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“Terrific.”

I looked at the drugstore just down the walk.

“Give me five minutes,” I said, and headed for it.

“Five minutes?”

They followed me in. I located the cigarettes quickly, but picked up a box of tampons I actually did need. I checked out the mirrors, watched the clerk behind the counter, and then picked up a pack of my favorite menthol cigarettes, shoving it into my blouse. Then I paid for the tampons and walked out, the two of them standing at the door.

Charlotte watched me take it out of my blouse.

“Here.”

“I thought something would ring if you did that,” Kathy Ann said.

“Obviously not,” I said.

“Why did you steal them? I saw you have enough money to buy them,” Charlotte asked.

I shrugged.

“I’ll save my money for something I can’t steal,” I told her, and she smiled.

“C’mon,” she said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun tonight.”

Kathy Ann’s face brightened.

“She likes you,” she said, as if the queen had just granted me permission to live in Nashville.

If it’s that easy to win friends here, I thought, maybe I’ll have a good time tonight.

Charlotte Lily offered me one of the cigarettes from the pack I stole for her. I took it.

“I want one too,” Kathy Ann said.

“You don’t get any. Punishment for forgetting,” she told her, smiled at me, and continued on. Like a whipped puppy, Kathy Ann remained a few steps behind us all the way to Stumpin‘ Jumpin’.

I was in Nashville and if Grandpa saw me now, I thought, he’d have me at a prayer meeting in the morning.

Too late for that, I told the voices inside me.

Maybe too late for a lot of things.

4

Getting into a New Groove

On the exterior Stumpin‘ Jumpin’ looked almost like another one of Mother darling’s honky-tonks. There was a blazing red neon sign over the two large black metal doors, at either side of which stood two human bulldogs. Each looked like a football linebacker, with thick necks and shoulders that made Grandpa’s look puny. Charlotte Lily exchanged some sort of greeting and message with her sister’s boyfriend through their own eye and head signals and then turned to us and said, “It’s a little too early. We have to go in when there’s a good crowd. We’re less conspicuous if we do it that way,” she explained. “C’mon, we’ll visit Keefer for a while.”

“Who’s Keefer?” I asked when I saw that Kathy Ann was very pleased by the suggestion.

“An old boyfriend of mine I toy with from time to time. He works in an auto body shop.”

“His father threw him out of the house,” Kathy Ann said.

“I believe it was by mutual consent,” Charlotte Lily told her.

“His father beat him up, didn’t he?”