Free Sinners Circle by Karina Sims

foster mom knocked
on the door. “You girls are too old to be in the bath together...”
    I was wearing my bathrobe walking
past the kitchen, drinking a coke when my foster mom said, “Amanda, can you
come in here, please?”
    Two police officers were sitting
at the dinner table while my foster mom, Debbie, was crying into a dish rag.
This first cop to speak, he looked like the kind of guy you could slap in the
mouth and he would think it was his fault and probably apologize for getting in
the way of your hand. He looked like a wimpier Don Knotts ,
like his legs were made of wet bread and his spine was nothing more than a cord
of garden worms. This wimp looked at the other police man who stood up, took
off his cowboy hat and stared at his shoes, shoes that I couldn’t see, because
the breakfast table was covering his legs.
    “Amanda, Miss, could you come
here for a minute please? We’d like to talk to you.”
    I walked over to the table, put
my coke down, Debbie moved the can away from the ledge. I remember thinking the
policeman with the cowboy hat should really have put the fuckin ’
thing back on because he was so damn bald without it. The cowboy cop took out a
newspaper tucked in his arm pit and unrolled it on the table. “Miss, I believe
we’ve found your mother, Francis Troy.”
    The picture of the woman on the
gray paper, printed in halftone, she sat in the living room of our trailer for
five years, on top of the TV watching my mother and I watch whatever was on. I
was sitting in the shopping cart chewing gum and fucking up my shoe laces when
she got the picture taken at Walmart . When she got
the prints back, she spilled gin all over them except for the one we put up on
top of the TV.
    Debbie, sobbing into that old
shitty rag that smells like garbage, she isn’t sad, she’s just trying to make
the story better. Trying to make herself part of something half the country
will hear about. The bald cowboy is blowing bad breath up my nose as his mouth
contorts around the words, “Francis Troy has been identified as the victim of a
child gang slaying down in Mexico. All suspects have been apprehended. The
State would be willing to pay your way to see the case in court, if you’re
willing to attend the trial.”
    There is a moment in our lives
when things change. For a lot of people this happens after death. Their ways of
thinking, their views of others, their awareness is brought to an entirely
different plateau. But for some, when this happens in the midst of life, the
reality of objects, others, what is being said, become crystal clear. I saw the
man in the cowboy hat wiggling his tongue around words he didn’t fully
understand. I saw the age on his face, the wrinkles on Debbie’s face. I noticed
she had her nice slippers on, I noticed the wimp with the gun and the shiny
badge pinned to his shirt didn’t really give a fuck. And even if he did, he
couldn’t bring my mom back. He wouldn’t be putting those eight Mexican kids in
prison. Even if he had the best intentions in the world, he couldn’t do shit
about anything. And because of this, in reality, he held no honest authority.
    What was coming out of the
cowboy’s mouth, they were just words. Sentences in fragments
that I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t put together. I reached for my coke,
when I dropped it in the kitchen I just kept walking until my back was against
my bedroom wall, my bum on the carpet.
    I heard words floating through
the door, words like “Francis” and “Marcy” and “raped by cousin.” Excited
voices popping, “both runaways from Mennonite commune,” “Francis kept the
baby... Amanda.” I could hear Gina splashing around in the tub, her fingers
skipping across the water.
    Whoever was in charge, whoever’s
finger hovered over the button of my fate, decided it was in my best interest
to stay with Debbie and Gina until Marcy could fix up a suitable place for me.
    While I waited at Debbie’s for
Marcy, I filled the big