Conversational?

Offhand, said my mother. Like she’d been watching too many grownup movies.

Like what? I prodded.

Oh, just, said my mother — I could hear how distressed she was becoming. Just . . . get on your knees, baby. That kind of thing.

Get on your knees, baby? I repeated.

Yes! A ten-year-old! Get on your knees baby!

Why didn’t you call the police? I yelled.

My mother didn’t answer. She was stupefied. She hadn’t been expecting the conversation to take this kind of turn. She’d thought we were talking about a naughty girl — someone who’d been a bad influence on me.

To think that Jessie had been working all these years. Kneading and reshaping a fragment of her life so small, so long ago — a period that to me had come and gone like a dream. My memories were of hopscotch and all-day skipping, with the occasional dark cloud drifting in to obscure all that golden childhood sunshine pouring down. And what had been just a dark cloud to me — troubling but insubstantial — was the shadow of Jessie’s concrete and inescapable suffering.

I did remember things. Besides the Madatall men and their armpit hair and the unsunny kitchen. I didn’t remember the teddy bear orgy, but I remembered strange, specific things she used to tell me and suggest. I remember her encouraging me to put a belt between my legs and pull on it to see what it felt like. I told her it reminded me of in winter, when I wore a snowsuit. Whenever I lifted my arms, the snowsuit rode up, so sometimes I lifted my arms, wearing my snowsuit, more than was strictly necessary.

That is your pussy, Jessie told me, nodding in an approving-teacher kind of way, as if about to bestow a checkmark.

The word made no sense to me in this context. She might as well have called it a teapot, a marshmallow.

What is my pussy? I said.

That feeling, said Jessie.

7

Trevor showed up, stepping into the foyer before I could get to the door to open it for him, holding a mere six-pack of Alexander Keith’s — he was only staying the afternoon, after all — and a box of Timbits with which to tempt Kelli down to the rec room to keep him company in front of the sports channel. He wasn’t dressed in his usual pastel, faux-scrubs Bestlife uniform. He was comfortable enough with us now to dress, I assumed, like Trevor-off-the-clock. Jeans instead of khakis and a black Pittsburgh Penguins shirt with Sidney Crosby’s number on the back.

“You go out,” decreed Trevor, “and have a good time. You need this, Miss Karie. Good for you, taking a break.”

“I really appreciate it, Trevor.”

“Oh, listen!” said Trevor. “This is what I’m here for. You know you can always give me a ring when it comes to Beaner-time — me and my girl know how to party, don’t we, Big Bean?”