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sisters. They were a lesson in what happened when people ignored God’s shopping list. Theysurvived on welfare checks and odd jobs, doing laundry and cleaning houses for people in town, supplemented by what they earned from the men who visited them. Uncle Pete, I decided, was just plain strange for wanting anything to do with such women.
    When I was older, I understood that the McClendon sisters were poor, uneducated, and abused. But at seven I only understood that they aroused both pity and disgust in my family. Polish those feelings with well-intentioned religion and you get charity.
    That’s how Easter got tied in with the whole mess.
    I’m ashamed to admit that I already thought of Easter in terms of goodie baskets and egg hunts and frilly new dresses, not of solemn celebrations of Jesus ascending to Heaven. The mountains were speckled with white dogwood blossoms and the soft green palette of new leaves, the yards around our house burst into patches of yellow jonquils and red azaleas; the air smelled sweet and warm-cool, and the bugs hadn’t come out yet. There were calves and chicks and kittens and puppies to play with, and a whole new clan of wild, gray Peter Cottontails bouncing across the long driveway between the front fields, and the fields began to trade the empty brown surface of winter for a primer coat of green stripes.
    I couldn’t be solemn. I was Mama and Daddy’s only daughter; I was the Easter princess. Everybody got new clothes to wear on Easter Sunday, but mine were special. Mama bought me a pale pink dress with imported lace at the neck and a skirt so ruffled that it stood out from my waist like a shelf. I had new white patent-leather shoes and sheer white knee socks with pink roses embroidered on the ankles and a broad-brimmed white straw hat with a pink ribbon that trailed halfway down my back.
    The Saturday before Easter was egg-decorating day. If there’s one thing you have on a chicken farm, it’s eggs. The Monday after Easter, by the way, was egg-salad day.
    We spent the whole Saturday in the kitchen, boiling eggs and dipping them in vinegar-scented pastel baths. Josh and Brady were too old and serious for egg decorating; Hop and Evan hung around but wouldn’t admit they wanted to participate, but Mama, Daddy, the old folks, and I decorated up a storm. No Fabergé designer for Russian royalty was ever more intense about egg art than we were.
    We put some of the eggs in a dozen small Easter baskets along with candy and Bible pamphlets. Those baskets were for the poor McClendon children of Steckem Road. Aunt Dockey and Mama and some other church ladies delivered the baskets to them every year.
    I raced downstairs in my nightgown on Easter morning. And there, in the center of the library table in the living room, sat my personal huge, pink Easter basket exploding with pink cellophane and pink bows and a soft pink poodle doll. Mama and Daddy peeked at me from the doorway.
    I said dutifully, “Thank you for the poodle doll,” then shoved it aside and went for the good stuff—foil-wrapped marshmallow eggs, and marzipan chickens, and a giant chocolate rabbit with yellow marzipan eyes, all nestled in a bed of green cellophane grass. I tore the rabbit from his plastic wrapping and examined his molded perfection with my fingertips. I could already taste his richness, imagine his hollow innards, his delicious shape.
    Evan strode into the room dressed in his blue Easter suit and white silk tie, his red hair slicked down, his white Bible in one hand. He was only twelve, but he was going through a holier-than-thou phase.
    “This isn’t what Easter is about,” he announced. “I think we should wait.”
    “Evan’s right,” Mama allowed. “Claire, don’t eat that candy until after church.”
    I had the rabbit halfway to my mouth. Oh, temptation. Oh, interrupted greed. Oh, the sin of chocolate lust. Oh, bunny.
    “Claire,” Daddy warned, drawing my name out.
    “Oh,
dammit
,” I blurted