Free Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson Page B

strokes, covering the gypsy’s smaller words at random, but I found an
o
, a
v
, another possible
o
, and an obvious
u
with a low, curved line after, like a comma.
    The second line had more visible pieces. It started with an
ay
, and I could make out three letter bursts of longer words,
Sai
and
Cec
. It ended with a lowercase
a
and a smeared exclamation point.
    I stepped back from the car, into the full force of the wind, trying to gauge the spacing of the letters. I put my free hand
     up to hold my hat on.
    I di ov u
, butting up to the picture of the rose.
    Under that,
-ay t Sai Cec a!
    “I’d like to buy a vowel,” I said, squinting at it, hating Anna and drugs and rock-n-roll and sex so hard in that blank second.
     She couldn’t have painted over the tic-tac-toe game? I couldn’t make the letters say
Berkeley
. Perhaps my mother was in a suburb or a smaller town nearby. Saint something? Santa Cruz didn’t fit, and I didn’t know California
     well enough to make a better guess. I shifted from one foot to the other, trying to remember the names of cities in California.
     I stared and stared, and then, almost involuntarily, I understood the first line of the gypsy’s message:
    I did love you.
And then a comma and my name in picture form. I was already shaking my head in flat negation when the rest of the missing
     letters filled themselves in for me, and now I could see the whole thing.
    I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!
    I shook my head. That couldn’t be it. Pray to Saint Cecilia? If she was going to tell me to pray, why not to Monica, a beaten
     wife herself, or a hard-ass like Saint Paul? Saint Paul and the gypsy both knew all about abandoning a life in midstride.
     Cecilia was the patron saint of music, and there was no way praying to that pious warbler could ever make me safe.
    I leaned in close to check the space below Anna’s message for more silver paint. There wasn’t any, so I searched the car’s
     whole side, expecting to see more peeking out from under something fresh. There was none to be found. I kept going, on to
     the next car and the next. I dropped to my knees to check each car’s belly, crawled to read the inside of the ones with no
     doors.
    There was nothing else for me.
    I walked back to the car with the rose on it and stared through Anna’s message at the silver words. I tried to make the few
     letters I had picked out say something else, but I couldn’t. Once the message filled in—
I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!
—I couldn’t unsee it.
    My body turned itself sideways, and my hands came up into the good batter’s stance I’d learned in Little League T-ball. I’d
     played from the time I was five until I was eight. After that, no one was around to take me to practice, but my body still
     remembered how to choke up. I gripped the narrow neck of my Coke bottle as if it were a miniature slugger. I swung it as hard
     as I could at the car. The bottle hit the spray-painted rose where the petals met the edge of the car’s underside. The blow
     shivered the thick glass so hard that it cracked into five or six pieces. I felt those shivers move all the way up through
     me to become a buzz in my teeth as I watched the shards fall to the ground. I was left holding the neck with a single, jagged
     slice of glass jutting out from it.
    It looked like a weapon. Something a person would have in prison, wicked and curved and slim. I dropped it, fast, and itjangled when it hit the other shards. I stared down at the green glass, glinting in the soil.
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice dripped acid. “I did love you, Coke bottle.”
    She’d made me come out here. She told me I had to kill Thom Grandee if I wanted to live. I’d put bullets in my dog because
     of her. Saint Roch tried to speak, and I said, “Shut the hell up,” to him. He didn’t know how Gretel was. None of them did,
     this chain of saints bobbing in my wake, and these saints all came from