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blood and cracked skin. Despite this, despite her dry tongue, she managed to seal it, and leaned against the flat bark of the oak—
This Oak Tree Planted in Memory of George Washington
is what the plaque said. She gazed as she had all day at the leaves.
    It was the first time Jennifer had seen oak leaves beyond a photograph or a movie; the first time she had listened to the dulled edges cut against one another in stirs of wind dying, coming back. Each time, the leaves restarted like the wheel of some engine ever-turning. On the underbellies were green and white splotches, but mostly the leaves had shriveled brown through the veins, frozen from when the storm hit.
    The trunks needed to be uprooted, she had already decided, the dirt shaken out of their wrinkled skin, like shaking out a rug, what her mama told her to do when they lived in Mississippi—shake out the rugs to rejuvenate the color. They had carried five rugs from home to abandoned home, occasionally replacing a worn-out rug or an unraveling one with a new one. Used to, she’d lay them across the chair backs and close them around her into a hiding place, a cloak. And when she stared out from between the legs, it was like being in a rocket or a smaller house—“my apartment,” she called it. If she touched the walls of her fortress, dust separated from the bright weaves, floating down and at the same time up to the ceiling, fine particles wrapped and strung through light. In the same way, the people heremoved about her, as if the rugs couldn’t be still now, the sky sifting its dust.
    As a child, the taste of dust had calmed her, and she would roll its familiar chalkiness back and forth on her tongue, refusing to spit like her stepfather, Terry. “It’s mud sucking,” he explained often, spitting into the sink or the toilet or sometimes into his hands, wiping the brown liquid onto his coveralls. In Louisiana and Mississippi, the dust was always brown.
    “That’s gross,” she’d tell him, and examine the folds in her dress, the one ribbon, the sleeves, to make sure the fabric remained untarnished. Her thick hair had always trapped dust, and every night her mother grabbed up long pulls and shook them before tying them into braids. Jennifer touched the ends to make sure they weren’t dipped in his brown goo.
    One night when they lived in Picayune, he laughed and said, “Better on my coveralls than in my
lungs
. Why you keep all that dirt inside?” She closed her mouth, just stared at his hands.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t touch you with these.” He spread the palms forward, lumbered into the room, then followed with another clumsy stride and another until Jennifer ran out to get something, anything to hit him with. She hated it when he tried to frighten her.
    Steel flat cars worked best for throwing—Barbies had a tendency to veer at the hinged legs and shoulders. But by the time she made it back to the kitchen, the laughing had switched to coughing and there he stood over the sink, gripping the metal rim, unable to spit. That coughing, it sounded like he’d never stop, like he had no more air in his lungs to help.
    Terry was tall, bowed through the center like a warped strip of metal, his spine never fixing right—sometimes, she thought, like the sun skimming the edges of the moon into slivers and quarters. If he collapsed, what to do with him?
    How would she possibly stretch him and raise him back up? He possessed too many ungainly bones, too much coughing that made her feel tiny, just a girl, and not older like she imagined to be. So she yelled for her mama, heavier and stronger, but in the bedroom with the door shut and locked, all the lights out.
    Terry doubled over the sink, and Jennifer yelled, again.
    “Don’t bother Delia,” he managed to say, the words coming out breathy with no force to them at all. “I’m all right. She needs to readjust. You know that, Jenny. I’m okay.” The coughing wasn’t as hard, that’s