I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me. "Call me if you ever

need help." he murmured. "I can be there for you that way. As a friend."

I turned my face until my mouth touched the shaven smoothness of his skin. His breath caught, and he didn't move. I nuzzled into the pliancy of his cheek, the hardness of his jaw, loving the texture of him. We stayed like that for a few seconds, not quite kissing, suffused with each other's nearness. It had never been like this with Gill or any other boy, my bones turning liquid, my body shaken with cravings that had no previous reference point. Wanting Hardy was different from wanting anyone else.

Lost in the moment, I was slow to respond when I heard the door open with a rattle. My mother had come back. Hardy pulled back from me, his face wiped clean of expression, but the air was weighted with emotion.

Mama entered the trailer, her arms filled with a jacket, keys, and a take-out box from the restaurant. She took in the scene with a single glance and shaped her mouth into a smile. "Hi. Hardy. What are you doing here?"

I jumped in before he could reply. "He helped me study for a math test. How was your dinner, Mama?"

"Just fine." She set her things on the kitchenette counter, and came to take the baby from me. Carrington protested the change of arms, her head bobbing, her face flooding with color. "Shhh," Mama soothed, bouncing her in gentle repetition until she subsided.

Hardy murmured goodbye and went to the door. Mama spoke in a carefully calibrated tone. "Hardy. I appreciate you coming here to help Liberty study. But I don't think you should spend any more time alone with my daughter."

I drew in a hissing breath. To deliberately drive a wedge between me and Hardy, when we had done nothing wrong, seemed an ugly hypocrisy coming from a woman who'd just had a fatherless baby. I wanted to say that, and worse things.

Hardy spoke before I could, his bleak gaze locked with my mother's. "I think you're right."

He left the trailer.

I wanted to scream at my mother, to hurl words at her like a shower of darts. She was selfish. She wanted me to pay for Carrington's childhood with my own. She was jealous that someone might care for me when there was no man in her life. And it wasn't fair of her to go out with her friends so often, when she should want to stay at home with her newborn. I wanted to say those things so badly, I nearly suffocated beneath the weight of unspoken words. But it has always been my nature to turn my anger inward, like a Texas skink eating its own tail.

"Liberty—" Mama began gently.

"I'm going to bed," I said. I didn't want to hear her opinion of what was best for me. "I've got a test tomorrow." I went to my room with swift strides and closed the door in a cowardly half-slam, when I should have had the guts to do it full-out. But at least I had the mean, fleeting satisfaction of hearing the baby cry.

CHAPTER 8

As the year went on I had begun to measure the passage of time not by the signposts of my own development, but by Carrington's. The first time she rolled over, the first time she sat on her own, ate applesauce mixed with powdered rice, the first haircut, the first tooth. I was the one she always raised her arms to first, giving me a wet gummy grin. It amused and disconcerted Mama at first, and then it became something everyone accepted matter-of-factly.

The bond between Carrington and me was closer than that of sisters; it was more like that of parent and child. Not as a result of intention or choice... it simply was. It seemed natural that I would go with Mama and the baby to her pediatrician's visits. I was more intimately acquainted with the baby's problems and patterns than anyone else. When it was time for vaccinations, Mama retreated to the corner of the room while I pinned the baby's arms and legs down on the doctor's table. "You do it, Liberty," Mama said. "She won't hold it against you like she would someone else."

I stared into Carrington's pooling eyes, flinching at her incredulous scream as the nurse injected the vaccines into her plump little thighs. I ducked my head beside hers. "I wish it could be me," I whispered to her scarlet ear. "I would take it for you. I would take a hundred of them." Afterward I comforted her, holding her tightly until her sobbing stopped. I made a ceremony of placing the I WAS A GOOD PATIENT sticker on the center of her T-shirt.

No one, including me, could say that Mama wasn't a good parent to Carrington. She was affectionate and attentive to the baby. She made certain Carrington was well dressed and had everything she needed. But the puzzling distance remained. It troubled me that she didn't seem to feel as intensely for the baby as I did.

I went to Miss Marva with my concerns, and her answer surprised me. 'There's nothing strange about that, Liberty."

"There isn't?"

She stirred a big pot of scented wax on the stove, getting it ready to pour into a row of glass apothecar\'jars. "It's a lie when they say you love all your children equally," she said placidly. "You don't. There's always a favorite. And you're your mother's favorite."

"I want Carrington to be her favorite."

"Your mama will take to her in time. It's not always love at first sight." She dipped a stainless steel ladle into the pot and brought it up brimming with light blue wax. "Sometimes you have to get to know each other."

"It shouldn't take this long," I protested.

Miss Marva's cheeks jiggled as she chuckled. "Liberty, it could take a lifetime."