Margo always wore bright pink lipstick. Her red hair was all sprayed up like a helmet of big round bubbles, even though the other women in town were wearing their hair down and getting it feathered. She was thick around the middle, but she always wore miniskirts. When I asked my fourth grade teacher how long a paper had to be, she said, “Like a skirt. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.” Margo’s skirts were always interesting. They covered everything, but just barely. And when she moved, you couldn’t help but watch, just in case they didn’t. She knew it too.

“You gotta maximize your potential,” she told me once, flexing her foot before slipping it back into her impossibly high pink pump. “I don’t got a bitty waist, but I’ve got killer gams. Play up what you got, toots. That’s the secret.”

I don’t know how long she and my dad tried to date. All I remember is that one day she took me to the lunch counter out at the Wal-Mart in Harristown instead of just eating at her place or making fluffernutters at our apartment. She wore shiny blue cream eye shadow. In the car on the way over, she even let me dig the little plastic tub out of her purse and smear some across my eyelids so we’d match. We had soft pretzels with big white flakes of salt; hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, and relish; and cherry slushies.

“What I want you to remember, girl, is that I’m not breaking up with you,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. “You and me, we’re still good. Okay? You remember that.”

I tore pieces off my pretzel and shoved them in my mouth, washing them down with slushie without hardly chewing, until I got brain freeze and my eyes teared.

“It’s nothing to cry over, honey.” She spit on her napkin and wiped my cheeks hard. “Your father’s a good man, April. He always means to be a good man. He just… he gets in the way of himself, you know?”

I didn’t know, but I nodded.

“None of this is about you. No one in their right mind would leave you.” Her eyes got wide after she said it, and she put her hand over her mouth. “I mean… I mean… Now, sweetie, you haven’t even touched that hot dog yet.”

I ate it all. Every last bit, like it was my job, to show Margo how perfect I could be when I tried. I didn’t want to give her any reason to break up with me too.

I threw up in her car on the way home. Right on my white tennis sneakers, and she wasn’t even mad. Chunks of pretzel and hot dog, all bright cherry red.