The Scamp (36 page)

I want to be mad at her. For throwing my stuff out. For telling me to get over it and get out of her house. For telling me that kids die all the time. For not telling me the truth.

But all I can think about is sitting up on the kitchen table while she cut my hair, her nose running because she was crying, silently, wiping at her cheeks with the backs of her hands, clipping me down to a close cap of blond curls, her hands holding my head. The scissor blades next to my ear. Telling me it was going to be all right.

I've never seen June Carol not dressed in her best. But now, she's in a pair of jean shorts and a pink T-shirt, white Keds on her feet and her hair in a ponytail, low at the nape of her neck. She's not wearing makeup, or jewelry. She looks like a forty-eight-year-old woman. Somebody's mom. Or grandma.

She hugs me hard. Sweet Lord, she mumbles into my shoulder.

It's just the two of you? I say.

Well who in the hell else, my mother says.

Chuck? I say. Where's Chuck? I look at June Carol. Where's Eli?

Oh, Rayelle, June Carol says. You know there are some things the women have to do alone.

My mother and June Carol get a room together, farther down the line, with two queen beds, and a better TV, and Couper sends me to help them settle, to rest with them. June Carol stretches her short body sideways across the bed, her feet barely touching the floor.

My mother sits outside their room in one of the two rounded-out plastic chairs, one orange and one brown, and smokes a Salem. The minty smell of it, like home to me.

They take naps, and showers, and in the evening, Couper brings us barbecue takeout, and we sit with their chairs and our chairs together on the sidewalk, me, my mother, June Carol. I watch June Carol drink a Miller right out of the can, and after supper, she asks for one of my mother's cigarettes.

I got a past, she says when she sees me watching her.

I laugh, but I can't stop shaking.

Why did you come? I ask her.

Because your mama asked me to, she says.

My mother crosses her arms over her thin chest, her arms, skinny and frail-looking, spotted with freckles and sun. The scoop of her T-shirt showing a cluster of sunburnt freckles.

You can never have too many mamas, June Carol says.

The only one missing is Summer.

That night I try to sleep with my mother. Her body small next to mine, curved away from me. She doesn't say she wants me there, or that she wants time alone. But when June Carol goes into the bathroom, she holds my hand, so tight it hurts me. All the bones colliding. I hold back. My fingernails stuck in the side of her palm.

But when she falls asleep, I go back to Couper's room. I think about keying in, slipping behind him into the bed, laying my cheek against his shoulder blade, near the bullet-wound scar, listening to his breathing. About snaking my hand around his waist, finding his hand to slip mine into.

He's awake.

What are you doing? I ask him. He sits at the round laminate table underneath the hanging lamp. His computer on, an open beer at his elbow.

Sending in my notes, he says.

To?

A national detective, he says.

I sit on the edge of the bed. Do you think they'll find her? I ask.

I don't know, he says.

Will you? I say.

I'm done looking, he says.

What about the book? I say.

Some things are better let go, he says.

I want to sleep.

I want to do it in a better bed, and not with my mother, or with June Carol in the bed next to me. When
I snuck out of their room, June Carol was in her nightgown, a pretty little white thing with lace edges and pink flowers. Buttons down the bodice. She prayed aloud before getting under the covers.

God our Father, she said, bless these women here with me and look after your daughters.

I watched my mother get into bed in the T-shirt and panties she'd worn all day. I lay for a moment in my clothes, my mother's hand wrapped around mine.

When we go to bed, we go out to the Scamp. Couper moves the table aside and puts the cushions on the floor, stacked vertical against the counter. He puts on the floral sheets, softer than any hotel's, covers the pillows, and leaves the top sheet for us to get under.

We get in naked, pressed together. Till morning.

thirty

KHAKI

Who would have me?

It's what I thought when I found Dakota. A six-foot-tall woman with a missing eye, pants soaked with her own urine and blood. Sleeping in a thicket like a bear.

I would.

I walk along the river in the moonlight, my feet on shelves of shale. They blacken with pine sap and soil. Even the rush of the river water won't take it off. I follow the shoreline until it's light, and then hide in the shelter of vines that pour down off a huge ash tree. They make a curtain of green, a lady's bowery where I can rest in the shade for an hour or two. My body cold and closing in on itself. I don't eat. My stomach tight with plain survival. I drink from the river.

At dusk, I move again.

It's days before I arrive.

When I do, I come up out of the weeds of the backyard, rising like a sprite. Like a spirit. Like the image of a dead girl, coming up in vapors from the grave.

She stands on her back stoop, feeding chickens that scatter in the yard and come when she tosses out seed. Her hair in a bun. Ratty blue jeans cuffed at the ankle. Her yard, filled with wind chimes and stained glass. Coming from her kitchen, smells I haven't smelled in years. A woman who might bathe you, feed you, swaddle you like the baby you're going back to being.

My stomach rumbles.

Her arms are strong. Her shirtsleeves, soft and rolled to the elbow.

She watches me coming. Silver in the grass, a purple light above us. Naked and clean from the river, except for my feet. The chickens disperse when I walk through. One of them, a beautiful soft gold. Another, speckled deep brown.

She holds out the hand she used to scatter seed. To me.

What's your name? she asks me. My own voice, cracked and dry. She brings me flat clean water in a glass.

I tell her. Kathleen.

acknowledgments

I'm grateful to many writers and friends who held me upright during the long process of this book: Georgia Popoff, who gave me retreat and made me martinis; Lena Bertone, who read the earliest drafts and never doubted me; and Shanna Mahin, whose sassy daily texts and phone calls gave me a courage I never knew I had.

I could not have asked for this book to land in better hands than with Meg Storey and Christopher Rhodes. Both offered a fierce love and a keen eye to the details that shaped
The Scamp
for publication.

And for my closest dears: thank you for hearing my voice, for not expecting apology, for loving me hard.

JENNIFER PASHLEY
is the author of two short story collections,
States
and
The Conjurer
. Her stories have appeared widely, in journals like
Mississippi Review
,
PANK
, and
SmokeLong Quarterly
, and she was awarded the Red Hen Prize for fiction, the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT Fiction.
The Scamp
is her first novel.

Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Pashley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books,
2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon and
Brooklyn, New York

Distributed by W. W. Norton and Company

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Pashley, Jennifer.

The scamp / Jennifer Pashley. -- First U.S. edition.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-1-941040-11-9 (alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-941040-12-6 (e-book)

I. Title.

PS3616.A83S33 2015

813'.6--dc23

2015016032

First US edition 2015
Interior design by Diane Chonette
www.tinhouse.com