When Selma was older but still too young to stay at home alone, her father would take her to bars on nights her mother drugged herself into a stupor with sleeping pills. Hidden in a corner, drinking Virgin Marys, Selma would watch her father interact with these women. It hadn’t been her father who had called the shots, though. These women had all the power. How charmed they’d been. How potent to the people around them.

Ruby, a beautiful woman with dyed black hair and the largest bosom Selma had ever seen, had been the woman who had finally made Selma’s father leave her mother. The others, Selma realized now, had just been playing with him, batting him around like a cat with a stunned mouse. They hadn’t wanted to marry him, because if they had, he would have left long before then. Selma had been thirteen when this happened, and she had loved going to visit her father and Ruby’s apartment in downtown Jackson. Selma had been on the cusp of womanhood, and Ruby had been all that Selma had wanted to be. Ruby, in her better moods, would show Selma how to apply makeup, making her lips so pink she looked like she’d just taken a bite of a cupcake. It had felt that way, too, sticky and thick. It had been during one of these makeup sessions that Selma had asked Ruby about her bracelet.

Ruby had stepped back and held up her hand, making the four heart charms jingle. “Women like me have exactly eight times in our lives to get the man we want. This is how we keep track.” She’d rattled the bracelet again. “I had eight charms. I have four left.”

“What happens to the charms?”

“They disappear the moment we decide on the man we want, the moment we know. The first few men are usually out of spite. We use them to steal the men of women we don’t like. The last four are usually for money. The very last one is the last chance to get exactly what we want. Is it money? Is it revenge? Is it love? Is it a family? It’s the most important charm.”

Selma had listened with rapt attention. “Do you have to use them all?”

Ruby had laughed, a sharp sound like a barking seal. “Darling, why would you waste them?”

Selma had tried desperately to process it all. She’d wanted to know everything but was afraid it was too much, that she didn’t have what it took to understand. Boys had just started to intrigue her, and she had trouble thinking beyond finding one to hold hands with. That was all. Just one. That had been all she’d wanted. “If you fall in love, can you just keep using the charms on the same man?”