Their childhood was uncurated. On rainy summer days they made earrings out of dandelion stems. You peeled the stem into thin strips and dropped them into a puddle. Instantly, magically, they curled up in a snail-shell spiral. Later they stole real earrings from a kiosk at the mall, cheap metal hoops that turned their skin green. They stole constantly: candy bars from Hannaford’s, perfume and lipstick from Justine’s mother, who sold Avon cosmetics and kept a sample case under the bed. They swiped old shirts and sweaters from the Websters’ closets. At the time, L.L.Bean offered a lifetime guarantee on all merchandise. Anything with a Bean label, no matter how ancient, could be returned for a full refund, no questions asked.
They stole nips of bourbon from the bottles Mr. Webster hid in the basement, the toilet tank, a toolbox in the garage. Claudia can remember rolling down the hill behind Justine’s house at age ten, outrageously drunk and delighted by the motion. She remembers Justine holding her hair as she retched; their hysterical laughter as Justine’s dog Daffy, the sweetest and dumbest beagle Claudia has ever encountered, lapped up the puddle of sick.
They did what they wanted, when they wanted, and if no laws were broken and no one was injured, it was largely a matter of luck. Justine’s mother had four other kids to nag, and Claudia’s was always working. Every so often she came home—cranky and exhausted, her knees and back aching, to sprawl on the couch and watch television and complain and cough and smoke.
But that is a later version of Deb. If Claudia reaches way back, she can conjure up an earlier iteration: young Deb in denim cutoffs and a halter top, long hair in a ponytail, washing her Chevelle with a garden hose. Deb vacuuming the trailer with the radio blasting, burning strawberry incense; painting Claudia’s toenails, and Justine’s, in rainbow colors to match her own. After the funeral, sorting through a box of junk from the trailer—pay stubs, expired coupons, dead scratch-off tickets—Claudia found that girl in a photo: her mother young and impossibly slender, lying on a foil blanket in a purple bikini, her skin slick with baby oil and lobster pink from the sun.
The photo was shocking. That it had been taken at all （by whom?）， that it had been kept. Most astonishing of all was the expression on Deb’s face. For as far back as Claudia could remember, her mother had despised being photographed. The few surviving family photos show her glaring at the camera, jaw clenched: Get that thing away from me! The bikini photo was different. Young Deb wore a mischievous smile, amused, playful. Incredibly, she was having fun.
On the back of the photo, in her mother’s familiar round cursive, was a date that explained everything: July 4, 1984. That was the summer of Deb’s thirtieth birthday, the summer she fell in love with Gary Cain.
THERE WERE OTHER BOYFRIENDS, BUT GARY IS THE ONE CLAUDIA remembers—silent Gary from the body shop, who spoke only in jokes; a tall, gawky man with orangutan arms and bushy sideburns that stretched nearly to his jaw. When and how he and Deb got together, Claudia has no idea. She simply woke one night with an urge to pee and found Gary standing in their bathroom in boxer shorts—dick out, pissing with tremendous force.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don’t you people knock?”
It’s my house, Claudia thought—but didn’t say, because she was twelve and dumbstruck, physically unable to speak to a grown man with his dick in his hand.
Everyone says that kids are adaptable. If that’s true, it’s because they have no choice. Claudia was already used to fosters coming and going—most recently Erica, who’d been picked up by the caseworker one Saturday morning and was never heard from again. Gary’s arrival was no different. She came home from school one day to find a hose running from the bathroom to Deb’s bedroom, Gary filling his waterbed. This was how she learned he’d moved into the trailer. Like a new foster, he was just suddenly there.
There is an extreme intimacy to living in a trailer. Claudia fell asleep each night to the sloshing of the waterbed, low voices behind her mother’s bedroom door. Gary was a big man, so tall he had to duck to clear the doorjamb. His work boots were the size of cinder blocks, and nearly as heavy; at least once a day Claudia tripped over them on her way out the door. Even after he’d left for work, he filled the trailer with his presence: blond stubble in the sink, fine as sugar; a cigarette butt floating in the toilet, urine dribbled at the rim.