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Then I paid for the tampons and walked out, the two of them standing at the door.
    Charlotte watched me take it out of my blouse.
    “Here.”
    “I thought something would ring if you did that,” Kathy Ann said.
    “Obviously not,” I said.
    “Why did you steal them? I saw you have enough money to buy them,” Charlotte asked.
    I shrugged.
    “I’ll save my money for something I can’t steal,” I told her, and she smiled.
    “C’mon,” she said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun tonight.”
    Kathy Ann’s face brightened.
    “She likes you,” she said, as if the queen had just granted me permission to live in Nashville.
    If it’s that easy to win friends here, I thought, maybe I’ll have a good time tonight.
    Charlotte Lily offered me one of the cigarettes from the pack I stole for her. I took it.
    “I want one too,” Kathy Ann said.
    “You don’t get any. Punishment for forgetting,” she told her, smiled at me, and continued on. Like a whipped puppy, Kathy Ann remained a few steps behind us all the way to Stumpin‘ Jumpin’.
    I was in Nashville and if Grandpa saw me now, I thought, he’d have me at a prayer meeting in the morning.
    Too late for that, I told the voices inside me.
    Maybe too late for a lot of things.

     
4
Getting into a New Groove
     

    On the exterior Stumpin‘ Jumpin’ looked almost like another one of Mother darling’s honky-tonks. There was a blazing red neon sign over the two large black metal doors, at either side of which stood two human bulldogs. Each looked like a football linebacker, with thick necks and shoulders that made Grandpa’s look puny. Charlotte Lily exchanged some sort of greeting and message with her sister’s boyfriend through their own eye and head signals and then turned to us and said, “It’s a little too early. We have to go in when there’s a good crowd. We’re less conspicuous if we do it that way,” she explained. “C’mon, we’ll visit Keefer for a while.”
    “Who’s Keefer?” I asked when I saw that Kathy Ann was very pleased by the suggestion.
    “An old boyfriend of mine I toy with from time to time. He works in an auto body shop.”
    “His father threw him out of the house,” Kathy Ann said.
    “I believe it was by mutual consent,” Charlotte Lily told her.
    “His father beat him up, didn’t he?”
    “I swear, Kathy Ann, you still don’t know anything about men, do you?”
    “Why?” she wailed as we turned a corner into a side street.
    “Why? You don’t remind a man of a time when he looked a fool or lost a fight. Sometimes I wonder if you learn anything being in my company. She’s still a virgin,” she told me.
    “So am I,” I said.
    “Sure, right. And there really is a Santa Claus. Oh, good, Keefer’s at work,” she announced. “The light’s on in the shop, and he’s the only one who would be working now.”
    We entered through a side door. A young man was working on a car fender, the sparks flying from his welding torch. There was a radio blasting country rock music. The shop was lit by a half-dozen white neon lights. Next to the car that the young man worked on was a vehicle with its rear end bashed in, a taillight hanging by wires as if the accident had just occurred.
    “He hates it when I sneak up on him,” Charlotte Lily told me with an impish grin. Then she did just that. She walked up beside him, waited a moment, looked back at us, and with her hands around her mouth, shouted, “Keefer!”
    He jumped to the side, the torch nearly turning at Charlotte Lily, who then screamed.
    “Damn you, Charlotte Lily,” Keefer shouted at her after lifting his mask off his face. There was a streak of grease down his right cheek. “I told you a hundred times that’s dangerous. You nearly got fried.”
    Charlotte Lily regained her composure.
    “Oh, fiddlesticks, Keefer. You’ve become an old fuddy-duddy at the ripe old age of nineteen.”
    “Right,” he said. He still hadn’t noticed either Kathy Ann