"Where do you want to belong?" I half whispered.

His expression changed with quicksilver speed, amusement dancing in his eyes. "Anywhere they don't want me."

CHAPTER 3

I spent most of the summer in Hannah's company, falling in with her schemes and plans, which never amounted to anything but were enjoyable nonetheless. We rode our bikes into town, went out to explore ravines and fields and cave entrances, or sat together in Hannah's room listening to Nirvana. To my disappointment I seldom saw Hardy, who was always working. Or raising hell, as Hannah's mother, Miss Judie, said sourly.

Wondering how much hell-raising could be done in a town like Welcome, I culled as much information as I could from Hannah. It seemed to be a matter of general agreement that Hardy Gates was born for trouble, and sooner or later he would find it. So far his crimes had been minor ones, misdeeds and small acts of mischief that broadcast a frustrated voltage beneath his good-natured exterior. Breathlessly Hannah related that Hardy had been seen with girls much older than himself, and there had even been rumors of a dalliance with an older woman in town.

"Has he ever been in love?" I couldn't resist asking, and Hannah said no, according to Hardy falling in love was the last thing he needed. It would get in the way of his plans, which were to leave Welcome as soon as Hannah and her brothers were old enough to be of some help to their mother, Miss Judie.

It was hard to understand how a woman like Miss Judie could have produced such an untamed brood. She was a self-disciplined woman who seemed suspicious of pleasure in any form. Her angular features were like one of those old-time prospector scales upon which were balanced equal amounts of meekness and brittle pride. She was a tall, frail-looking woman whose wrists you could snap like cottonwood twigs. And she was living proof you should never trust a skinny cook. Her notion of fixing dinner was to open cans and ferret out scraps in the vegetable drawer. No wilted carrot or petrified celery stalk was safe from her reach.

After one meal of leftover bologna mixed with canned green beans and served on warmed-over biscuits, and a dessert of canned frosting on toast, I learned to take my leave whenever I heard the rattling of pans in the kitchen. The strange thing was, the Gates children didn't seem to notice or care how terrible the food was. Every fluorescent curl of macaroni, every morsel of something suspended in Jell-O, every particle of fat and gristle disappeared from their plates within five minutes of being served.

On Saturdays the Cateses went out to eat. but not at the local Mexican restaurant or the cafeteria. They went to Earl's meat market, where the butcher dumped all the scraps and cuts he hadn't been able to sell that day—sausages, tails, ribs, innards, pigs' ears—into a big metal tub. "Everything but the oink," Earl used to say with a grin. He was a huge man with hands the size of catcher mitts and a face that glowed as red as fresh ham.

After collecting the day's leftovers, Earl would fill the tub with water and boil it all together. For twenty-five cents you could pick out whatever you wanted, and Earl would set it on a piece of butcher paper along with a slice of Mrs. Baird's bread, and you would eat at the linoleum table in the corner. Nothing was wasted at the meat market. After people were through with the tub, Earl took what was left, ground it up. added bright yellow cornmeal, and sold it as dog food.

The Cateses were dirt poor, but they were never referred to as white trash. Miss Judie was a respectable God-fearing woman, which elevated the family to the level of "poor white." It seems a minor distinction, but many doors in Welcome were open to you if you were poor white and closed if you were white trash.

As a file clerk to the only CPA in Welcome, Miss Judie earned barely enough to put a roof over her children's heads, with Hardy's income supplementing her meager earnings. When I asked Hannah where her daddy was, she told me he was in the Texarkana State Penitentiary, although she'd never been able to find out what he'd done to get himself there.

Maybe the family's troubled past was the reason Miss Judie had established a spotless record of church attendance. She went every Sunday morning and Wednesday night and was always to be found in the first three pews, where the Lord's presence was the strongest. Like most people in Welcome, Miss Judie drew conclusions about a person based on his or her religion. It confounded her when I said Mama and I didn't go to church. "Well, what are you?" she pressed, until I said I thought I was a lapsed Baptist.

This led to another tricky question. "Progressive Baptist or Reformed Baptist?"

Since I wasn't sure of the difference, I said I thought we were progressive. A frown appeared on Miss Judie's forehead as she said in that case we should probably go to First Baptist on Main, although from what she understood, their main Sunday service featured rock bands and a line of chorus girls.

When I told Miss Marva about the conversation later, and protested that "lapsed" meant I didn't have to go to church, Miss Marva replied there was no such thing as lapsed in Welcome, and I might as well go with her and her gentleman friend Bobby Ray to the nondenominational Lamb of God on South Street, because for all that they had a guitarist instead of an organist and held open communion, they also had the best potluck in town.

Mama had no objection to my attending church with Miss Marva and Bobby Ray, although she said it suited her to remain lapsed for the time being. It soon became my habit on Sundays to arrive at Miss Marva's trailer at eight o'clock sharp, eat a breakfast of Bisquick sausage squares or pecan pancakes, and ride to the Lamb of God with Miss Marva and Bobby Ray.