“I remember who you are—you’re the market ladies.”

“How’s the colander?” Rat rejoins.

“The colander was fine.” He smiles a ragged sort of thin-lipped smile. “But that woman you sold me—remember, with the little ring-thingy in her nose for leading her by?—she turned out to be a real piece of shit.”

Rat is disturbed by this way of talking. He’s drunk, she decides. She tries to catch her mother’s eye. “Mama, we should get going,” she says. “It’s getting late.”

But Vanessa just looks at her with a dazed expression, and says nothing.

The man in black finishes rolling himself a cigarette. He offers it to Vanessa, who hesitates, says no, then says yes. Rat starts to remind her mother that she’s quit, but stops herself.

He lights Vanessa’s cigarette, then starts rolling another for himself.

“Some people forget that smoking is a sociable activity. Passing the peace pipe,” he says.

The guy’s definitely bombed, Rat decides. “Mama, are we going shoe shopping, or are we…”

“Let your mama finish her clope in peace,” says Johnny Cash.

Rat ignores him. “Mama …”

“You go on ahead. You start looking,” Vanessa says. “I’ll catch up with you in a moment.”

Chapter 6

Johnny Cash’s real name was Thierry. He came from the north, near the Belgian border. This is the story he told Vanessa, when he first moved in with them, him and his mean snarly collie, Vesuvio, who almost succeeded in making Rat beware of dogs.

His father was a town surveyor. Every week or so, after work, his father used to go out drinking with a couple of colleagues, and when he came home, he would beat Thierry silly. His mother and sisters, Thierry maintained, were the worst of all, because they looked on and did nothing.

His entire childhood Thierry could never remember anybody’s kissing him or putting him to bed or saying a kind word. Even at school, the teachers said he was useless.

When he was sixteen, Thierry realized he was bigger than his father, and if he didn’t get out he was going to kill him. He moved in with the carpenter he’d been apprenticed to, but the carpenter made a pass at him, so he left. Went to live on a commune, where he learned to tend a kitchen garden and to cook for thirty people. Later, he’d trained as a youth counselor, helping kids with problems. This, Thierry felt, was his true vocation. After he came down south, he worked a few summers at a camp above Brix for teen delinquents, but he’d fallen out with the director, a fat-assed bureaucrat who wasn’t interested in the kids, but only in his own comfort.