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other responsible set of parents.

TWO
    “I know what it is,” Emily told Bernice on their second day at Gillian Cooper’s apartment. “I swallowed a demon.”
    “You did no such thing,” said Bernice. They were out by the pool, Bernice sunning in a green plastic chaise, Emily sitting up beside her with a white Diamondbacks sun visor shading her face. “There’s no such thing as demons.”
    “One slipped into my mouth while I was sleeping. Now it’s cooking me from the inside.” She seemed downright pleased.
    Bernice picked up her Diet Pepsi and handed it to the girl. “Here, drink some of this. You do not have a demon in you, and you’re going to be fine.” In fact, Bernice was worried, as the child clearly still had a fever. Landis had left yesterday—she and Emily had dropped him at the bus station downtown—and she still hadn’t heard from him. She tried to tell herself that she would, that for some reason he
just couldn’t get to a phone—he’d stopped service on the one at the trailer last week—but deep in her heart she knew she’d blown it. He was gone, run off, back to the life he’d had before meeting her. She thought it was a cheap and cowardly trick to leave the way he had, acting like he really wasn’t, like it was all still OK between them.
    “We need to go to church,” said Emily.
    “We do not.” She held out a tissue. “For one thing, it’s Friday. Blow real good, OK?”
    Emily did this, solemnly handing it back when she was done. The whites of her eyes were the color of robins’ eggs. “It’s OK. I can pray in my head.”
    “You better not.” Bernice watched another mother with her child on the opposite side of the pool. The woman was Mexican-looking, her daughter a round-stomached little windup toy, brown as a Brazil nut, wearing a yellow plastic water wing on each arm.
    “I can talk to him. I can talk to him for you!”
    “Who?”
    “Jesus.”
    “You know what, honey? Instead of Jesus, I wish you’d talk to Jerry.”
    “Who is that?”
    “Think of a nice, fat man with a beard and sunglasses kind of like Mr. Landis wears. Sort of Santa Claus, only with a guitar. He died, too. Instead of talking to Jesus, you talk to Jerry, OK?”
    Emily was quiet. It was hot out by the pool, but Bernice wasn’t ready for the air-conditioning again. At least out here the air was real. Gillian’s apartment was small and smelled of carpeting, and all the furniture was glass or acrylic. It was bad in there—deeply unnatural. Right now, Gillian was away at work.
    “I’m not afraid to die,” said Emily.

    “Stop it,” said Bernice. “No one’s dying.” She closed her eyes. This wasn’t so easy. She hadn’t planned on being abandoned. “Hey,” she said, brightly. “What about we go get some ice cream?”

    The Albertsons supermarket was only a few hundred yards away, but there was no practical way to walk to it—you had to cross eight lanes of traffic with no pedestrian light, and the line of cars never let up. It amazed Bernice that it had come to this—a world where you couldn’t walk, even if you wanted to. She got into the Nova, which despite being parked under one of the sun awnings that stood along the outside edge of the parking lot, still contained air as hot as a blast furnace. She cranked the feeble air conditioner and rolled down her window, then got back out and strapped Emily into her seat. For some reason, the word toenail had been stuck in her head all day, and she thought of it again. Tucson, toenail, tough, turban. She wondered if her brain was getting baked.
    Inside, the supermarket was so cold she immediately got shivers. Emily held her hand as they walked first to the liquor section, where Bernice picked out a green bottle of premixed margaritas for herself. Then they wandered past meats and the huge pharmacy area over to dairy and cakes and bread. The smell made her dizzy. Bernice did her best not to meet people’s eyes. She had no idea what the