“Would you mind writing that on the blackboard five hundred times?”

Her voice is quiet. “I miss you, Jax. Real bad. I get this aching in my throat sometimes and I’m not sure if you’re real or not. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.” Jax hears her blowing her nose, the most heart-warming sound he has heard in his life to date. He wishes he could program that nose blow into his synthesizer.

“I don’t even have your picture anymore,” she says.

“Goddamn Barbie stole it.”

“That’s a crime against nature,” says Jax. “She stole my photograph?”

“Well, there was money involved. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“You had to pay someone to steal my photograph?”

A waitress with her blouse tied in a knot at the base of her rib cage passes Jax with a tray of dirty plates and gives him a look, running her eyes down his shirtless torso.

“I sacrificed my shirt to a medical emergency,” he whispers.

She rolls her eyes as she wheels around and butts the kitchen door open with her hind end.

“I should have seen it coming,” Taylor says. “That Barbie was petty larceny waiting to happen. I can’t believe how bad I’ve screwed up here, Jax. Seems like I’ve made every wrong turn a person could make.”

“You sound like a seven-car freeway pileup.”

“I am. I didn’t even tell you yet, I lost the van-driving job.

I couldn’t work out the baby-sitting. They kept me on the substitute board, but I don’t get called much. Now I’m a cashier in a department store. Ladies Intimate Apparel, to be exact. Six dollars an hour.”

“That’s not so bad. Forty-eight dollars a day for selling undies. That’s almost a thousand a month.”

“Very good, math whiz, except it isn’t. They take out some for taxes and Social Security and this mandatory insurance plan that I can’t even use yet for six months. I’ll get around seven hundred a month.”

“Hey, that ought to melt away those unwanted pounds.”

“I figured out a budget: our rent is three hundred and ninety, so if you figure in water and electricity and gas—we haven’t turned on the heat yet, so I don’t know what that will be—but say five hundred total, for rent and utilities.

Then another fifty a month to keep the car going so I can get to work. If we can get by on a hundred a month for food, that should leave fifty dollars for emergencies. But Jax, we just keep getting behind. I had a car-insurance payment come due, and then today my register turned up forty-four dollars short, and they say they’re going to take that out of my paycheck. I’m thinking, what paycheck?”

“That’s robbery.”

“No, it probably was my fault. I get distracted trying to keep an eye on Turtle in the store. They have this special af-tercare program at her school for low-income, I guess that’s me, but even that costs three dollars a day. Sixty a month.

I don’t have it.”

“You’re eating on twenty-five bucks a week?”

“Yeah. One dollar a meal for the two of us, plus Turtle’s milk money that she has to take to school. We’re not eating too high off the hog, as Mama would say.”

“No, I’d say you were eating very low off the hog. I would say you are eating the hooves.”

“Jax, poverty sucks.”

“Can I quote you on that? Maybe a bumper sticker or something?”

“I know you’re not rich either, but it was different there, with you and me to split the rent, and Lou Ann always around for baby-sitting.”

“You should click your heels together and get your butt back home, Dorothy.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you the funny part. Now they’re telling me I need to dress better for work. My supervisor says jeans and T-shirt is not acceptable attire for a cashier in Ladies’

Wear. I wanted to tell her to shove her under-wired bras and transfer me to Auto Repair. But if I lose this job we’ll be living downtown on a bench, or in our car, and that’s no joke. I swear I’ve considered shoplifting from the juniors department.”

“Taylor, read my lips: Come home. I’ll send you the money. I don’t think this Annawake figure is going to come after you.”

“You don’t think so?”

“She seems more like the lurk-in-the-bushes and make-scary-noises type.”

Taylor blows her nose again. “If I could get there on my own, Jax, I would. I feel tired all the time, like I could lie down and sleep a hundred years. But you can’t be sending money. You don’t have next month’s rent.”