Sarah Read Online Free Page A

either side of my cheeks. ‘Good luck.’
    Glad just wrings his hands and makes me feel nervous.
    I walk, in the flat white Mary Janes Glad made me wear instead of the spike heels I wanted, out of the caravans with everyone seeing me off, past The Doves, and into the lower-lit fluorescent night-time of the overnight truck lot. The Nice Man’s truck is right where Glad said it would be, five rows in and seven across. It is a plain truck, nothing special. No custom anything. The door is a dark blue and I can see my face mirrored on it. I squint my eyes so I can pretend I am seeing Sarah’s reflection. I am supposed to tell the Nice Man my name is Cherry Vanilla, but after I knock and he says, ‘Who is there?’ the name ‘Sarah’ just comes out of my mouth.
    At first I’m scared of the Nice Man. He reminds me of a New Orleans voodoo priest, his eyes rimmed with a thick black tattoo. Then I realize, after I sit on his lap a little and he talks to me in his near indecipherable Appalachian twang, that he is just a laid-off coal miner. And it’s true what they say; the dust settles in every crease of skin like a new layer of pigment.
    ‘Started in the mines when I was ten,’ he says and places his charcoal-lined hands gently on my waist.
    He is from Mingo County, West Virginia. Everyone in West Virginia, no matter how bad off they are, gives thanks at least they don’t live in Mingo County.
    ‘I used to lie in the bed with my brother at night while my mama listened to The Christ Cure Radio Show and my daddy sucked on a piece of coal to help his graveyard cough,’ he tells me while bouncing me tenderly on his knee. I thought about asking him if he heard my grandfather’s sermons too, as his show came on not too long after The Christ Cure Radio Show and was very popular in Mingo County, but I remember what Glad told me about not getting personal about my life.
    ‘It ruins the fantasy of who they want you to be,’ Glad had said.
    ‘I do love Jesus,’ the Nice Man says and begins to run his hands up under my pink skirt and to my peach panties. ‘And you are such a sweet thing.’ I hope he will say the name I told him. I want to hear her name while his hands begin to diddle me. I close my eyes and let him rock me and caress me.
    ‘Sarah,’ he finally whispers into my ear.
    ‘I’m here,’ I whisper back, ‘not going nowhere.’ I let my eyes roll back into my head in pleasure.
     
     
    Sarah comes back a month after I’ve started working. The green-bean truck-driver man had stopped by to see her while she was gone. Other lizards were more than happy to be helpful and let him know Sarah’s whereabouts. He was so mad that she was carrying on in some other state, with a cargo inspector at that, that he got rid of our room and put everything she’d left out on the brown lawn. Someone rang up Glad and I came and gathered up all the things and took them back to the caravan. Except her bubble bath. I left that sitting there on the rotting grass.
    Mother Shapiro paid for Sarah to get our room back at the Hurley motel, but mostly Sarah stays with Mother in her caravan. They’re always together. Sarah even starts acting like she cares about the lizards’ moons too.
    Mother Shapiro knows all the girls’ monthly cycles by heart. At any given time, if Mother is sitting in The Doves, some lizard will holler out to her across the floor asking if they were ripe. Some want to know so they can force a driver they are fond of to settle down with them and a baby on the way. Some want to make sure they weren’t gonna catch, so they can earn extra money risking sex without a rubber. Some just want to know so they can set aside enough money to get their feminine hygiene products ready. Mother Shapiro is pretty good at figuring out why a lizard wants to know. Folks say she has a second sight that way. Being a big believer in condoms she usually yells back across The Doves to the girl, ‘Honey, you’re as ripe to seed and as