Free Ada's Rules by Alice Randall

their retirement once the gigs got slow.
    They had not expected middle age to be an erotic territory of such flower and flavor. They were surprised to discover that the removed bits, the breast, the prostate, the hip, served to enhance their appreciation of what remained, the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee, the skin just beyond the margins of their most effacing scars.
    They kissed, and licked, and bit what remained, but best, they tongue-kissed, and he poked deep into the insides of her lady parts with the same sweet power and fingers with which he thumped the piano keys.
    They found pleasure in its hiding places; they invented new pleasures; they applauded themselves with laughter.
    Then the daughters died. Glo, Mag, and Evie were wide-hipped good mamas who perfectly performed a hip rock that could calm any fretting child. It was a move they had inherited from their mother, as Bird had in herited it from her mother, MaDear. When that precious part of Bird’s legacy vanished with her older daughters into the grave, it took some of Bird’s sex with it. Bird had long been the kind of woman who rocked a man like her back had no bone. Then she wasn’t.
    If sex was death’s overture, Bird wanted nothing of it. And she wouldn’t acknowledge the fourth child, Ada, as hers. That would mean she had another daughter who could die, and that possibility was too much. Bird drank to drown and kill it. Whenshe wasn’t drunk, she thought of jumping into her front-yard lake, the lake she could see from her bedroom window.
    Temple went to Preach’s church. He sat in the back. He crouched in his pew, head in hands. He prayed for relief. When Bird’s fast-descending Alzheimer’s arrived, he accepted it as the answer to his prayer. It was not the relief he had wanted, but it was too much relief for him to turn it away.
    He prayed more. She forgot more. The house got cluttered. Things were better. She couldn’t see the lake from her bedroom. Old friends moved in with them. Things were as good as they were going to be.
    When Temple saw Ada sad that her mother did not know her, Temple chastised his last daughter. He said, “Baby, she cain’t know you and not know losing them. Ain’t no choice. You grown now. You don’t need her as much as she needs to not know you. She don’t even wanna know me. We got walls inside of walls everywhere in this house.”
    The piles got higher and more. Eventually Temple and Bird could be in the same room and not see each other. This was a comfort to Bird. When it was not enough comfort, she found her way back to the center of one of her rooms.
    Usually she was out in the piles checking the whereabouts of a scrap. She wanted to know where, exactly where, every bit of flotsam and jetsam—which could not get sick, get amputated, get infected, get diabetic retinopathy, go blind, leave behind wailing children that scattered out to California and Oregon—was.
    Anything with a ruffle, anything soft as the silk of their hands,any curler or hot iron or little jar of blue grease, any half-used jar of Vaseline or raggedy washcloth she had wiped their noses or butts with, Bird kept and tried to keep track of. Except soon she had too many things to know where anything was. In her drunk fog, she hoped somewhere lost in all the mess her daughters were hiding alive.
    Bird listened as Ada cooked. Ada was making the spinach and chicken and noodle casserole. Bird could hear her sautéing the chicken, smell the olive oil and onion. Bird could hear Ada rinse the noodles. Bird knew Ada would mix them with cream cheese. There would be an assembly line on the counter. There would be casseroles in the oven. And in the freezer. There was another good one with wild rice and more chicken. When Ada had the time and everybody was awake, particularly on a Friday, she would fry pork chops or steaks, or fish. Mainly she made casseroles and cleaned the toilets and kept