Maybe she and Jon can drive to Dallas to get a second opinion from a specialist. Maybe they can adopt, or the next time one of her brothers or cousins calls and asks if Suzanne and Jon can take care of their children for a little while, just until they sort themselves out, maybe Suzanne will say yes, but only if they’re willing to leave them for good. If she decides to have the procedure done, she isn’t going to tell anybody until it’s over and done with. She will check herself into the hospital, have the surgery and be back in her own kitchen before Lauralee gets home, before the plant whistle blows and Jon comes home from the plant.

Suzanne heads to the kitchen table for her legal pad and the gift bags she brought in from the car earlier that day. When she looks out the kitchen window and spies D. A. Pierce riding her bicycle in circles in front of her house, she drops everything and rushes outside, calling, You there, Debra Ann Pierce, you come here. I want to talk to you. The child lets out a high-pitched squeak and takes off pedaling down the street, sturdy legs moving like two piston pumps. She swerves madly to dodge a truck that has run the stop sign at the corner, and keeps right on pedaling.

*

To avoid being run over by a young man with his eye on the ball, they walk along the edge of the practice field. When Lauralee dawdles, Suzanne reminds her to pay attention. You stop paying attention and next thing you know, somebody’s come and towed the family car away, or you come from church one day and find all the furniture sitting on the lawn, sinking into the swamp.

She carries a plastic food container in one hand and six Avon bags in the other. Three more gift bags are hidden in the heavy purse that hangs from one shoulder. It’s hot as the devil’s armpit out there, but Suzanne’s red hair is tucked neatly behind her ears. Her bright orange pedal pushers are freshly ironed, and her blouse is white as a magnolia blossom. Even out here on a hot and dusty football field, she wants her neighbors to say, Suzanne Ledbetter looks like she just stepped off an airplane.

Lauralee walks a few feet behind her mother with her head down and the baton cradled in the crook of her elbow. She has legs like a jackrabbit and her face is covered with so many freckles it looks like a red pen exploded on it, and although Suzanne curled the girl’s hair again before they left the house this afternoon, it has already fallen. In the center of her forehead, a single, valiant curl hangs on for dear life. Stand up straight, Suzanne says, and Lauralee throws her head back, high-stepping her way across the field and clutching her baton like it’s Judith’s sword.

On the football field, the team is doing its first set of burpees. When they get to fifty, Coach Allen tells them to do it again. Sweat rolls down the boys’ foreheads, and the edges of their pads and jerseys are dark with water. One boy falls to the ground and lies there. When somebody squirts cold water in his face, the spectators laugh. Shit, back when they played ball, Coach threw a bucket of ice water in their faces. They once watched a boy get heat stroke out there, and he didn’t go to the locker room. He played through it.

Suzanne and Lauralee walk up to the bleachers where the fans sit with cold beers or plastic cups of iced tea wedged between their knees, and when someone says under her breath, God love her, Suzanne knows they are talking about Lauralee, who has drifted over to the outer edge of the practice field and begun doing figure eights with her baton.

Good job, honey, her mother calls. Try to do a reverse flash followed by a Little Joe flip.

Lauralee wrenches her arm behind her back and spins the baton until it flies into the dirt and lands with a thud. She is so talented, a woman says. I can’t wait to see her in the halftime show in a few years. And she’s tall, says someone else. Bless her little heart. Try a pinwheel, Suzanne calls out. Try a double spin. Lauralee flings the baton into the sun, spins twice, and watches the baton roll to the sideline.

Suzanne climbs up on the bleachers and hands out pink-and-white Avon bags. Each bag holds next month’s catalog along with lipsticks and eye shadows, perfumes and creams and lotions. Each item is wrapped with soft pink tissue paper and carefully tied with a white ribbon no wider than a fingernail. Smiling broadly and taking care to thank each woman individually, Suzanne slips their checks and cash into a small white envelope and zips it into her purse.

Ten to one, Suzanne has a relative who owes money to at least one man sitting at the other end of the bleachers. Ten to one, her mama bounced a check to at least one of their daddies, back in the good old days. They would never hold it against her, but a woman could spend her whole life proving everybody wrong. So Suzanne keeps moving. She gathers, carries, and drops off. She volunteers, counts, plans, and falls to her knees to gather crumbs that no one else can see. There is always something that needs to be cleaned—a table, a window, her daughter’s face.

Hit him harder, a booster yells. Y’all ain’t going to beat Midland Lee with that attitude, says another. Two boys crash into each other with a loud smack and lie unmoving on the field for a few seconds. Oh hell, one of the boosters yells from the aluminum bleachers, you just got your bells rung a little bit. On your feet, boys, shouts the coach, and the boys slowly roll onto their sides and get to their knees and stand up.

After the Avon has been distributed, Suzanne unlocks the sides of the plastic container she sent Lauralee to fetch from the car. The lid swivels up to reveal three dozen chocolate cupcakes she’s made to give to the team when practice is over. One of the women remarks on the container, and Suzanne passes out catalogs. She is having a product party next week. They should come over for pimento cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Y’all bring your checkbooks. She winks at them, just like Arlene would have.

On a good day, Suzanne’s mother could talk the pithy out of a cucumber. Everyone she ever met had high hopes for her. She was a master at reading a situation and becoming whoever she needed to be—Adventist, card shark, desperate mother in need of a little help. In Blanco, she had been a practicing Catholic. In Lubbock, she spoke in tongues and walked barefoot over hot coals. For a time there, when they lived in Pecos, she had everybody believing that she had lost her sight in a gas explosion. The family laughed all the way to the county line over that one.

This all goes for Lauralee’s college fund, Suzanne tells the women, and while that is not strictly true, it is true enough.

I’m sure she is going to be very successful at whatever she makes up her mind to do, one of the ladies says before turning to talk to the woman sitting next to her about the weather, the football team, the price of oil. When one woman gives an update on the Ramírez case, another wonders aloud what the girl’s mother was doing while her daughter was out running the streets. Well, I’ll tell you what she wasn’t doing, Suzanne says. Paying attention.

Mmm-hmm, another woman says.

It could have been any of our daughters, says a third.

Not mine, Suzanne says. I don’t take my eye off her for a minute.

And then, just as one of the linebackers stumbles to the sidelines and begins retching in the grass, Lauralee flings her baton high into the air, spins around three times, and looks up to the sky with a wide grin on her face. The baton smacks her in the eye so hard that even Coach Allen gasps. She lets out a wail that spins across the practice field like a dust devil, a high-pitched scream that is a full-frontal assault on both hearing and reason.

Suzanne runs down the metal bleachers, each aluminum row trembling as she steps hard, her purse banging against her hip, the cupcakes forgotten and melting on the back row. She grabs her daughter by the shoulders and peers into her eye. It is barely red. She is unlikely to have so much as a bump.

You’re okay, she tells her daughter. Rub some dirt on it. But Lauralee wails on and on, and then everybody stops what they’re doing—Coach Allen stops yelling at the team, the women stop peering into their gift bags, the boosters stop armchair quarterbacking, even the team stands still—and all of them, in what seems to Suzanne to be a single, coordinated motion, look at her as if to say, Well, do something.

I hate the baton, Lauralee yells.

Oh, you do not. Suzanne chews her finger and looks back over her shoulder at the row of boosters, still sitting there with their mouths open, still waiting for her to take control of the situation. She doesn’t hate it, she calls to them.

Lauralee wails again and then falls to the ground, rolling back and forth with her hand over one eye, saying Ow, ow, ow.

Stop it, Suzanne whispers fiercely. You want to let these people see you cry? She pulls her daughter to her feet, walks her quickly across the field, and pushes her into the front seat of the car, all while begging her to stop that damned crying and act like a big girl, for heaven’s sake. She turns on the car and points the vents directly at her daughter’s face, and now she can see that the eye has begun to swell after all. She is going to have a shiner the size of a walnut.

Can we go home, Lauralee asks quietly.