Taylor begins to laugh or cry, she’s not sure which. “Yeah,” she says. “Barbie should have left us a note like that, don’t you think?”

Turtle sits next to Taylor on the sofa, but stares into the darkness. “Mom, did I make her mad?”

Taylor pulls Turtle onto her lap. “Turtle, you had nothing to do with this. Look at me now, okay?” She strokes Turtle’s hair and gently turns her head toward her. “Look at my eyes. Can you look at me? Don’t go away.”

With a great effort Turtle pulls her focus out of the darkness and fixes it on Taylor’s face.

“That’s it. Stay right here with me, and listen. Barbie liked you. She’s just a nut case. She’s the kind of person that can only think about herself, and she just decided she had to move on. We always knew that, remember? We decided we’d give her a ride that time in Las Vegas, but we always knew she wasn’t going to come with us the whole way. Remember?”

Turtle nods.

Taylor rocks back and forth with Turtle in her arms. “Don’t worry, you know I’m not going to leave you alone. You’ll stay with me. Tomorrow’s Sunday, I don’t have to go to work. And maybe on Monday they’ll let you ride the van with me. You can help me drive, okay?”

“I don’t know how to drive.”

“I know, but we’ll think of something.” Taylor has no earthly idea what they’ll think of. She knows it’s against every regulation of the Handi-Van company to bring family members on board.

“Before you know it you’re going to be starting first grade,” she says.

“Mom, remember Lucky Buster?”

“I sure do.”

“I saved him, right?”

“You saved his life.”

“Will we ever see him again?”

“I don’t see why not. Sure.”

Turtle relaxes her hold on Taylor just a little.

“You think we should get ready for bed? I think it’s past my bedtime too,” Taylor says. She exhales deeply when Turtle finally releases her and goes into their room.

Taylor gets up and turns out all the lights. She doesn’t want to look in Barbie’s room, but she has to, to make herself believe. Sure enough, even the double bed is stripped down to the ugly blue-striped mattress. At least now she and Turtle can have separate rooms, Taylor thinks—she’ll move in here and let Turtle have the room with the twin beds for herself.

She will meet friends in school, and invite them over. They will be a normal American family. Taylor is less optimistic about her own possibilities for sharing the double bed. She misses Jax.

By the time she goes in to kiss Turtle goodnight, Turtle is in her in-between sleeptalking stage.

“Buster has to go home, Mom, this one in the water.”

“Goodnight, Turtle. Sleep tight.”

“My tummy hurts. Do those trees real or the dog was talking. Is it raining?”

“Yeah,” Taylor says softly. “It’s starting to rain again.”

She undresses and climbs into the other twin bed. She’ll have to figure out how to get new sheets for the double bed before she can move into the other bedroom. There is a lot more than too much to think about. She never imagined it would be this much of a problem to lose Barbie from her life. She should have known better. You don’t adopt a wild animal and count it as family. Before Taylor turns off the light, she reaches over to her night-stand to take a look at Jax in his paper-bag ensemble.

The photo cube is gone.

22

WELCOME TO HEAVEN

“WELL, TAYLOR, YOU’VE BROUGHT YOUR pigs to a pretty market. How’d you lose your telephone?”

“Not the phone, Mama, the electricity. They couldn’t shut the phone off because I didn’t even have one yet. This number where you just called me back is a pay phone.”

“Oh,” Alice says, shifting the receiver. She’s about decided her bad ear hears better than the good one. “Well, what’s this other number I’ve got written down here?”

“That’s the Handi-Van number. What I’m trying to tell you is you can’t call me there anymore because I had to quit.”

Alice is confused. It doesn’t help that Sugar keeps coming in and out of the living room to ask questions. And this living room is crowded with enough furniture for two or three households. When Alice first peered into Sugar’s huge china cabinet, she expected to see fancy dishes or Jesus stuff, but it isn’t, it’s Indian things of every kind. Old carvings, arrowheads, tacky little ceramic Indian boys. At least no head-lamps.