Lorraine tripped and crumpled on the floor the one night she tried to dance in her mother’s shoes. When her father yelled, “two left feet,” and Smitty laughed, she kicked a shoe into a cabinet. Her mother hugged her and said she needed lessons, but that it was a pretty good show.

            The memory stings. Really, everything did seem pretty good, or good enough, before the fragility of arrangements became clear: how a family can dissolve the way a gummy bear melts on the tongue.

            There is distance, though, between who she is now and that desperate child she was four years ago—skinny in high-water jeans, pockets stuffed with dry cereal, waiting for her mother to bring in bags of ice after work. Four cheese singles, a stick of margarine, and a container of milk floating in a red cooler.

            Lorraine balls the wax and presses it flat on the table. She thinks about Smitty: how he needed her approval for his drawings; how they wrote captions together for his humanized rat series, how they created an actual book and dreamed of getting it published.

            Her father’s comings and goings didn’t bother her. Her mother’s boyfriends didn’t bother her, but the day Smitty dragged his clothes into the kitchen and she understood he was leaving, she was shaken. Her father gestured to the box of Hefty bags, offering Lorraine one to gather her stuff.

            She hadn’t spoken about any of this until this week with Sementha.     She recalled the cereal box scratch-and-sniff as a determining sign. Instead of pineapple, like the image, the paper smelled like lemon. With his ridiculous mouth, her father blew ridiculous smoke rings toward her. And didn’t he know she was no longer that little girl who would laugh at his silliness? With the scratch-and-sniff at her nose, it was clear that lemon beat cigarettes, and she wouldn’t abandon her mother. She stood up from the table, got the broom, and began sweeping the crumbs off the floor. Her father found the dustpan, stubbed out his cigarette, and as he squatted to hold it in place, he gave her a wink.

            When her mother lost the lease, and they had to leave the only home Lorraine had ever known, Lorraine ripped her carefully drawn self-portrait—the one that had won the ribbon, the face of a girl who never imagined a mother with cancer, from the wall. She could have done better as a daughter. Sementha, this woman who had only known her a couple of weeks, implied as much.

            Cleaning out her room before the move, she pressed Raggedy Ann—her “cozy”—to her chest; its mess of red yarn hair smelled like damp leaves she and Smitty had burrowed under while their father raked piles. She hurled a clump of rumpled, soiled clothing in the air like she used to do with fall leaves. But whereas the leaves lifted lightly and scattered in the autumn breeze, her clothes dropped in thuds like birds shot out of the sky. She tossed the doll into the giveaway box.

 

            Lorraine carefully peels wax from her nail beds and rubs her palms concentrically. Her mother’s boyfriends came and went; they showed no appreciation for her mother. It didn’t seem that her father ever did, either. Could she? Did she have adequate gratitude? The ball of wax is pressed and flattened. She holds the silver-dollar pancake to her cheek and rests a moment there.

            She slowly exhales, extinguishing the candle, and forms a little wax heart.

            A desk light casts a shadow on the dresser beside her mother’s beloved silvery plant. Lorraine had carried it on her lap from the last house, and its heart-shaped leaves seemed to whisper, “Be brave.” Lorraine caresses her sleeping mother’s arm and sits on the rickety chair next to the bed. She places the heart on her mother’s chest and rests her head against her side. In sleep, she dreams she and her mother are assembling a village in the sand with cups the size of shot glasses. They are diligent and unsmiling as they set up a series of houses. A smooth, flat mesa makes a stage in the center.           Lorraine runs buckets of icy water back and forth, and the cold splashes their dresses. The sun’s rays tingle and sting her skin. Her mother’s tanned face is open, her hair shimmers, and she’s radiant. Lorraine’s body is under the sand, and the sun slips under the whitecaps. Waves of pressure pound her chest. Her mother’s arms move furiously as she taps in her red shoes. Her mother gasps, and Lorraine is breathless. They are one channel sharing lungs, inextricably linked, both struggling for a gulp of oxygen. Lorraine opens her mouth to scream.

            “You’re okay, child,” a soothing voice says. It is Sementha standing at the side of the bed. She swirls a stick of lit incense above them and places her hand on Lorraine’s shoulder. Being called “child” exposes a yearning and threatens to split her wide open. “Your mother is with you. She’ll remain with you.”

            The trail of smoke ascends and disappears like mist. Lorraine may not have many chances. For weeks, she’d stayed away, not wanting to touch her mother or accept her worsening condition. Something now wrenches her toward her mother. She crawls onto the bed and scoots around her mother’s thin frame. Her mother’s skin is soft; her scent, like wet earth, is familiar. Before leaving the room, Sementha says, “Lord, hold this mother and child in your care.”

            Lorraine rubs her mother’s smooth clavicle. Her eyes blur as she watches her mother’s chest rise and fall.

            The wax heart. Where is it? She pats lightly over her mother’s body, searching, feeling with her fingers under the sheet against the edges of her mother’s cotton nightgown. No heart. Gone.

            Her mother’s fingers tenderly graze her arm. “Mom?” Lorraine gasps. “It’s me. Say something.” Her mother lifts her fingers and sets them down, a tender tap. “I love you, Mom,” Lorraine says. And when the corners of her mother’s lips turn up, a release washes over her as if a very tight belt around her waist has been unbuckled. The brightest, purest blue fills her mind. Her mother is too weak to speak, but her smile feels like a gift wrapped with shiny ribbons.

            Later, in the living room, Sementha brings Lorraine a butter and cheese sandwich and some milky sweet tea, and sings softly, “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King.”

            Lorraine swallows the cheese sandwich, and a tacky coating on the back of her throat remains.

            She turns silver hoops in her ears and looks across the room at the framed photo of Mom, Dad, Smitty, and herself in front of the dolphin pool. She gets up to see the picture. It was taken on her ninth birthday; she had just gotten her ears pierced. She turns and plucks the roses from one of the tap shoes on the shelf. Slipping her palm into it, she lifts and taps it several times to hear the click of the metal on the wood. Would her mother’s soul be saved? Turning to Sementha, she asks, “Was she good? Does God think my mother was good?”

            Sementha says, “It’s not about good and bad, baby. Why do people assume those words are opposites of each other? Consider the struggle of a single, solitary day. Is your mother just one thing? Are any of us? That woman must have done ten thousand things for you since you were born. And she would keep on doing so if she could.”

            Lorraine throws herself on the couch and breaks. She weeps until her eyes are sore, and her body is a hollowed-out canyon.

            Sementha drops a pillow into a clean blue cotton case, fluffs it, and says, “Lift your head, child.” Lorraine, exhausted, complies.

            In early dawn, her father, with matted hair and drooping eyes, sits across from her in the overstuffed maroon chair. Holding a pack of smokes in one hand and her tattered Raggedy Ann doll in the other, he is looking directly at Lorraine when she awakes. What is he doing here? How could he have her doll? On the shelf, the daisies have been put back in the red tap shoes, and in the air, a whiff of candle wax lingers. Her father clutches Raggedy Ann behind her head and dances her like a floppy string puppet. Lorraine’s eyes widen, and her stomach tightens. Is she nine? Come on.  Her father’s eyes soften back to her, and he sits the doll in his lap. “Smitty’s coming,” he says. He lights a cigarette, smokes in awkward silence, and Lorraine doesn’t move a muscle. He extinguishes the cigarette in the kitchen sink and returns. He brushes yarn hair off Raggedy Ann’s worn face and raises her in the air. “Your mom saved her,” he says, leaning forward. He lifts the doll’s limp arm in a goofy wave. Lorraine doesn’t want to smile at him. Her bones are heavy like stones, but when her doll is released and soaring toward her, Lorraine sees the bright face of a young saint, crowded among others, illuminated by a white flame, and does the only thing she knows to do: She reaches out her arms.