"Now," he went on, "you can go and visit heaven. What? You see a room just like the first one, the same table, the same pot of stew, the same spoons as long as a sponge mop. But these people are all happy and fat."

"Real fat, or do you mean just well-fed?" Lou Ann asked.

"Just well-fed," he said. "Perfectly, magnificently well-fed, and very happy. Why do you think?"

He pinched up a chunk of pineapple in his chopsticks, neat as you please, and reached all the way across the table to offer it to Turtle. She took it like a newborn bird.

Chapter 8 The Miracle of Dog Doo Park

Of all the ridiculous things, Mama was getting married. To Harland Elleston no less, of El-Jay's Paint and Body fame. She called on a Saturday morning while I'd run over to Matties, so Lou Ann took the message. I was practically the last to know.

When I called back Mama didn't sound normal. She was out of breath and kept running on about Harland. "Did I get you in out of the yard?" I asked her. "Are you planting cosmos?"

"Cosmos, no, it's not even the end of April yet, is it? I've got sugar peas in that little bed around to the side, but not cosmos."

"I forgot," I told her. "Everything's backwards here. Half the stuff you plant in the fall."

"Missy, I'm in a tither," she said. She called me Taylor in letters, but we weren't accustomed to phone calls. "With Harland and all. He treats me real good, but it's happened so fast I don't know what end of the hog to feed. I wish you were here to keep me straightened out."

"I do too," I said.

"You plant things in the fall? And they don't get bit?"

"No."

At least she did remember to ask about Turtle. "She's great," I said. "She's talking a blue streak."

"That's how you were. You took your time getting started, but once you did there was no stopping you," Mama said.

I wondered what that had to do with anything. Everybody behaved as if Turtle was my own flesh and blood daughter. It was a conspiracy.

Lou Ann wanted to know every little detail about the wedding, which was a whole lot more than I knew myself, or cared to.

"Everybody deserves their own piece of the pie, Taylor," Lou Ann insisted. "Who else has she got?"

"She's got me."

"She does not, you're here. Which might as well be Red Taiwan, for all the good it does her."

"I always thought I'd get Mama out here to live. She didn't even consult me, just ups and decides to marry this paint-and-body yahoo."

"I do believe you're jealous."

"That is so funny I forgot to laugh."

"When my brother got married I felt like he'd deserted us. He just sends this letter one day with a little tiny picture, all you could make out really was dogs, and tells us he's marrying somebody by the name of She-Wolf Who Hunts by the First Light." Lou Ann yawned and moved farther down the bench so her arms were more in the sun. She'd decided she was too pale and needed a tan.

"Granny Logan liked to died. She kept saying, did Eskimos count as human beings? She thought they were half animal or something. And really what are you supposed to think, with a name like that? But I got used to the idea. I like to think of him up there in Alaska with all these little daughters in big old furry coats. I've got in my mind that they live in an igloo, but that can't be right."

We were sitting out with the kids in Roosevelt Park, which the neighbor kids called such names as Dead Grass Park and Dog Doo Park. To be honest, it was pretty awful. There were only a couple of shade trees, which had whole dead parts, and one good-for-nothing palm tree so skinny and tall that it threw its shade onto the roof of the cooler-pad factory down the block. The grass was scraggly, struggling to come up between shiny bald patches of dirt. Mostly it put me in mind of an animal with the mange. Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels.

"Look at it this way, at least she's still kicking," Lou Ann said. "I feel like my mama's whole life stopped counting when Daddy died. You want to know something? They even got this double gravestone. Daddy's on the right hand side, and the other side's already engraved for Mama. 'Ivy Louise Logan, December 2, 1934-to blank.' Every time I see it it gives me the willies. Like it's just waiting there for her to finish up her business and die so they can fill in the blank."

"It does seem like one foot in the grave," I said.

"If Mama ever got married again I'd dance a jig at her wedding. I'd be thrilled sideways. Maybe it would get her off my back about moving back in with her and Granny." Dwayne Ray coughed in his sleep, and Lou Ann pushed his stroller back and forth two or three times. Turtle was pounding the dirt with a plastic shovel, a present from Mattie.