Leaving Eden by Anne Leclaire

my daddy a mule, and I’d been turned into a cow, which was the worst thing of all.
    Now, just like Nell Mosley watching the magician’s watch, I stared at that money.
Glamour Day
was less than a week away. You can ask her for it, a voice told me. She’ll give it to you, if you ask her. That was absolute fact. Martha Lee would have given me about anything. But the money was all mixed up with disappointment over the driving lesson and seeing all those pictures of Mama.
    There must have been a hundred bills in that envelope. I only took two. A ten and a five. Just what I needed and not one dime more. After, I pedaled straight home and put the money in the syrup pitcher. I thought I’d feel relieved that I had almost enough money, but I didn’t. Taking from Martha Lee was different from lifting penny candy down at the Cash Store. Martha Lee was kin. Or close to.
    Daddy wasn’t home, and I was far too edgy to settle down. I spent a little time cleaning up the kitchen. After a while, I decided to bike over to the creek. All the other kids would be at the lake, the girls lying around in new bathing suits and oiling themselves up, the guys showing off, swimming out to the raft and diving in, making a big deal out of it. There’d be music playing on every blanket. I didn’t belong. Being without a mama made me different. Half the time, people acted like I was a special case, and the rest of the time, they acted like I should be used to having a mama who was gone, like that was something a person could get accustomed to. No one ever talked about her, or asked me one thing about her.
    When I felt lonely like that, I tried to imagine the future and the day I would come home from Hollywood. It’d be in the summer, maybe, and I’d be on a short break from filming a movie that was opening at Christmas. The
Eden Times
would do a story about me and take a picture that they’d feature on page one. People would ask for my autograph and I’d sign one for everyone.
Taylor Skye.
I’d write it out in serious blue ink, not something tacky like purple. And I’d be extra nice to everyone, even Elizabeth Talmadge, who’d have grown fat by then, have a head full of split ends, and no longer be queen of anything except the cash register at Winn-Dixie.
    I pulled on my old swimsuit from last year, which was too small and rode up my butt. There wasn’t much in the cupboard so I made myself a PB&J and grabbed a can of Coke. I considered taking a beer, but by the time I got around to drinking it, it would be warm. Warm soda tasted a sight better than warm beer. I was flipping up the kickstand on my Raleigh when a blue DeSoto pulled up. Wiley Bettis. For once without Will.
    “Hey, Tallie,” he said. He opened the door and got out.
    “Hey, yourself.” It was strange to see him without his twin, like half of him was missing. “Where’s Will?”
    “At the pond.”
    “Why aren’t you there?”
    “Didn’t feel like it. Where you off to?”
    “Swimming. The creek.”
    “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”
    Wiley had this decrepit ’57 DeSoto someone had stripped the plates off and left for dead in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. He’d towed it home and spent the entire previous summer rebuilding the engine. Wiley’d gone through grammar school in the slow reading group, but he was some kind of genius when it came to engines.
    “I’ll bring you home, too,” he said, staring at the ground where his toe was busy working a hole in the grass.
    For heavens sake, Wiley Bettis, I wanted to say. Straighten up and look at me. One thing I knew I would demand in a boyfriend—not that I ever
considered
Wiley boyfriend material— was that he be able to look me straight in the eye. Mama said you couldn’t trust someone who didn’t, and I put that in my notebook, too.
    “Okay,” I said. A girl didn’t have to worry about how she was dressed when she rode in an old DeSoto with a front seat patched with duct tape.
    When we got to the creek, we