Six springtimes have passed since William III left us. I mean died. Mama said it wasn’t anybody’s fault, it was just one of those things. Right after it happened, though, she put all his toys in a plastic sack and set them out on the porch for the Salvation Army truck, like it really was someone’s fault. I asked her why she gave them away so soon—the little monkey that played cymbals, the rubber elephant that squeaked, everything— and she just said it was time. But she was crying like it really wasn’t time at all.

A few months later Daddy called the White House and got an eight-by-ten picture of the President sitting on his horse, signed near the horse’s back legs. Mama framed it and put it on the wall over the TV set for good luck.

The next spring she had another baby, and that was Doris Ray. After her came the twins, Jimmy and Roy Dean. Pretty soon, William III got completely erased from our lives and it was almost like he had never even lived at all.

The only thing was I couldn’t forget that easy. Because the truth, the thing I could never tell anybody, is that William III didn’t die all at once. He died in parts, every night at supper.

What I mean is this: For weeks while he was sick Mama always said the same thing, “Pray for William III, Jesse.” Every night, I shook my head.

“Pray he gets well before the iris bloom,” she’d beg. But I wouldn’t say the magic words that might’ve changed God’s mind. I sat quiet and let my brother die.

For all these years, I never told anybody, not even a best friend, which was something I didn’t have anyway. But all that changed when Roxanne moved into the trailer next door.

Mama didn’t like her much. She said Roxanne was anything but respectable. For one thing, it was okay with me that Roxanne had a Liberty Bell tattooed on her chest. It wasn’t okay with Mama. Another thing was, Mama said Roxanne was too old to be my friend. I disagreed.

I think if you’re thirteen, you’re old enough to choose your friends. Roxanne used to say friendship’s measured by heart-time, not clock-time, and I know that’s true because with Roxanne the years didn’t make any difference at all. Even though she was thirty, almost thirty-one, she was my very best friend.

I met Roxanne the day after Christmas. Mama was making us take down the decorations, which is just one reason I hate the holidays. Christmas, to me, is a lot of work followed by the most boring week of the year before school starts up again.

After William III left, I could see things really clear. For example the skates. That year I’d wanted white shoe skates with blue pom-poms on the toes. But when I found them under the tree, all I could see were the big creases in the leather covered with chalky white shoe polish.

“Mrs. Santa tried them out first,” Mama tried to explain. “She wanted to make sure they worked real good.”

All my past Christmas dolls with their slick faces and homemade clothes lit up in my mind like a string of lights. I knew Mama shopped at the thrift store, but until then I never guessed Christmas came from there, too.

This year seemed like it wasn’t going to be any different from the rest. Then I heard a knock at the door.

“Somebody’s here,” Doris Ray yelled, pulling at my sweatpants. I was standing on the recliner trying to undo the last ornament, the angel at the very top of the tree.

Mama hollered from the bedroom, “Get the door, Jesse.”

“Get the door,” Doris Ray echoed.

“Okay, okay,” I said, reaching for the treetop one last time. I grabbed the angel’s foot and yanked. The whole tree fell to the floor.

“Now look what you did,” I said to my sister. I picked up the angel and twirled it by the hair. It looked all right.

By then Doris Ray and the boys were lined up at the window looking out. I stopped and peeked, too. Roxanne was standing there wearing a huge black furry coat and these big cat-eye sunglasses covered in green rhinestones. Her long red hair flared out like a fire alarm. I recognized her right away as our new neighbor.

“You want to come in?” I asked, opening the screen door a crack.

“Sure,” she said and stepped inside, not even mentioning the upside-down Christmas tree. “Y’all have any jumper cables? My car won’t start and I was supposed to’ve been at work thirty minutes ago. By the way, my name’s Roxanne, what’s yours?”

I said it was Jesse and that I thought we had some jumper cables in a grocery sack in the pantry. I realized I was still holding that dumb plastic angel, but before I could set it down, she took my chin in her hand and looked into my eyes. “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen,” she said. “They’re like moon pools. Deep green moon pools. With flecks of gold.”

I didn’t know what to do, so when she let go I said, “We learned in science that there isn’t any water on the moon, and if there was a pool, it probably wouldn’t be green because you wouldn’t have photosynthesis.”

Roxanne grinned. She said that might be perfectly true in a scientific sense, but in a more important sense, green moon pools definitely existed.

“What do you see when you look at the moon, Jesse?”

“I don’t know,” I said, picking at the star behind the angel where all the fake gold was peeling off. “Craters, shadows, I guess.”

“Well, I see a mother holding a baby,” Roxanne said. “The moon pools are the mother’s eyes.”

She seemed pretty sure about things so after she got the jumper cables and left, I looked in the bathroom mirror for at least five minutes. I didn’t see anything except plain green eyes with a few mustard dots. No moon pools. No gold. And that night the moon looked the same as ever. But from that time on, I knew Roxanne was different from anyone I had ever known in Ida, Texas. And for some crazy reason we got to be friends, even though two people couldn’t be more different from each other.

For one thing, Roxanne wore nothing but push-up bras. She said that what a girl wears underneath determines how she feels about herself. She might’ve been joking, but I believed her because all my panties were white cotton from a mail-order catalog, and I felt rotten about myself.

Take my hair for instance. Roxanne’s hung to her waist like a mermaid’s and the color was dark red brick, the kind Mama wants for a house someday. Mine, on the other hand, is straight and thin and the color of dirt when it hasn’t rained in a long time. Nobody would want a house that color. Mama says my hair is exactly like her aunt Willa’, fine as a duck’s behind.

She says Willa’s was so stringy and flyaway she finally pinned it into a little flat knot on top of her head, had to use about fifty bobby pins, and wore a knit cap pulled down over it.

Mama’s telling the truth, I know, because I saw a picture of Willa in an old family album. She sat in a porch swing scowling and wearing that knit cap pulled down to her ears.

Plus, I’m flat-chested. Roxanne loaned me her $13.95 breast developer, but having any room to myself for twenty minutes a day is a near impossibility where I live.

First there’s my kid sister, Doris Ray. Sharing a room with a five-year-old is no picnic, let me tell you. I hardly get a minute’s peace. “Jesse, can I have a banana?” “Jesse, me and Mark got engaged today.” “Jesse, I wish I was a dolphin.” Lord, I wish I was anything, anywhere but in a double bed with a five-year-old.

And then there’s the twin boys. Just getting them bathed at night is major. They scream and holler. Think they’re going down the drain with the bathwater. It’s crazy, I think. When you’re little, you can’t figure out who you are on the outside, then when you get older you don’t know who you are on the inside. Roxanne said when you finally start figuring it all out, it doesn’t even matter anymore.

Being around her made me feel as light as a balloon, and I hoped she’d never leave. But from the very first, Roxanne said she wanted to go to Florida, get a job on a love boat. I hoped that’d be a long time off because when people move out of the trailer court, they almost never come back.

Her leaving would mean no more walks to the bait store for moon pies and ginger ale. No more long talks.

And all those times she’d lay her face on the ironing board and I'd stretch out that long red hair to the end and iron it so pretty and smooth. All those times would be gone. When you have a best friend, the first one in a long, long time, you never want it to end.