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one they’d lived in before, an old Airstream with a single cot Perry slept on while Myra lolled on the two-cushion loveseat. He had a little garden out front, mostly strawberries and forget-me-nots, and he and Myra hung a wheel of chimes outside their window to christen the occasion.
    Those chimes didn’t last. It was like Myra didn’t realize they’d make music every time a breeze blew by. They were gone after a week. And Jim’s calm didn’t fix her shit. She’d still miss a shift about once a week at Byron’s Truck Stop—where she made doughnuts and sold truckers and teenagers their gas—because she’d be doing her drinking.
    Perry tried to feel lucky that Myra didn’t drink all the time, just some of the time, tried to feel lucky that even when she did drink she kept it tidy. No public scenes, no weeping calls from a bar like Donald used to do. Myra just goes to her and Jim’s room and drinks in bed till she don’t know what’s what.
    Perry knew it was because of a sadness of some kind, or a noise she didn’t want to hear. She had tried to get to the bottom of it, pin down the reasons why, but the truth was there was no list of reasons, unless that list included everything and everybody .
    Myra had taught Perry about makeup and clothes and hair. Took care of her when she was sick. Smelled like Oil of Olay (her night cream) and limes (her Coronas). Once Baby Girl had called her a drunk-ass drunk and Perry socked her dead in her arm. Had meant to get her on the chin. It was the last thing Baby Girl ever said about Myra, and in return Perry stopped doing her impression of Charles in front of the TV.
    Perry loved Myra the way any child loves their mother, only she could see her mom more clearly than just any daughter could. Myra wasn’t some smeary presence who lived only for her kid. Perry was just a midpoint on her timeline. It was similar to how Perry saw Baby Girl. Both of them had their flaws, but Perry had her own, too.
    She and Jim didn’t have that same understanding, but that was a good thing. Jim wanted Perry to hold on tight to her innocence until she arrived safely into adulthood. It was nice to be seen that way, like she was unsmudged and unwrinkled and flapping dry in a clean spring air. Until someone pulls the pins and what, it’s time to lay flat on a bed? Was that what adulthood was? If so, she’d been an adult since she was fourteen.
    Jim pulled into the Walmart parking lot so they could turn around and go back toward the McDonald’s. It was strange seeing it in the light of day, knowing she and Baby Girl had just been thugging there not hours before. Perry almost wanted to ask Jim could he drive around back, just real quick. She wanted to see the tire marks from the doughnuts. The embers from the fire. Had it actually all happened? It seemed like a dream she’d feel dumb for having.

 
    WHEN BABY GIRL GOT HOME Charles was eating Cheerios out of a mixing bowl. “This is good,” he told her. She could see the open bag of sugar on the table in front of him, a ladle sticking out of it. No wonder it was good.
    “Hey, Charles,” she said, “you make some for me?”
    “Oh my Lord,” he said. This was his new thing. Oh my Lord. He had gotten it from their uncle Dave, who they lived with, and who had found God after Charles got hit by a car while on his motorcycle a little over a year ago. Dave had been out all night that night, which used to be common, had come home to a police officer waiting in his driveway. Ran right to church after that. Baby Girl could understand. Church answers a lot of questions for you, so you don’t have to yourself. Back in the day she used to go to church and it wasn’t all that bad, she played bells in the kids’ choir, ganked Danishes to eat with her little friends before Sunday school, bowed her head to pray to a God she imagined looked like Santa Claus in his pajamas.
    Church just didn’t intersect all that cleanly with her interests these days, was