One

What tormented me most, even more than Polly’s secrets, were her cigarettes. I’d seen the black lungs in ads, and pictured Polly’s lungs, already old, already threadbare, quivering in the smoky cloud of each puff like doomed soldiers in the trench of her chest. The cafeteria lady at my school loved Salem Lights. I’d see her outside in her smock, smoking up a storm. Then she got sick and left for a while. She came back thin and pale, hairnet pulled over a bald head as she served us spaghetti. Then one day she disappeared for good. They announced her death over the intercom, and everyone got free onion rings.

“A shame about the poor lady,” Polly remarked. “You never know when the Bear might strike.” Polly never used the word cancer. It was as if invoking it would be an invitation for it to slide under our door and slink inside her cigarettes. So she said Bear. People had lung Bear, stomach Bear, skin Bear, or worst of all (and she said this in a whisper) hinder Bear—or, colon cancer. “My uncle had the hinder Bear,” she said delicately. “He shrank down to ninety pounds, poor fellow. But they cut it out of him and he was okay for a few years, ’til he had a heart attack while leaning over a rain barrel and drowned.”

When I was eight years old, my third-grade teacher told us about the Great American Smokeout. If smokers could just quit for one day, the theory went, maybe they could quit forever. I stared in fascination at the charts showing circulation improving, lung function increasing, heart rate dropping like a sparrow from the sky.

The morning of the Great American Smokeout, an event that held zero interest for Polly, I hid her last packet of Virginia Slims. She discovered that fact just before the bus came.

Polly had worked as a cashier at Walgreens ever since my father died. She confronted me before school in her Walgreens smock, her name tag dangling from a cord she wore around her neck.

“Willow,” she said. “Come here.”

“Yes?” My hair was drawn into two ponytails. I had my prized lunch box and was ready to go.

“Where are my cigarettes?”

“I don’t know.”

Her eyebrow arched.

“Don’t you lie, Willow.”

I looked at her defiantly. “It’s the Great American Smokeout.”

“So? Some damn fool who doesn’t even smoke made up a holiday? What if it was National Pee Your Pants day? Should I pee my pants, you think?”

“I have to go to school.”

I opened the front door, letting in a fall breeze and the murmurs of the kids at the bus stop.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Polly said.

“But, Mom, I have perfect attendance!”

“Well that’s your problem and you can fix it in two shakes of a rat’s tail if you just tell me where you hid my cigarettes.”

I turned around, but left the door open. We stared at each other. My lunch box dangled from my hand. A line had appeared in her skin between her eyebrows, like a twitching nerve rising to the surface. I could hear the bus rumbling down the block, coming closer.

The gauntlet had been thrown. I hated Polly at that moment, but not enough to capitulate. It was National Smokeout Day and I was going to save a fraction of her life.

“The Bear is going to come for you,” I told her. “Just like he came for the lunch lady. Is that what you want?”

We held each other’s gaze as the bus groaned to a stop and I heard the creak of the doors opening. Then with a hush, they closed. The bus eased away and there was silence.

“You know, in my day, girls who missed school grew up to be tramps. Got pregnant early,” Polly remarked.

“You are so mean,” I said.

“No!” she answered. “You are mean. Forcing your poor old mother to drive to the store and restock.”

“I’m trying to keep you from dying!” I shouted, my voice full of righteous indignation.

The line between her eyes was back. “That’s God’s way!” she shot back. “The parents are supposed to die before the child and everyone starts bitching soon as it happens. Now tell me where you hid my damn cigarettes!”

I stood perfectly still, stone faced, lest my body or expression give away when Polly was getting warm. I heard her back in my bedroom, swearing, jerking opening drawers. Next the kitchen, then the den. The cushions from the couch hit the floor. The magazine stand rattled. The wooden blinds thwacked against the window.

I was going to lose. This was nothing; it was only a desperate gesture of love and rage. It would not stop Polly, in the long run, from smoking or from getting older or from dying, but suddenly it meant the world to me. I wanted perfect attendance, but more than that, I wanted someone above me in the chain of life. I didn’t want to be alone, a single blue egg in a crumbling nest.

“Damn it,” Polly mumbled. “Damn it, damn it, damn it. You damn kid.”

Finally she slumped down at the out-of-tune piano in the hallway. I glanced over at her and she stared back at me. Something in my posture or expression must have tipped her off because her eyes squinted and took on a hooded look and then she turned from me, gazing at the piano.

She struck the middle C and it clanged in its off-tune fashion.

I held my breath.

She struck D.

My heart began to sink.

E, F . . .

G was a muffled thud.

She perked up, struck it again.

“No, Mom,” I said pleadingly, but it was too late. She jumped up and propped her knees on the bench so she could open the lid of the piano and peer inside at the keys.

“AH HA!” she shrieked. She stuck her hand in and retrieved a crumpled box of Virginia Slims, the one she’d opened the night before. She withdrew a bent cigarette and tried to straighten it, but gave up. “It’ll do,” she said triumphantly. She cast a glance at me, but something in my expression caused the glee to leave her face. The hand with the cigarette slowly fell to her hip.

“Ah, well, you tried, don’t feel so bad,” she consoled me. “I won’t smoke this in front of you, okay? You are a good kid. Now come on, let me drive you to school.”

My fears about Polly’s health and life span left me with a certain undercurrent of daily anxiety that ruined even good things for me: the upside-down Jell-O molds she’d make for me, holding more cut fruit than needed; the movies we watched together; and my favorite sound, that of a car door locking. It ruined the feel of guinea-pig fur and the crunchiness of popcorn. Ruined smooth, dark water and the stones skipping over it.

Polly didn’t even know of the extent of my suffering; the way I’d stand over her at night and listen to her breathing, as though it might stop at any time, and I would be needed to start her old heart up again. I’d read manuals on resuscitation and practiced on a large bisque doll with a flat chest whose crystal blue eyes stared up hollowly as I counted the pushes.

“I don’t think that’s going to help,” said my best friend, Dalton. He was small and lean, with expressive eyebrows, and longish hair he kept slicked back over his ears. He had two small dents on either side of his eyes due to a forceps accident at birth, where he was pried from the womb of his mother, who later ran off with a tour boat guide from Key West.

Dalton’s father was very permissive and never seemed to notice him running around with dirty jeans and undone homework, and let him ride his bike all night if he wanted. Polly was oddly kind to him, in a stern sort of way. “It’s not that boy’s fault that his mama ran off on him,” she said. “Take a look at what those forceps did to his face and you got to believe there was some hurting on her end, too. Not saying that’s why she vamoosed. I’ve met his daddy a time or two and he’s no prize. Anyway, not my concern.” Dalton reminded her of another boy who had lived in the neighborhood years before.

“Name of Phoenix Calhoun. Parents acted like he wasn’t even there for some reason. Goofy as hell, ran around barefoot in December. But he and your brother were thick as thieves, and Phoenix was loyal as a hound dog.”

Dalton’s dad had a series of live-in girlfriends who never stayed around for long. Thus my friend was philosophical on the subject of mothers.

“I can’t let her die,” I said. “She’s so old.”

He shrugged. “Things die. That’s one thing I’ve learned. My dad says my mom’s love for him died one day when they were arguing about who left the lunch meat out on the counter. Boom. Dead.”

I looked back down at my doll. At the crystal blue eyes, the ridiculously long lashes. “Help me count pushes,” I told Dalton.

The only time my mother seemed truly invincible was when she was in her garden, which encompassed most of our front and back yards. A nest of violets bloomed in her front garden, shadowed by the hedges of ligustrum and holly. Indian hawthorn, iris, and hydrangea, blue and pink. The backyard contained a fig tree, a peach tree, a satsuma tree, a pecan tree, and the vegetable garden, set into ten rows she had hacked and shaped herself. Tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow crookneck squash. Eggplants, new potatoes, Kentucky Wonder pole beans. Peppers, sweet peas. Strawberries. Greens. These were her children. These were the ones she tended and praised and criticized and brought to harvest unless the frost or the heat or the insects killed them dead.

“Varmints,” she said, speaking of tomato worms, red spiders, leaf beetles, stinkbugs, and snails, but also raccoons, squirrels, possums, weeds, the neighbors’ pets, and the neighbors themselves.

On the one side was Darcie Burrell—a reed-thin woman with a permanently conflicted expression, as though, deep inside her, someone was trying to bathe a cat. She attended our church, and was famous for praying over people who later died.

“The angel of death,” Polly said. “Every church has one. There was one back home in Bethel. She had a goiter and blue toes.”

Mrs. Burrell had two little twins, a boy and a girl. Several years younger than me, with horrific dispositions and a penchant for jumping up high enough on their backyard trampoline to flip us the bird over the fence, a gesture that Polly heartily returned.

“Mom,” I said. “Come on. They’re like five years old.”

“Old enough to shoot the bird, old enough to be shot by the bird,” she answered grimly. “I know the Good Book says not to hate anyone, but I hate those kids. They’re not even human. They’re like child/rodent half-breeds.”

Mr. Burrell was an airline pilot and always traveling.

“Right,” Polly said. “He’s probably a shoe salesman who says he’s an airline pilot and goes and sits at a bus stop all night so he doesn’t have to come home to those brats.”

“Mrs. Burrell says her kids are gifted.”

“Oh, yeah, they go to that fancy school. Montosaurus.”

“Montessori,” I corrected. I had read about it in a magazine. I wanted to attend a Montessori school, moving from station to station, self-guided, a genius.

“Brat colony. That’s what I call it,” Polly said.

One morning we went out into our driveway and found our trash cans I’d set out the night before turned on their sides, and the twins going through the garbage.

Polly’s shrieks brought Mrs. Burrell out of the house and made the children look up disinterestedly.

“What are you kids doing?” Polly howled. “Are you raccoons? Get out of my trash!”

“We were curious!” the boy said. Obviously, this was their go-to excuse for all their evil deeds, and Mrs. Burrell fell for it hook, line, and sinker. “I understand, but that’s not the proper way to express your curiosity,” she chided benevolently. “Jared and Madison, apologize to Mrs. Havens.”

They smiled. “We’re sorry,” they intoned together.

“Like hell you are,” Polly sniffed.

Mrs. Burrell looked aggrieved. “Mrs. Havens, I’d appreciate you not using language like that in front of the children.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Polly shot back. “I’ve heard those kids say the ‘S’ word while they’re out on the sidewalk pounding ants with a hammer.”

“Go in the house, kids.” She gave Polly a long, martyr’s stare. “My kids are Montessori children and they’ve been trained to be open to new experiences. They just got confused about what’s proper.”

Polly was having none of it. “Why don’t you leave them with me and I’ll show them what’s proper with a peach-tree switch?”

She gasped. “Violence is never the answer, Mrs. Havens.”

We stood and watched without helping as Mrs. Burrell picked up the garbage herself.

“Don’t forget to drag the cans to the curb,” Polly reminded her. “And turn the handles to the street.”

The twins weren’t the only problem with the Burrells. Polly complained bitterly when their aggressive strain of Bermuda grass crawled under the fence and began bullying her more stately St. Augustine. Also, their gardener piled wood against the common fence they shared with Polly, causing it to rot. Polly suspected the gardener of using a kind of pesticide that took out the bees, too. Bees were the chosen insects of Polly’s world. Almost biblical in their goodness, spreading mercy and pollen on their crooked little legs. The Burrells were bee killers and that was the worst crime of all.

“They have no respect for nature,” Polly complained, ignoring the fact of her constant war on the varmints of various species who invaded her garden. “Of course, who knows how many critters those horrible kids have taken out with a claw hammer.”

Old Mr. Tornello and his wife lived on the other side of us. They were stooped, reclusive people who let the neighborhood newspapers pile up on their driveway. Mr. Tornello was grouchy and slow-moving. His wife was small and quiet and almost always sporting a Band-Aid somewhere on her face.

“She’s got the skin Bear,” Polly said. “Too much time in the sun, I suppose. She was Miss Kansas back in the day. She’s still real pretty, such a delicate face. A shame.”

So Mrs. Tornello and her rotating Band-Aids had Polly’s sympathy. Mr. Tornello and his heart problems did not.

“Listen, pure meanness is keeping that man alive,” she said. “That old heart of his will still beat long after I’m toes to the sky.”

Mr. Tornello’s crimes: sawing off the limbs of her prize redbud tree, which dared drop its blooms on his side of the fence; letting his dandelion scourge send its seeds over the fence every spring to take root in her backyard; and also owning the ominous one-eyed cat that perched on their common fence and stared at her.

Rain or shine, no matter the season, Polly fought the good fight against the predators of her garden, not just the neighbors, but the cold winters and the rains that, in high summer, scalded her tomatoes, and the funguses and blights, and the raccoons that crawled the fence and ate her figs, and, of course, the squirrels. The squirrels were the worst of all. They would strip her trees of pecans and peaches and tear through her garden, pulling down the delicate trestles she’d used for her climbing tomatoes. They’d crawl up the bird feeder and eat all the seeds. They’d gnaw on the lead skirt of her vent pipes, causing roof leaks.

Polly tried putting a rubber snake in the peach tree to scare off the squirrels. It was found belly up to the sky the next day. She tried a mixture of cayenne pepper, vinegar, and water, which she sprayed at the edge of her garden, again to no effect. She seemed especially distracted when the pecans began to mature and turn brown, pacing around and puffing a cigarette down to the filter while cursing the squirrels. Her shotgun, I knew, was loaded with blanks. BUT I hid my brother’s old BB gun, afraid that she would grab it and shoot a squirrel with it.

“That gun is useless anyway. Your brother shot your sister in the back of the leg one time, and all she did was scream and call for Jesus. It’s not gonna wipe the smirk off a squirrel or I would have used it by now.”

She gave me a long, hard look. “And don’t think I don’t know whose side you’re on.”

Polly knew that I was traitorously enamored of all varmints great and small, and once, after she caught me trying to feed a squirrel one of her prized pecans, I never heard the end of it. (“Not just a pecan!” she’d raged. “A shelled pecan!”) But she did not know that Dalton and I had great plans for our animal friends: Someday we were going to pool our money and buy some acreage out past the old farm road, where land was cheap, and establish the Fur Good Animal Sanctuary. There we would coexist with our saved, spoiled creatures, living on cake batter and hot dogs, and let goats sleep in the living room.

Dalton’s backyard was twice the size of anyone else’s, and it was already a bit of an animal sanctuary. They had dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens, and a bullfrog pair that would hang out in the ferns behind the koi pond. Dalton’s dad, Pete, was soft on animals, easy on rules, and mostly drunk, so the animals kept collecting, and that growing herd was responsible for driving off more than one of the live-in girlfriends. Pete was also in on Dalton’s and my deepest, darkest secret.

Down on Allengrove Street, there lived a family who kept their poodles outside in the backyard and never paid them any attention. They were thin and their coats were dirty and tangled. Dalton and I would toss hot dogs over the fence for them. One bitter cold night in December, when the dogs were shivering outside, Dalton and I sneaked out of our houses, crawled over the fence, stole the poodles, and never brought them back. Instead, we gave them baths and trimmed their fur and toenails and they slept in Dalton’s bed and were happy as clams. The family that owned the dogs put up posters everywhere, offering a reward for their return.

Polly didn’t approve of anyone who neglected or abused an animal. But still, I wasn’t certain of what her reaction would be, so I decided to keep quiet about it. In the process I discovered that, although I didn’t appreciate Polly’s secrets, I really liked my own.

When I got home from school one day in early September of fifth grade, I found Polly once again riffling through The Farmer’s Almanac.

“Did you order some other kind of squirrel repellent?” I asked.

“The best repellent of all. The squirrel’s natural enemy.”

“You ordered a dog?”

“No, dummy.” Dummy was a term of affection from her. She said it lightly and humorously, the way a grandmother would say dear. She cackled with delight when a package appeared on our front porch a few days later. It was a plastic owl, looking remarkably real, with a no-nonsense beak and a twisted head and beady yellow eyes that seemed to stare right through me, searching for squirrels in my rib cage. Polly set it on the kitchen table to admire it. “Looks a bit like Mrs. Burrell, does it not?” she mused. “And a bit like old Tornello around the beak.” She propped the owl in the limbs of the pecan tree and patted its head. “I am going to have pecan pie this November, so help me God.”

She waited by the back window and peered into the yard. A squirrel moved off the fence and approached the pecan tree, the nuts gleaming green. Blooming pampas grass moved in the wind. The sun was falling but Polly didn’t move. I was afraid she’d freeze that way, a statue built of schemes and venom, but I stood beside her and waited with her.

“Look,” Polly breathed. “The bastard’s on his way to the tree.”

The squirrel darted and stopped, darted and stopped, raised up on his little legs and stood staring at the owl.

The owl stared back. Polly tensed.

The squirrel darted away, jumping on the fence and disappearing into the gloom.

Polly was jubilant. “The owl did it! It was worth twenty-two dollars and ninety-nine cents plus three dollars and fifty cents shipping!”

The next morning, I awoke to a shriek. I jumped from bed and rushed to the living room to find her staring out in the backyard in her bathrobe, shaking her head and murmuring, “Sweet mother of a son of a bitch!” I followed her gaze, disbelieving. A fat squirrel sat on top of the owl, eating a green pecan. Its tail was draped sideways over the owl’s head, as though the owl were wearing a Daniel Boone cap.

Polly turned and rushed into her bedroom. I heard a rustling sound and she came out holding her shotgun.

“Mom, you’ll upset the neighbors again,” I said, but I could have saved my breath.

She burst into the backyard, aimed the shotgun at the squirrel, and blasted away. The sound of the blank echoed in the quiet neighborhood. I imagined the world waking up to the acrid scent of black powder and gardener rage. The squirrel beat it out of our yard so fast it was just a blurred image, a continuum of fur and tail that made a quivering line to the fence and then shot up and out into the yonder. She was cursing now at the outer reaches of her cursing limit, ass and damn and thieving bastard and big-balled son of a bitch.

“Mom . . . ,” I said. “It’s Sunday morning.”

“Jesus would understand!” she bellowed back at me. “Jesus threw a fit in the temple with the money changers; they were the squirrels of Jerusalem!”

“Hey!” called a voice from the other side of the fence. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Our back gate creaked open, and there stood Mr. Tornello in nothing but his long nightshirt and his slippers. He had a hoe in one hand with yellow pieces of his damnable dandelions stuck to the blade. His face was bright red and contorted with rage.

“Woman,” he told Polly, “you use that shotgun one more time and I’m going to call the police!”

“It’s loaded with blanks,” she retorted. “And if your old cat was worth a damn, there would be no squirrels in my garden, nor yours.”

“You leave Marty out of this!” Mr. Tornello shouted. He laid a liver-spotted old hand over his chest. “My doctor says this could go at any moment. I’m not supposed to get excited.”

“She hasn’t had her coffee yet,” I mentioned in a weak, peacemaking voice.

He pointed a finger at Polly. “Mark my words. You’re gonna kill me someday.”

Polly had one friend in the neighborhood: Mr. Chant, a bachelor who lived five houses down and worshipped her. He was a shy, sweet man in his early fifties, slightly built, with bowed legs and hairless arms. He was wistful and sad eyed, as though he’d recently given someone unacknowledged flowers. In his spare time, he painted.

“Is he any good?” I asked Polly.

“I saw some of his paintings when I went over there with some canned summer squash,” Polly said. “They are a little strange. Hard to identify. I saw one that looked like a bird but the rest lost me. I hear he’s got a store on the Internet.” Polly doted on Mr. Chant, treating him like a son. In return, he’d come over and have coffee with her and march obediently around her backyard as she pointed out some damage by squirrel or nature with her lit cigarette. Four times a year, Mr. Chant would drag the old ladder out of her garage and laboriously haul himself up it and clean her rain gutters. In the summertime the mosquitoes always got him, and no matter what kind of repellent he wore, he’d come down scratching the welts on his arms.

“Now, Bob,” she’d say. “The skeeters went and got you. I can clean the gutters myself and those critters leave me alone.”

“Oh, Miss Polly,” he’d say. “I’d never forgive myself if you fell off that ladder and hurt yourself.”

One evening, just before Christmas, Dalton was over watching Black Beauty. We’d both been traumatized earlier that day when Polly had taken us to the North Houston Aquarium, and an octopus had eaten his mate right in front of us. “That’s how it was on the farm, too,” Polly had told us dispassionately as she drove us home. “Peaceful and happy one minute, the next minute: Chomp. That’s God’s plan. Stay for supper, Dalton.” Polly had let us eat rice and beans in front of the television, arching her eyebrows at Dalton’s manners. “Is there no one home to teach that boy not to eat like a wolf?” she’d whispered to me in the kitchen. “You’d think one of his daddy’s trampy girlfriends would show him how to hold a spoon.”

“Mom,” I whispered, “stop being mean. He tries so hard around you.”

“Now how is that being mean?” she demanded. “He can’t hear me.”

Dalton and I lay sprawled on the floor in front of the gas fireplace, watching the magnificent stallion thunder down a beach, when the doorbell rang. “Could you get that, baby?” Polly called from the kitchen. “I’m sunk to my elbows in dishwater.”

I found Mr. Chant standing on our front porch, his eyes shining, his face flushed, panting and holding a large, flat item in Christmas wrapping.

“Hello, Mr. Chant,” I said. “What’s that?”

“It’s something I painted for your mother,” he told me. “I just finished it.” Indeed, he still had a fleck of rust-colored paint under his eye.

“Is she here?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered cautiously.

“Come in, Bob,” I heard Polly say behind me. She brushed me out of the way and finished drying off her arms with a kitchen towel. “My daughter is rude to keep you standing there in the cold.”

We went to the kitchen and Mr. Chant put the present reverently on the table. “It took me all fall to paint this,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I used your Homeowners’ Association photograph as a guide.”

Polly stiffened. She hated that photo. But now she made a great effort to smile and say, “Why, what a lovely gesture, Bob.”

She glanced at me. “Don’t you have a horse movie to watch for the hundredth time?”

“Nah,” I said. “This is much more interesting.”

She gave me a chilly stare.

“Are you going to open it?” Mr. Chant asked.

Polly looked uneasy. “Okay, but first, let’s have a margarita.”

He smiled shyly. “Oh, Miss Polly, you know I don’t drink.”

“Well, I’ll have one.”

Mr. Chant began a story about his dog and kept right on going while Polly turned the blender on high and whirred up some courage.

“All right, then,” Polly said after taking a healthy sip. “Let’s see what you’ve got here.” She set down her drink and carefully opened her present, revealing her image in all its glory.

I gasped. Polly was dressed regally in a high-collared Victorian robe. Her hair was a shiny rust cloud around her face, the same color as the splotch on Mr. Chant’s cheek. Her jaw was frozen, her smirk terrifying. One nostril was bigger than the other. Her eyes were an unnaturally bright, satanic green, and she had very little neck.

She couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Oh, Bob,” she said at last, “it is absolutely gorgeous! I’m going to have a cigarette right now to celebrate.” She fumbled in her purse.

“Do you really like it?” he asked. “I don’t do lids very well.”

“It’s so lovely,” she said, pressing the hand holding her unlit cigarette to her chest in a way that tipped me off immediately that she was being insincere. “This is so precious.” She embraced him, and he held on a bit too long.

After Mr. Chant left, Dalton wandered into the kitchen. He stared at the painting. His ears moved back and forth slightly, always a sign of nervous excitement. We exchanged glances. I shook my head, warning him. Polly drained the margarita and took long, deep drags of her cigarette as we stood studying her portrait.

“Is one of my nostrils really bigger than the other?” she asked.

“No. I think that’s a mistake.” I leaned in close. “Looks like he got the nose hole crooked and then painted over it.”

She swiveled her head suddenly and glared at Dalton.

“What do you think?” she demanded.

Dalton’s ears moved again. He’d always found Polly extremely intimidating.

“Uh,” he said. “It’s nice?”

“Nice!” she barked and he began to shiver.

“Nice! I mean you’re much more pretty, Mrs. Havens!”

She touched her own throat. “I have a neck, right?”

“Yes,” he affirmed, with confidence now. “You have a neck.”

“What are you going to do with it?” I finally asked.

She shrugged. “Hang it up in the sewing room.”

“You’re going to hang it up?”

“Look, he means well. And I need my gutters cleaned.”