“Mama, don’t you think I know that?” Taylor feels her whole self shaken by this small, continuing antagonism with her mother. Her mouth turns down at the corners as she tears open a detergent box and shakes its green-smelling contents into the machine. “How am I supposed to know?
I jumped in the car with Turtle because I was scared to death and it seemed like the safest way to go. That’s all I can tell you. I got started rolling down this hill, but I don’t know why or how far.”
“Don’t you sometimes think you ought to just go talk to this Six-shooter woman, see if she’ll listen to reason?”
“Fourkiller. No, Mama, I don’t. Because what if she won’t?”
Alice leans her hip against the washer and looks kindly at her daughter. “I know, hon. No mother that ever loved her child is going to argue with you.”
Taylor feels an ocean of relief. She busies her hands with clothes. “I don’t know how far we should go. I was thinking California maybe, some little town where you and me and Turtle could find a place to rent. I’m smart enough to know how to keep us from starving, I can find work. And in two or three months this thing will pass over and we can go back home.”
Alice holds Barbie’s stretch pants against herself, and laughs. She has hardly an ounce of extra on her frame, but against that purple Spandex outline she looks like a stout tree trunk. Taylor holds them against her own body, which is lean but nothing close to Barbie’s hourglass. She tosses the pants in with their jeans. “I’ll have to cross off fashion model as a career option. I’ve put on weight since I got Turtle.” She laughs at herself. “And I wasn’t even pregnant. I don’t know what it is. I guess just observing regular mealtimes for Turtle’s benefit.”
“Taylor, I can’t believe my ears. Look at you, slim as a grass snake. You’re perfect.”
At the light, clattering sound of cardboard boxes, they both turn and see that the orange-haired boy has leveled Turtle’s tower again. His mother pays no mind; her doughy breasts in a stretched T-shirt tremble with concentration as she loads one machine after another with crumpled jeans.
As the boy zooms away, Turtle keeps her eye on him for a long time. Finally she starts again from the bottom.
“Well, Mama, perfect I may be, but I have put on weight.
Hanging around Miss America in her leotards makes you notice yourself.”
“Taylor, I never heard you run yourself down before. You’d just as well jump off a bridge than to start in like that.” Alice closes a machine lid and sighs. “When I was in my thirties I had these little square hips left over from being pregnant and I just hated it. I kept thinking, ‘All those years before, I had a perfect glamour-girl body, and I didn’t spend one minute appreciating it because I thought my nose had a bump in it.’ And now that I’m old, my shoulder hurts and I don’t sleep good and my knuckles swell up, and I think, ‘All those years in my thirties and forties I had a body where everything worked perfect. And I didn’t spend one minute appreciating it because I thought I had square hips.’ ”
Taylor smiles. “I take your point.”
Turtle has made a new tower, bright and precarious by the window, nearly as tall as she is. She stands beside it with her fingers tense at her sides, following the boy around the room with her eyes like a person with a fly swatter and a killing intention. He wheels around the end of a row of washers and starts toward her. Turtle waits till his fingertips are almost in reach of the tower before she scoops both arms wide and knocks it down herself, sending the boxes flying.
Jax’s voice on the phone is empty of humor. The voice by itself scares Taylor, let alone what he is reading to her, a letter from Annawake Fourkiller. She can’t concentrate at all.
“…premature to take any legal action yet,” he says, and Taylor is distracted by her memories of confronting social workers before Turtle’s adoption—confident young women in offices who wouldn’t believe in a child named Turtle without a birth certificate, any more than they believed in fairies.
“What does she have that will see her through this into a peaceful womanhood?” Jax asks, but it isn’t Jax asking, it’s Annawake Fourkiller, who sat in the kitchen drinking coffee less than two weeks ago, when Taylor’s world was still intact.
Her mind fathoms random images of Turtle, the mean, dark eyes of that boy in the laundromat when Turtle sent boxes flying into his face.
Jax reads, “…she can’t belong to you. Yours sincerely, Annawake Fourkiller.”