Free Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle

is he?”
    “A wild man,” Cindy told her. “A wild raring stud.” And Cindylaughed to see that look on her mama’s face. Her mama needed that.
    Constance Ann got that zipless from an Erica Jong book. Constance Ann thinks that Erica Jong is Jesus Christ Born Again and Fear of Flying is her bible. Cindy finally read it just so she’d know what Constance Ann was talking about and she didn’t like it near as much as she liked The Love Machine or Peyton Place. The worst part of Fear of Flying was that man that didn’t wipe himself well. That was so dumb. Chuckie at age three could wipe himself and she could not bear to think of a grown man who could not. Even Buzz Biggers, as filthy as he was, wasn’t like that, and if Cindy had been that woman in the book that slept with that man, she sure as hell wouldn’t have told it. Constance Ann said it was symbolic and so Cindy just let it go, didn’t argue because Constance Ann knows a lot about symbolic things and as a result can quote lines from all of the Jill Clayburgh movies; that’s what Constance Ann has over Cindy, that and a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Constance Ann says looking at naked medical pictures is different from the other.
    Paranoid, masochistic—then that shrink had the nerve to bring up her daddy who was a fine man, book smart and deep. It’s nobody’s business that he got himself all wrapped up in King Tut. A lot of people have hobbies. Cindy’s mama plays solitaire, and Cindy collects those little squat Coke bottles that you hardly ever see anymore.
    “Why don’t you cash these in?” Charles Snipes asked her once. “Then you can buy a whole case.”
    “Buying is not the same as finding!” she told him, which made good sense to her but did not to Charles Snipes or her mama who said more or less the same thing at Cindy’s daddy’s funeral.
    “Just take the whole crate, Cindy,” her mama said. “Don’t stand around in the front yard waiting for somebody to lay one down so you can say you found it.” God, that pissed her off just like it did when that shrink asked her questions about her daddy and how he was homebound due to a rare paralysis that came and went. The shrink said “psychosomatic,” that word which means it’s all up in the head. So stupid.
    “If it was all upstairs like you say,” she told the shrink, “then it would have been his scalp that was paralyzed instead of his legs, an arm from time to time, his eyelids.” Cindy couldn’t stand the thought of her daddy sitting in that Lazy Boy recliner with his eyes closed, paralyzed that way; it made her ache. It was a rare cancer that overtook him; a man who had an interest in Egypt, an artist of the mind, overtook and struck down by a rare cancer which is why he shot himself in the chest the way that he did, too much of a man to let himself get weak and helpless. That sea monkey asshole, dragging it all up again. It wasn’t his daddy that had been stretched out at the funeral home like he’d been starched and pressed. Catherine was studying real estate and thinking of getting her tubes tied and Ginny Sue was going to fraternity parties and making A ’s on things like African Astronomy, and there Cindy was facing her first divorce and a dead daddy. “Let’s stick to the present,” Cindy told the shrink. “I know about what has already happened.”
    Ginny Sue can go right on thinking that therapy is the thing to do if she wants but Cindy ain’t buying. Cindy has never even figured out why Ginny Sue went to therapy in the first place, a little broken engagement, big deal. Ginny Sue came home from Atlanta in a pure crazy fit just to say the wedding was off. That pissed Cindy off; there she’d already driven to Raleigh to get a bridesmaid’s dress that was so god-awful sweet-looking she wouldn’t have worn it to a dog fight. The dress couldn’t be returned because Cindy’s waist is so tiny that it had been altered; she gave it to a child down the street to wear