowel, and "Momma" became long, shuddering o's and a's that sounded more like mourning than hope.

It was close to dawn when I finally made my way home, hoa.r.s.e and all wept out. I closed the front door softly behind me, and the click that latch made as it caught was an awful noise, final and heartless and mechanical. My daddy snored on the sofa; he'd never stirred or noticed I was gone.

I am calling her now, much louder. But I have left the houses behind me, and no one tells me to shut up or phones the cops. I am pa.s.sing closed stores and offices, and I realize I have made my way to the library.

My mother is here. I see her across the street with her back to me. She is standing in the glow of the security light that hangs over the library's front entrance. She is talking on one of the pay phones that hangs in a bank of three near the door.

"Momma," I yell, and I run toward her. "Momma."

She turns to me, still talking into the phone. She holds up one finger in a "just a second" gesture as I sprint toward her. She turns and sets down the receiver as I come up the library's front steps. She nods at me, as if in pleasant greeting, and says, "I was on the phone, Rose Mae. Hush now. It's the middle of the night, and you really shouldn't be outside."

In the harshness of the security light, her bloodshot eyes look crimson and blind, but astonishingly calm. Not even the sight of me tearing down the street, hollering for her with my nose running and my cheeks striped black with wept-away mascara, has disturbed her.

I clutch her by the arms and say, "I have to get ahead of Thom. I have to go somewhere he won't expect, and then I have to lure him there. I have to set a trap somewhere and lure him there and kill him."

"Because that's gone so well for you already," my mother says with sarcasm so heavy that her mouth literally twists up with it.

"I let him kill my daddy," I say.

My mother puts her hands over my hands on her arms, deliberate and calm, and says, "You're going to rip yourself in half, Rose Mae. Calm down." She takes my hands off her and turns me toward the road. She puts one arm over my shoulder and starts walking, towing me with her out of the pool of the library's security light. "Done's done. I'm sorry about your father if you are, but his liver would have killed him in another fifteen minutes anyway." She shrugs, cold and pragmatic, as she walks me across the street.

"Where's my gun?" I say as she tows me along. "I need my gun."

My mother shakes her head, a decisive no. She uses her free hand to pull the thin sheaf of tarot cards out of her pocket. The hanged man is at the top of the stack, faceup.

"I was wrong, Rose Mae." She shakes the image of the hanged man. "This is a tricky card, and I read it wrong."

I stop dead. "Where is my got-d.a.m.n gun?" I yell at her, invoking Daddy's favorite cuss.

"Shhhhh," she says, calm as a corpse. She starts dragging me forward again. "Look at you, crying for your father. You think you don't have at least that much mercy for your husband? You can have your gun if you want it. Go lay your trap, but you'll pause too long, and he'll kill you. If by some miracle you manage it? You won't come back from it. Believe me." I realize she is navigating back toward her house, the last place on earth I ever want to see. But my dog and my bag are there, and my gun is there, too, tucked away in some hidey-hole of hers. She turns her head to look at me directly. "I know what it is to do a thing you can't ever undo." She lets that sink into me. I look at her b.l.o.o.d.y eyes and see again what a broken thing she is.

I do not want to be her. I do not even want to be me.

"I don't know what to do," I say in a small voice.

She nods, turning to face forward again and picking up the pace. "Well, you can't run-not on your own. You'll leave a trail. And you cannot kill him. It'll ruin you. I think it will make you a woman you do not want to be."

"So what's left? I don't want to die," I tell her. "Thom is coming. I don't know what to do."

"You don't have to do anything," she says. We are turning back on Belgria Street, and she offers me a small, encouraging smile. "I finally fixed it. I did what I meant to do years ago, what I should have done the first time I came to Amarillo and saw what you'd married."

I sniffle, and my head is starting to ache. "I need my gun."

"You don't have to kill him, honey," my mother says, like she is soothing an overwrought toddler. As we pa.s.s under a streetlight, I see her face has gone smooth, and in spite of her bloodied eyes she looks at peace, a good ten years younger. "I came to the pay phone to call the Saint Cecilias. I couldn't call from the house-they have very strict rules about leaving a trail."

We are back at the house. She closes the front gate behind me, and it clangs like a prison gate. Even so, I let her tug me up the stairs, back inside to where my anxious dog is waiting by her leash.

Instantly, all the f.u.c.king blue closes in on me. This whole house. Blue kitchen, blue bathroom, blue parlor, her blue-green bedroom. Even my room is infested with it. I want to be someplace that is restful and painted white.

Even so, the sound of her voice, her firm hand on my arm, these things pull me up the stairs.

"It's all set, Rose Mae. The Saint Cecilias will come tomorrow night, around midnight. They will take you someplace safe. They will move you town to town by car, no public transportation. No trace. You can start fresh, and not even I will know where you are." Her voice quavers on that last sentence, and I see that it is costing her to give me up. Her calm face is so sad.

Perhaps this is justice, for her to give me up now, just when she has finally filled that gaping wound of a room she keeps upstairs. Her shrine has held its proper saint, and when I'm gone, it will be only a hole again. That is the word on the fourth card I laid out, the word written in curlicue letters below the gypsy-haired lady in the lace blindfold, clutching her sword and scales. Her word is "Justice."

"But what if Thom comes here?" I say. "He will find you and kill you, like he killed Daddy." We are back in my room again, and she presses one hand firmly on my shoulder, pushing me down to sit on the bed.

"No, he won't," she says. She sits beside me. Pats my hand. "Stop worrying, Rose. I am fixing this, I told you. Once you are safe away, I'll call the police. The ones in Fruiton, and in Amarillo, and here. I'll call the FBI and anyone else I can think of. I'll tell them about what your husband did to Eugene. At the very least, Thom will be questioned. I'll make sure he knows that I called, that you were already here, and are gone now. He won't be able to hurt me, because it will prove everything I've said. He'll probably get away with killing your daddy, but he won't be able to come after me."

I nod, my head aching. I say, "You called Saint Cecilia for me."

"Yes," she says. "Tough it out until midnight tomorrow, and Rose Mae Lolley will truly be gone. You will never have to worry about him finding you. You can live. You can live, and be made into someone new."

That sounds so beautiful to me. I want that. I want just that, so badly.

I let her put her arm around me. I am weak and suddenly so tired. I let her pull my head down on her shoulder and hold me. I am clay in her hands, ready to do whatever she says, to smash into whatever shape she makes of me.

CHAPTER 17.

IT'S PAST LUNCHTIME when I finally wake up. My gut is churning with anxiety, but the house feels empty. It is so quiet, I wonder if my mother has gone out again. Her bedroom door is firmly closed.

In the kitchen I find coffee prepped and a note that says, "I have a migraine. Canceled readings for today. Do not turn the sign on. Your ride comes tonight-Stay inside."

She's underlined the last two words. I nod as if she is present and expecting an answer. Under twelve hours, and I'll be out of Thom's reach. It feels like a race, but one in which I am my mother's pa.s.senger. It is a race that she is winning. Sherlock Holmes himself could not take make and model, maybe even a license plate, on a car that's parked legally all the way across the country and find me in three days. Especially since Daddy would have pointed Thom toward Vegas, where he believes his Claire is "playing cards."

I shy away from that path of thought. I do not want to think about the circ.u.mstances under which my father would have given Thom this information. I do not want to think about my part in it. I can't right now. I have to get through the next twelve hours, and at midnight everything will change. I don't know enough about what will happen to even imagine it. All I know is, I won't be here, I won't be me, and in almost every way, I'm fine with that.

In the front room, I hear Gret's one-footed sc.r.a.ping at the front door, asking to go out. I open it for her. Parker's dogs are out, too, but I call her firmly back to me as soon as she has done her business. I can't have her running the yard, perfectly visible, a three-legged beacon announcing to Thom that his Ro is in this house. As she swishes past my legs and comes inside, I see Parker opening the gate. His dogs surround him as he enters, leaping and wagging, so happy to see him. If Parker had been gone only five minutes, his three would still be palm fronding him through the front gate like he was Christ entering Jerusalem. Dogs are like that.

Miss Moogle puts her dirty feet right in the center of his belly, leaving muddy paw prints on his shirt. "Moogle! Be a lady," he says, but he's grinning at her and the hands that push her down are firm but gentle. He's one of the almosts, mucking up my every way.

Based on the clothes-khakis and a rumpled blazer-he's coming home from teaching an early morning cla.s.s. His hair is out of its tail. It hangs to his shoulders, thick and dark, thin sunlight catching the red. I like how it looks around his bony Irish face.

I'm wearing flannel pajamas, and I'm barefoot with bed head and no makeup on, but even so I keep the door cracked open and smile at him.

Parker comes up onto the porch, bypa.s.sing his own door to walk toward mine. "Day six?" he says.

"Yep. Can't come out yet. But there's no rule that says you can't come in," I say. I am absurdly pleased that I brushed my teeth before I came downstairs.

He pauses, then says, "That's so."

I swing the door wide for him, saying, "There's coffee running."

"I'm more of a tea guy." I close the door behind him. He walks to the center of the room and pauses there, looking around. "Where's Mirabelle?"

"Out, I guess," I say, more for my benefit than his. I want to remember the feel of being alone in a house with a man like this. Maybe even with this man.

"Out?" he says. He sounds incredulous as he turns back around to face me. He is near the love seat, but he makes no move to sit down. No indication that he plans to stay for longer than a minute, but I want to keep him here. He's speeding time up with his very presence.

"I guess. Or upstairs in her room."

"Has to be," he says. "Have you ever actually seen Mirabelle go out?"

Last night, I think. I remember how she stood on the threshold, balanced with her toes even with the doorjamb, every molecule of her inside. Then she tilted forward and tipped herself out onto the porch like she was stepping off a cliff.

"Of course I have. I met her at an airport," I point out.

"Yeah." Parker nods, thoughtful. "She still leaves town a couple, three times a year. But she eats enough Ativan to soothe a whole pack of wild horses before she can get in the cab."

"She goes to the library," I say.

Parker shakes his head. "Not anymore. Has to be more than three years since she's gone there. There's this girl who works down at the branch who comes by a couple times a week and swaps out books for Mirabelle. Their book club even meets here."

"Groceries?" I say.

"Delivered. Last year I started bringing her mail in because she stopped crossing the lawn to go get it. The box kept overflowing."

I shrug. I find I am not terribly interested in my mother's possible agoraphobia. I don't want to talk about her at all. I have put my future squarely in her hands, and it disturbs me to realize how angry I still am with her under the numbness.

"Well, I guess I better..." Parker trails off, then he takes a step toward the door. I move to intercept him.

When we prayed together, me on my roof, him fighting nothing on his backyard lawn, it felt to me like a date. I think he felt it that way, too, but we never said good night. It's not like he could walk me to my window. Moreover, there will not be another chance. Tomorrow I'll be gone.

I've blocked him, and now I come in way too close for friendly morning conversation. He looks older at this distance; I can see the fine creases in the skin around his eyes. He is a little closer to thirty-five than thirty. I lift my hands up to touch his face. He holds still and lets me. I pull him down, rising up on tiptoe, and I kiss him.

He stands absolutely still for this, too, only his mouth moving with mine, as a yes. It's strange and static; it hardly feels like kissing. I'd never been with a man before who wasn't ready in some black underneath part to hurt me. A kiss with a dangerous fella makes its own fever, black and sweet. It is the goodest kind of dirty.

This, kissing Parker, is as edge-free and white as an egg. He smells like Ivory soap, and he tastes like mint toothpaste and cool water. It's a lot like drinking water, actually. Pleasant and quenching, nothing more.

I pull back and I look at him, and he looks back. His eyes are a very pale blue. His gaze is so calm that he seems almost placid, like now that this is out of the way, he might wander off and find himself a tasty cud to chew.

"That was nice," I say, stepping back. "I'm glad we did that." It's true; now I will regret him less.

He smiles at me, a strange smile I can't read. He says, "You're welcome."

"I'm welcome?" I say, quizzical, not sure how he means it. Maybe he means I'm welcome to kiss him again? Not likely. But this cryptic echo of my mother in the airport irks me. She told me I was welcome, and I hadn't thanked her, either.

"Yeah," he says. "You're welcome." His strange smile widens, and now I can can read it: He's ticked. read it: He's ticked.

"That was kindness? Charity work?" I say, ticked right back. "You're saying I should thank you?"

For a second, he seems mad enough to actually be considering my questions, but then he eases and says, "I don't mean that you should thank me. But, yeah, that was pretty much just for you." Now I'm on the verge of angry, and he isn't anymore. I'm not sure what he is. Not angry, not placid. "This is for me," he says.

He steps in close, moving slow so I have time to hit him or wheel away or say no, but I don't do any of these things. I like kissing when I'm angry. I let him tip my chin up, bend to me, and this time his arm wraps my waist and pulls my body in, bringing me close enough to feel his body's heat, even through his clothes. This time, I am not kissing s.h.a.ggy-Doo.

Again, it is utterly not dangerous, but even so, I lose a little breath. I have had wilder rides, but I begin to understand that I've been thirsty. I have been thirsty for so long, living in a dry and barren place, crawling along. He pulls me closer, up against him. I feel his body rising to me, and in response, a coiled feeling starts low in my hips. His hands slip down, cupping my a.s.s and lifting me into him, and suddenly nothing is as sweet as this. When you've been in a desert, nothing is more basic and more necessary, nothing is better, than water.

I think this, and then the kiss gets slippery and really good, and I am not thinking at all. I tangle one hand in his thick hair. It's longer than mine. I slide my other hand between us to cup him and he is ready for me, hard and too long for my palm.

"No," he says into my mouth, and he steps back, three steps fast, until the backs of his legs meet the love seat and he sits down, fast and surprised. I am left standing there with my mouth open and one hand cupping the air where his not-at-all-impotent c.o.c.k used to be, the other lifted high. Three strands of his hair have caught and pulled out, hanging from my raised fingers.

I drop my arms and find I am already so flushed that my embarra.s.sment cannot redden me further.

"We're grown-ups, Parker," I say. This could have been a h.e.l.luva send-off.

He points at me and says, "Married grown-up." He blows air out in a whew whew sound, then leans forward, his forearms resting on his knees. "This is not what I want from you. I'm sorry." sound, then leans forward, his forearms resting on his knees. "This is not what I want from you. I'm sorry."

When he looks up at me, his eyes have gone so sad that it is difficult to stay angry or even feel ashamed. My mother, who apparently does not share my troubles with lying to women, told me he was impotent. She said that to make me leave him be when I would not believe that he was celibate. But it must be so; Parker has been celibate since his wife died. I feel like I've invaded some sacred s.p.a.ce he's made. And what does it matter to me, really, if my mother's landlord has me on her reading table or kung fu dances the rest of his life away, his hands moving slowly through the air to touch nothing, like a monk? I won't be here, either way.

I say, as kindly as I can, "Do I remind you of her? Your wife?"

"Ginny? G.o.d, no. Not at all." I'm a little insulted, and it must show on my face, because he adds, "That's a good thing. I used to see a woman, and if she had two eyes, I would think, Ginny had two eyes."

"I understand," I say. "We don't have to talk about it. I apologize. I just want you to know, I think it would have been really good for me."

"Good for you. Yeah," he says. "Like a salad."

I laugh, startled. I come and sit down by him on the love seat. I leave a good ten safe inches of air in between us. "I didn't mean like a salad."

"Yeah, you did." He is chuckling, too, but I hear something serious behind his lightened tone. He turns to look at me before he says, "I don't want to be a salad again, Ivy."

That word again again catches my attention. "You've been salad before?" catches my attention. "You've been salad before?"

"Sure. You know how many girls-women-Mirabelle has filtered through that room? More than thirty since she started. Twenty-two since Ginny died. You're not the first neighbor lady to make a move on me."