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know what.
    Weeks would pass and the tomatoes in Martha Lee’s garden would turn from green to red before I would learn that Mama’s coming home had nothing to do with movies and not getting the part.
    I was trying to decide if I dared reach for the beer I’d hidden under the steps, when Martha Lee offered me a swig from hers, but all I could picture were the germs sitting on the can top, and that stopped me cold. That was one thing I was particular about. You would be amazed at the number of germs in the average person’s mouth. Dogs are even worse. “No, thanks,” I said.
    If Mama were around, this would be the time they’d start telling tales, the “Remember” stories I called them ’cause they always started out with “Remember when we . . .”
    “Martha Lee?” I said after a minute.
    “Yeah?”
    “Tell me a ‘Remember’ story.” I sounded like a baby. I didn’t care.
    She stared off into the woods that ringed her property.
    “A Duane one,” I said.
    When they were girls, every Halloween, Mama and Martha Lee would fashion a dummy out of straw and dress it up in my granddaddy’s old clothes. Then they would dream up a prank using the dummy. They named every dummy Duane, after this boy who had such a crush on Mama in the fifth grade that he told her he’d shoot himself if she didn’t go to the movies with him. Sometimes, at night in bed, I’d imagine Spy Reynolds telling me he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him. I’ll have to think about it, I always said, before I conceded, not wanting his death on my conscience. “Did Duane really die?” I asked Mama once. “Better,” Martha Lee said. “He ended up marrying Effie Webb.” And naturally this would set them off.
    Sometimes, when they started telling these stories, they would laugh so hard—scream with laughter, actually—that Mama had to beg Martha Lee to stop or she’d pee her pants. They must have told these stories a hundred times, but each time they’d laugh like it was something they’d done only the week before.
    One Halloween they took one of the Duanes to the overpass south of town and then waited for the ten o’clock that went from Washington to New Orleans. When they saw the lights making the curve, they lifted Duane and tossed him over the fence and onto the rails. Even knowing it was a straw-filled sack of my granddaddy’s clothes, they gasped at how it looked like a real man lying down there on the rail bed. Then, to hear them tell it, all hell broke loose. Mama maintained you could hear the squeal of the engineer laying on the brakes all the way to Memphis. Next, in what looked like slow motion, the train derailed. It just folded up like a child’s toy and bucked off the track. Mama and Martha Lee took off, heading for the woods by Elders Pond. They stayed there half the night, listening to the sound of sirens crying in the distance.
    “We could go to jail for that,” Martha Lee kept whispering to Mama, “it’s a felony or something,” and Mama kept telling her to shut up. The story was front page for a week. By some miracle no one was seriously injured, but even so, the state police were called in to investigate. Mama and Martha Lee made whispered phone calls every day all that week, agreeing they’d confess if Duane’s clothes were traced to my granddaddy, even if it meant they’d go to jail.
    The Doberman story was my favorite. That Halloween they were sixteen and had heard about a monastery just over the border in Kentucky where the monks raised Dobermans. They borrowed Samuel Curtis’s car, the one papered with
God Is the
Answer
and
Jesus Cares About You
stickers on it—which, in the telling, only made the whole thing funnier—and headed for Kentucky with Duane the Dummy sitting up front with them, riding shotgun. They got lost twice before they finally found the place and got to toss Duane over the chain-link fence. Within minutes, those old Dobermans went crazy, barking and yapping and