Leaving Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

thick as a man, all she got was those creepy roles. This was pure fact. I don’t think Mama could even bear to watch Brooke Shields.
    So for years Mama had been dying to get her hands on Martha Lee. Mama maintained thin brows would be the start of a big improvement—a
transformation
—but Martha Lee would pop the tab on another can of Pabst, light two more Salems for herself and Mama, and laugh her big laugh. “You can’t transform the hound dog into the flea,” she’d say. In most things, I stood firmly on Mama’s side, but I was glad Martha Lee held her ground. I couldn’t picture her with nervous Garbo brows.
    I took another sip of my beer and watched while a hawk circled over a stand of white ash to the left of Martha Lee’s house. I knew he was only searching for his dinner, but I started thinking about how that bird had a big picture of everything on the ground, a
context
for things, and I had to wonder how my life would look if I could see it from a distance instead of always being stuck in the middle. I wondered if things somehow would settle easier in our hearts if we could see the whole picture of our life while we were living it, like the hawk’s view of the ground, instead of jangly bits and pieces that didn’t seem to fit.
    I was still drinking the beer, enjoying the prickly feeling it brought to my forehead, and staring at Martha Lee’s garden and reminding myself that things didn’t always have to be laid out straight as string to make sense, when her truck pulled in the yard.
    “Hey, there, Cookie,” she said, like she expected to find me there.
    “Hi,” I said, stashing the beer below the steps.
    “How’s things going at the Flip-N-Furl?” Martha Lee had a deep disdain for Raylene’s shop. Then and there I decided to keep the facts about
Glamour Day
to myself. Telling Martha Lee wouldn’t be one bit like telling Mama.
    She kicked off her shoes, then—right in the front yard— stripped off her nurse’s uniform, which sported some kind of stain on the front that was gross-gross-gross, an orange splotch that made me queasy just to look at it. I didn’t even want to
think
about where that might have come from. I went in the house and grabbed a clean T-shirt and cutoff jeans for her to cover herself with. Martha Lee in bra and panties was not a sight you’d want to be spending much time looking at. Not like Mama, who could have modeled for Victoria’s Secret if she’d wanted to.
    “How’s your daddy faring?” she asked as she got dressed. You didn’t need a translator to know she was really trying to determine if he’d been drinking.
    “He’s okay.” Course he was drinking, but without Mama, my daddy was so lost, it was hard to stay mad at him. And he still kept his job at the mill. In our town, a drinker who held his job wasn’t an alcoholic, just a man enduring a streak of bad luck.
    “What about you?”
    It was so good to have someone listening to me, I reeled off my list of complaints, starting with the scene with stuck-up Elizabeth Talmadge, who was
so
obvious, it was pathetic. Then I told her how I was the only one in my class who couldn’t drive and how my daddy said he’d teach me but never had the time when he was sober and after he stopped at CC’s you wouldn’t want to go with him unless you planned on ending up in some culvert counting broken bones. Finally, despite myself, I told her the whole thing about the Glamour Company coming to Raylene’s and how there was a team of trained professionals who did your makeup and how you got to pick out five outfits and how they took your picture and you got to keep one. “Raylene says they make you look like a star,” I told her, but she didn’t seem the least interested or say anything like Mama would have.
    “I miss Mama,” I finally said.
    “I miss her, too, Cookie,” she said. She went in to get herself a beer and then rejoined me on the steps.
    Back that summer, when Mama returned home from Hollywood, a