“One,” said the preacher. We were sitting on the couch and Winn-Dixie was sitting between us. Winn-Dixie had already decided that he liked the couch a lot. “One,” said the preacher again. Winn-Dixie looked at him kind of hard. “Your mama was funny. She could make just about anybody laugh.”

“Two,” he said. “She had red hair and freckles.”

“Just like me,” I said.

“Just like you,” the preacher nodded.

“Three. She liked to plant things. She had a talent for it. She could stick a tire in the ground and grow a car.”

Winn-Dixie started chewing on his paw, and I tapped him on the head to make him stop.

“Four,” said the preacher. “She could run fast. If you were racing her, you couldn’t ever let her get a head start, because she would beat you for sure.”

“I’m that way, too,” I said. “Back home, in Watley, I raced Liam Fullerton, and beat him, and he said it wasn’t fair, because boys and girls shouldn’t race each other to begin with. I told him he was just a sore loser.”

The preacher nodded. He was quiet for a minute.

“I’m ready for number five,” I told him.

“Five,” he said. “She couldn’t cook. She burned everything, including water. She had a hard time opening a can of beans. She couldn’t make head nor tail of a piece of meat. Six.” The preacher rubbed his nose and looked up at the ceiling. Winn-Dixie looked up, too. “Number six is that your mama loved a story. She would sit and listen to stories all day long. She loved to be told a story. She especially liked funny ones, stories that made her laugh.” The preacher nodded his head like he was agreeing with himself.

“What’s number seven?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” he said. “She knew all the constellations, every planet in the nighttime sky. Every last one of them. She could name them. And point them out. And she never got tired of looking up at them.

“Number eight,” said the preacher, with his eyes closed, “was that she hated being a preacher’s wife. She said she just couldn’t stand having the ladies at church judge what she was wearing and what she was cooking and how she was singing. She said it made her feel like a bug under a microscope.”

Winn-Dixie lay down on the couch. He put his nose in the preacher’s lap and his tail in mine.

“Ten,” said the preacher.

“Nine,” I told him.

“Nine,” said the preacher. “She drank. She drank beer. And whiskey. And wine. Sometimes, she couldn’t stop drinking. And that made me and your mama fight quite a bit. Number ten,” he said with a long sigh, “number ten, is that your mama loved you. She loved you very much.”

“But she left me,” I told him.

“She left us,” said the preacher softly. I could see him pulling his old turtle head back into his stupid turtle shell. “She packed her bags and left us, and she didn’t leave one thing behind.”

“Okay,” I said. I got up off the couch. Winn-Dixie hopped off, too. “Thank you for telling me,” I said.

I went right back to my room and wrote down all ten things that the preacher had told me. I wrote them down just the way he said them to me so that I wouldn’t forget them, and then I read them out loud to Winn-Dixie until I had them memorized. I wanted to know those ten things inside and out. That way, if my mama ever came back, I could recognize her, and I would be able to grab her and hold on to her tight and not let her get away from me again.