Me too, she says, and they fall quiet for a little while. She stares at his face as if trying to memorize it. I’m going to bring you a toothbrush, she says, and Jesse laughs. The only person who ever gave a tinker’s damn about whether or not he brushed his teeth had been his sergeant, and he rode Jesse’s ass all the time. Now he’s back home in some place called Kalamazoo. That sounds like a made-up place, D. A. says, and Jesse tells her that he used to think so too, but then he looked at an atlas and there it was, barely an inch from Canada.

When the plant whistles at quitting time, Jesse says he has to go to work soon, but he could use a flea collar for the cat if she can get one, and a few more cans of tuna fish. Another jug of water, maybe some bug spray. She writes it all down for him, and when she spots a scorpion coming out of the pipe where he puts his trash, Jesse walks over and stomps it with his boot. D. A. looks down at her thin plastic sandals, the pale-pink nail polish she let Casey put on for her, and she imagines the scorpion scuttling over the lip of her sandal, the tail rising to deliver the hot, agonizing sting. She thinks how nice it is when somebody saves you from something, even if you don’t need to be saved.

*

She can ride her bike the entire length of Larkspur Lane, even around the curve, without touching her handlebars, not even once. She can turn twenty-six cartwheels in less than a minute and hang upside down on the monkey bars until she nearly passes out. She can stand on her hands for thirty seconds, on her head for one minute, and on one foot for ten. These, she demonstrates on the hot concrete at the bottom of the flood canal. She can slip a candy bar into her pocket at 7-Eleven, smuggle a casserole out of Mrs. Shepard’s house in her backpack, and, if her T-shirt is baggy enough, listen to a lecture from Mrs. Ledbetter with a can of chili tucked in the waistband of her shorts.

In a different year, a normal one, she might feel guilty about stealing. But since Ginny left, Debra Ann has thought about what it means to live an upright life. She keeps the kitchen clean and makes sure her daddy gets some rest on Sundays. She checks on Mrs. Shepard and plays with Peter and Lily—she knows they’re imaginary, and she does not care, they have pointed ears and wings that shine in the sunlight, and they fly in from London when she is having a bad day, when she can’t stop picking at her eyebrows and wondering where her mama is, and why the hell she left in the first place. D. A. has given a lot of thought to the matter of petty theft, parsing her lessons from a week of vacation Bible school last summer, and she knows: Stealing is better than letting a man go without food and company.

When Jesse leaves for work every afternoon, she rides her bike over to Casey or Lauralee’s house on the off chance they might be home. She rides home and sits cross-legged on the floor in the garage so she can rifle through Ginny’s old cedar chest. She tries to listen to the Joni Mitchell album she found in the kitchen trash can, but it reminds her of driving all over West Texas with Ginny, killing time and seeing what there was to see. She reads an article in Life about the bicentennial celebration in Washington. She eats a piece of buttered bread with sugar, carefully wiping up the sugar she spilled on the counter. That done, she walks over to Mrs. Shepard’s house with a can of Dr Pepper and bag of chips, and when she sees that Mr. Shepard’s truck is gone, she crawls into the hawthorn hedge and lies down in the gently stippled shade, and thinks about Ginny until her cheeks and chin are muddy with dirt and tears. It’s a good place to cry—cool and private, no eyewitnesses.

People get old and die. Mr. Shepard was already sick when he had his hunting accident, even if he didn’t want to talk about it. His hair fell out, he started to walk with a cane, he forgot things, and toward the end, he couldn’t always say Debra Ann’s name. Everybody knew.

Men die all the time in fights or pipeline explosions or gas leaks. They fall from cooling towers or try to beat the train or get drunk and decide to clean their guns. Women are killed when they get cancer or marry badly or take rides with strange men. Casey Nunally’s daddy was killed in Vietnam when she was just a baby, and Debra Ann has seen photographs hanging in their hallway—a high school portrait taken just a few months before he left for basic training, a wedding photo taken when he was on leave, and the girls’ favorite, a snapshot of him taken at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. He wears his dress greens with a single patch sewn to the top of his left sleeve, and he holds his baby daughter up to the camera, his grin wide and toothy.

I never knew him, Casey says. To her, David Nunally is the flag that Mrs. Nunally keeps folded in her cedar chest. He is three medals resting in a small wooden box lined with purple satin, and paint peeling off the wood trim on their house. He is Mrs. Nunally’s job at the bowling alley, the grocery store, the department store, and her praying for help in a dozen different churches, each a little stricter than the one before. He is Casey wearing the long skirts of all Adventist women and girls, even in the summer, and church on Saturdays instead of Sundays. He is Casey saying to Debra Ann, Everything would be different if—

When people die, there is proof and protocol. The undertaker dressed Lauralee’s grandmother in her favorite wig and blouse. He tried to hide her cancer with a thick layer of face powder and arranged her hands so they rested just beneath her breasts, one pale and wrinkled hand crossed over the other. Lauralee reported that her grandma’s cheek was cool and rubbery, and Debra Ann had already taken Casey’s hand to guide it into the casket when Mrs. Ledbetter grabbed both girls by the tender, fatty part of their arms and squeezed hard, when she leaned down and breathed in Debra Ann’s ear, What in the world is wrong with you?

But Ginny Pierce is not dead. She left—left town, left a note and most of her clothes, left Debra Ann and her daddy. So Mrs. Shepard pats her arm and offers to trim her bangs for her, and Mrs. Nunally purses her lips and shakes her head. On Sunday mornings, her daddy makes breakfast for them. Sunday afternoons, they grill steaks and drive over to Baskin-Robbins. When they come home, he sits in the living room playing albums or wanders down the block to sit in Mr. Ledbetter’s backyard and drink a beer.

When Ginny comes home, Debra Ann doesn’t want the house to be such a mess that her mom turns around and walks right back out the door again, so she straightens up and tries to figure out how to help Jesse get his truck back. She worries about her dad, who doesn’t sleep enough, and Mrs. Shepard, who sometimes pretends she isn’t home, even when Debra Ann lies down on the front porch and hollers, I can see your tennis shoes under the door! She waits for her mama to call, jumping every time the phone rings and then sighing when she hears her daddy’s voice on the other end. She practices what she’ll say when her mother finally calls home. She will keep her voice causal, as if Ginny is calling from the customer service desk at Strike-It-Rich to see if they need ice cream. When she calls, Debra Ann will sound friendly but not too eager, and she will ask the question she has been hanging onto since February 15, when she wandered home early from the basketball courts and found Ginny’s note pinned to her pillow.

When are you coming home?

Ginny

Sunday morning, February 15—It will be cold comfort, knowing she is not alone. Plenty of other women have gone before her. By the time she pulls into the fire lane at Sam Houston Elementary, two suitcases and a shoebox of family pictures hidden in the trunk, Ginny Pierce knows plenty of stories about those other women, the ones who ran off. But Ginny is not the running-off kind. She will be back in a year, two at the most. As soon as she has a job, an apartment, a little money in the bank—she is coming back for her daughter.

Mama, why are you crying? Debra Ann asks, and Ginny tells her, It’s just my allergies, honey, and D. A. shakes her head in the same manner she does everything, fiercely—It’s February, too early for allergies—as if that settles it. And Ginny swallows the stone in her throat. Could you scoot over here for a minute, honey? Let me see your face?