Free Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle Page B

person can get away with the cockatoo look. Randy Skinner just loves her hair this way. TGIF! She thinks that tonight might be a good time to ask Randy over to her house instead of just kissing in a parked car in the lot of Ramada.
    “I can’t believe you do that,” Constance Ann said just yesterday. “Eating face in the parking lot of Ramada Inn right there in the center of town.”
    “Some things you never outgrow, Constance Ann,” she said. “It’s like putting a quarter in one of those machines at the grocery store knowing full well that you don’t want that rubber worm or plastic bracelet inside of it. But you do it. You do it every now and then; pay your money and take a chance just to feel that little plastic egg sitting there in your palm and remembering how you never got exactly what you wanted but you played with it anyway.”
    Cindy goes now and sprays a little Halston in her cleavage, puts on some mascara and tells Chuckie if he eats all those Cadbury Eggs that she bought up right after Easter that his face will look so bad a dermatologist won’t touch him. She tells him he’s going to spend the night with his grandmama whether he likes it or not, that if he’s bored just to go in a different room from the one her mama’s in. How My Dermatologist Makes My Skin Tingle. My Psychiatrist Had A Lobotomy. A Prescription For Love by Cindy Sinclair Snipes Sinclair Biggers Sinclair (maybe Skinner). It’s The Man Behind The Pills That Makes Me High. Cindy laughs right out loud there in the front yard of the house that her slutbucket sister would NEVER have wanted to show. Cindy might buy that house from her landlord. She might get a satellite dish so she can pick up the whole wide world. Then again, she might not. They need to make those dishes look like something other than giant-size diaphragms. Good God, it makes her laugh to picture a woman big enough to insert a satellite dish. The sun is shining like her daddy is smiling from heaven, just smiling, but without the gunshot. He’d say, “There’s my pretty little Goldilocks.”
    The day would be perfect if she didn’t have to see her mama, but of course she does. Her mama needs a ride to work, a favor, so what else is new? The Prodigal Son’s brother got the shit end of the stick. Do this, do that, Cindyrella. If she drives real fast like she did in high school, screeching and revving, she can keep from getting pissed off when she sees her mama. It’s a wonder Cindy doesn’t die from pissed off. Her mama makes people want to die; that’s all there is to it. “Dead due to pissed off,” the doctors would say. “Her mama did it to her.”
    * * *
    Emily Pearson Roberts sits in a green Lazy Boy most of the day, a small tin of snuff tucked deep down in the pocket of her pink fluffy robe along with a little cash and a piece of note paper with important phone numbers written in her own tiny scrawl. The days seem to flow by in a winding weary manner much like the Saxapaw River which curved all around this county and then on to who knows where; it still does though she hasn’t laid her eyes on that deep, brown water in years, possibly hasn’t touched that water since that day in the rowboat all those summers ago when she had let her hand trail down alongside the boat and leave a momentary mark while James sat there with his shirt sleeves rolled up and lifted that oar from side to side, his fishing tackle spread out between their feet, her whole body hidden from the sun by the large straw hatthat she wore, the same hat that her sister Lena said made her look like an old country woman. She reckoned she did, an old country woman, especially compared to that piece of animal Lena wore on her own head. An old country woman, wasn’t nothing wrong with that. There weren’t any fish, at least not that day, and she was glad because she felt that river was nasty and that anything that lived there was probably nasty, too.
    “Is this the same woman that loves