When Cher saw the girl on the drive home that evening, she pulled to the shoulder and offered her a ride, even though the two women hadn’t spoken in six years. The girl clambered into the passenger seat, rain dripping onto her shoulders from the ends of her stringy blue hair. Mud squished around in the girl’s flimsy sandals, coating the floor mats in red clay. Truly, the girl was a young woman now, though Cher wouldn’t exactly say her former student had blossomed. No miracles had occurred in the chrysalis of adolescence. It gave Cher no pleasure at all to notice this; she’d managed to detach herself over the years from the whole embarrassing melodrama of their acquaintance. Plus, Cher was retired now. When she thought about the girl, which wasn’t often, a kind of blankness settled in. Certainly not anger. Not regret. If God had given Cher nothing else in this life, He had given her peace when she asked for it, even if He could have done a mite more in the way of vanquishing her enemies.
Cher and the girl had first become familiar during Cher’s tenure as a remedial math teacher for Clinch County Schools. Back then, the girl was a quiet freshman with the nervous habit of biting her bottom lip in a way that left it chronically misshapen. The two had bonded, briefly, over their shared name, though it was only a nickname for both of them. Elder Cher was born Cheryl Ann Cash, only child of Jet and Bernice Cash, clean living, hard-scrabbled proprietors of a family laundromat on Fifth Street. Younger Cher was born Cherokee Fantasy McQuarrie, one of a half-dozen dirty-footed white children that lived in a single-wide trailer on a remote tract of land off Highway 441 South.
Cher the Younger had not been a very good student. She’d chewed her lip and stared out of the window and nodded off whenever Cher the Elder—or as she’d been known to her students back before her divorce, Mrs. Bass—explained fractions and linear equations.
“People can like themselves and still aim to improve themselves,” she’d often remind classes full of disinterested faces. Even after thirty years of teaching, Cher tried to remain optimistic, reaching out to her students in a way that urged them to tap into some secret reserve of collective potential. “Others your age have started on roots and radicals. Doesn’t that sound exciting?” When she did single students out in her classes, she tried to maintain an attitude of hopeful encouragement. “Wouldn’t you like to do better than your current circumstances?” she’d once asked a boy who came in late smelling of fried fish and marijuana. He’d put his head on his desk and pulled his arms inside his T-shirt.
“Wouldn’t you like to lose weight?” he shot back.
Cher capped her dry erase marker and answered the boy with the calm of a veteran educator. Teachers, perhaps more than anyone, knew that children typically mouthed off out of insecurity or deeply felt shame.
“As a matter of fact, I am trying to reduce,” she told him. “Just this morning, I’ll have you know I went on a run.”
The boy pulled out one of his arms, biting off a dirty thumbnail. “To the donut store?”
Cher smiled. “To the cemetery, actually, to visit my parents. They died in a horrible car crash when I was your age.”
Students who had previously been smirking now looked noncommittally at the floor.
“Did you know,” Cher continued, “that if a body is damaged enough, the funeral home can’t embalm it? That was a thing I’d liked not to have known at the tender age of fifteen. Then again no one wants to see their loved ones burnt to a crisp. It certainly doesn’t make for pleasant dreams—imagining the screams of your mother and father as they burned to death inside of a used Mercury Montego.”
Cher’s actual morning run had consisted of jogging three streets over to see if her husband’s truck was in the driveway at Melanie Tuttle’s house. It wasn’t there, however, and when Cher peered through a window, she noticed Melanie asleep on her couch, her robe hanging open to reveal a single whopping breast with the largest areola Cher had ever seen. That perturbing business aside, Cher found that periodically reminding her students that they weren’t the only people in the world with problems usually resulted in shutting them up, for a few minutes at least.
The problem that arose with Cherokee Fantasy McQuarrie was that the girl simply didn’t have the good goat sense to accept help when it was offered to her. It was no secret that Cherokee hadn’t been born into a life of privilege. Her mother’s face had appeared on the front page of the newspaper more than once for drug-related charges. Cherokee’s father was one of two brothers—either Jared McQuarrie or Justin McQuarrie—who painted houses during their few sober days a month. And the most recent McQuarrie baby had been removed from the home by child protective services.
Cher had taken an interest in Cherokee, or at least she’d become casually devoted to the girl out of some vague notion that the child reminded her of herself—shy, nervous, a few pounds heavier than the other girls, something intelligent behind the eyes that did not always translate to straightforward academic achievement. Cherokee often wore wrinkled, ill-fitting clothes—oversized shirts, too-tight pants—no doubt because she had no one in her life to help her. Cher remembered shopping at Rose’s with her own mother at that age, just prior to her mother’s death, trying on wool skirts with no give whatsoever, begging for Ship ‘n Shore tops that were always too expensive but offered a more sophisticated, womanly fit. Bernice Cash so rarely removed the shapeless aprons she wore to the laundromat that it was hard for her to get excited about her daughter’s appearance. “No one ever pampered me,” she’d bark. “If I hand over a fortune to Rose’s for blouses your father will murder me in cold blood.”
“Don’t you think that’s extreme?” Cher would say, rolling her eyes. “Subjecting yourself to the electric chair because your wife splurged on blouses?”
“He wouldn’t go to the electric chair,” Bernice snapped. “Any judge with a brain would rightfully release him. And any wife would be crazy to cross her husband that way.”
Cher felt that what Cherokee needed was maternal guidance. Someone to show her that one’s sense of style shouldn’t suggest a relaxed approach to personal hygiene, and someone to demonstrate that she, too, could present as pretty, if she only had the same tools as other girls. It wasn’t until after Cher went to live with her Aunt Bev in Tifton that she learned the importance of a beauty regimen; young women simply needed help with these matters. “Oily skin and bad breath are a fast track to failure, Cheryl Ann,” her aunt had warned her early on. She sipped her gin fizz with an attitude of having it all figured out, absently flipping through an issue of Mademoiselle on her lap. “If Bernie had taken more pride in herself, she could’ve ended up a grand woman. It pains me she let your father turn her into a drudge—that mortician ought to thank his lucky stars your parents went out the way they did because Lord have mercy, that man would’ve had his work cut out for him. Can you imagine Jet Cash slathered with that foundation—of all people?”
Cher put together a gift for Cherokee. She began with a few essentials picked up at Walgreen’s: face cleanser, demure lipstick, a curling iron, an aerosol can of anti-perspirant. At home that night she realized it wasn’t enough. She rifled through her closet, pulling out clothes she hadn’t worn in years. The girl was what, a size eighteen? Here was a full-length gown with a beaded bodice she’d bought for an Alaskan cruise; it had set her back two hundred fifteen dollars and she’d worn it exactly once. Here was a Land’s End sweater embroidered with cardinals, here was a pair of lined slacks with cuffed hems, here was a V-neck blouse in emerald green with glittering rhinestone buttons. Cher even threw in a casual tank top with CHER airbrushed across it in fanciful letters, then a jaunty leather cap with a brim, then a leopard-print skirt with buttons down the side and a gold-plated brooch in the shape of a leaf.
Cher folded the clothes and placed them in a Dillard’s shopping bag with a lavender satchel on top. Then she called her cousin Jan to tell her what she’d done.
“Hopefully you didn’t give her any used underwear,” Jan said.
“Of course I didn’t give her underwear,” Cher said. “I did slip in a pair of unopened pantyhose.”
“What color?”
“Sandalwood.”
“Long as they’re not white. Nobody wears white pantyhose anymore.”
“For God’s sake, Jan, I know that.”
Cher presented her gift the following day, pulling the girl aside as the other students filed out of the classroom for lunch.
“This is for you,” she said, handing her the basket of personal items. “I know money’s tight at home, but every girl’s entitled to a few necessities.”
She studied the girl’s face for signs of delight. Cherokee only nodded.
“Okay. Thank you.”
“I also thought you could use these,” Cher said, pulling the Dillard’s bag out from behind her desk. “They’re nice but they don’t fit me anymore. Dances are coming up, other things—maybe a job interview? There’s a silk top in here that would look so pretty with your eyes. But casual pieces, too. It’s a fun mix of garments for all occasions.”
Cherokee stared at the bag of clothes, not taking it. Cher wondered if the girl was confused, or perhaps overwhelmed by the gesture. Maybe she’d never received a gift like this before.
“You can keep the bag in here for the rest of the day,” Cher offered. “So you don’t have to lug it from class to class.”
“Thanks.”
Cher placed a maternal hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I know how hard it is to feel disconnected from your family. The important thing is that you respect yourself no matter what. Jesus loves you, Cherokee, and so do I. And so do all the teachers at Clinch High.”
That night, Cher carried a banana mayo sandwich out to Brock in the garage. She found her husband perched on a metal stool with a screwdriver, dismantling their quesadilla maker under a lamp.
“The thing’s not broken, it’s just full of cheese,” he called when Cher stepped through the door. “Why do you have to cook with so much cheese?”
“How do you make quesadillas without cheese?”
“I don’t see why we need specialty appliances for every little thing,” he complained. “Waffle maker, panini press, quesadilla maker. Toaster oven. Something’s wrong with you if you think you’re too good for pans.”
“I don’t think I’m too good for pans, Brock.”
“If the George Foreman breaks, you’re on your own.”
Cher set down the plate with the sandwich. She stared hard at the bald spot on her husband’s head. It seemed to be getting sunburned from its proximity to the lamp.
“Are you fucking Melanie Tuttle?”
Brock didn’t look up. He chipped at some hardened cheese with his screwdriver.
“I don’t even like Melanie Tuttle.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Brock picked up the sandwich and took a bite. He looked his wife over from toe to tip, briefly lingering over the silk kimono festooned with blossoms until he made his way down to her ratty slippers.
“Why are you so suspicious of everybody?” he said. “What happened to you in life that you always think the worst?”
“My parents died in a car accident.”
“Oh, right. How could I forget the only song we sing around here? The Ballad of Jet and Bernice Cash who cremated themselves in a station wagon.”
He grabbed his keys off the bench. Cher blocked his path.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to clear my head.”
She pressed a finger against his chest. “I came in here tonight to tell you about a nice thing, and you made it all about yourself and your issues with cheese.”
“You’re the one who started in on Melanie Tuttle.”
“If I find out you’re sleeping with that big-nippled whore I’ll cut your dick off and eat it.”
“You’re crazier than a sack of salamanders.”
“I mean it, Brock. I’ll throw it on my George Foreman grill and roast it like fingerling potato.”
The next day at school, Cherokee didn’t have her homework. Even worse, she wore a tasteless T-shirt with a noticeable hole in the collar. BIG JOHNSON BAR & CASINO, the shirt said. LIQUOR IN FRONT, POKER IN THE REAR.
Cher tried not to show her disappointment.
“How’d the clothes fit?” she whispered as Cherokee was leaving with the bell.
“Fine,” Cherokee said, pushing past her out of the classroom.
The following day did not go better. Cherokee arrived with part of her homework finished, but it was mostly illegible on account of being written on the bumpy bus ride into school. She wore a spaghetti strap tank top and baggy camo pants.
“Cherokee,” Cher said, polite but firm. “You know spaghetti straps are not allowed in class. Do you have a sweater you could put on, or a tasteful blazer, perhaps?”
Cherokee shrugged. “No.”
“I think you do have those articles of clothing at home.”
Cherokee chewed on her lip. She stared out of the window.
“Cherokee?”
The girl didn’t answer.
“Cherokee, please go to the nurse’s office and borrow a T-shirt for the rest of the day.”
Cherokee rolled her eyes and slouched out of the room, scowling.
That night over grilled chicken with risotto, Cher puzzled over why the girl hadn’t worn any of the clothing. The lack of gratitude baffled her, and she found herself rambling on about it to Brock. “I’d only just ordered the paisley dress from the catalog so really I could’ve returned it for another size, but I had this vision of her trying on the dress and looking at herself in the mirror, and just feeling really good and confident and happy, maybe even enough to finally wake up to the fact that her life matters, and her grades matter, and her future matters, and I’m sorry but that worthless mother of hers—”
“Maybe she didn’t like the dress,” Brock interjected, shoveling a bite of risotto into his mouth. “Could be too old-looking for her.”
Cher set down her fork.
“There’s nothing wrong with the dress. When you’re of a certain shape you wear what flatters, not what’s trending.”
“So what are we out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Take what the dress cost as a tax write-off. Charitable donation.”
Cher rose from the table, blowing out the candles. “I didn’t give that child some of my best clothes for the tax break. We’re not even itemizing this year.”
“I only meant if this Cherubim Fantasia—”
“Cherokee Fantasy McQuarrie.”
“The girl’s what, fifteen years old? Just go to her house and get your stuff back if it means that much to you.”
“I’m not going to her house, for God’s sake.”
Brock shrugged. “I don’t care what you do. I’m just tired of talking about it.”
Cher spent the weekend checking social media to see if the girl had worn the clothes to any social events. She found Cherokee tagged in exactly two pictures, her slightly blurry face among a crowd of youth in the Pep Boys parking lot after dark. She wore a skimpy bandana top and white jean cutoffs so short they barely covered the underside of her buttocks. Cher saved the pictures to her camera roll to show Brock, then changed her mind and deleted them. How could the girl be so careless and sloppy? Couldn’t she see the stakes of carrying on in public like an imbecile, barely dressed? Maybe it wasn’t a matter of having a negligent mother at all; maybe Cherokee Fantasy McQuarrie was simply the sort of individual who’d flop and shuffle through life even with every opportunity in the world laid at her feet.
On Monday, Cherokee was out from school. No guardian called the office to report her sick, she simply didn’t show up to class. After lunch, Cher went to the girl’s Instagram. She discovered a post from two hours earlier, a picture of two bare feet with chipped nail polish on the sandy banks of the Suwannee River. Pondering life, the caption read.
Cher sent the girl a message. Why are you absent from school today?
Around 2 PM, the girl wrote back. Nothing to wear.
Cher excused herself from class and marched down to the principal’s office.
“I need to leave,” she told him. “I’m not well.”
“I don’t have anyone to replace you this late in the day,” the principal said. He slid some peanuts off his desk into his hand and ate them. Cher happened to know that the principal, whose name was Garrett, was no brainiac. She’d taught him herself at that very school some twenty-odd years ago.
Cher leaned across his desk. “I am going to throw up at any minute, Garrett. I will vomit tomato bisque all over this office and the smell will never come out of the carpet. It’s going to soak right through into the concrete below and stay there forever like the blood of the innocent.”
Cher arrived at Cherokee’s house just before three, pulling into the dirt driveway and parking beside a rusty Chevrolet on blocks. A flea-bitten dog on a chain slept below it. Cher stared at the run-down trailer a moment, noting the towels that had been draped in the windows in place of curtains. The whole structure seemed to sag toward the earth.
Cher climbed out of the car, keeping one eye on the sleeping dog. She reached the porch at the same time a naked boy came out to pee off the edge. He looked about three years old. Cher called out to him.
“Honey, where’s your mama?”
The boy stared at her, blinking, his small hands on his penis.
Cher stood back so as not to get sprayed by urine. “Are you here alone?”
The boy finished peeing and went back inside, leaving the front door open. Cher watched from the yard as the boy climbed onto the couch and resumed eating a sleeve of crackers. She climbed the steps and entered the home.
“Hello?” she called, glancing around.
The air smelled faintly of burnt toast and marijuana. The boy paid Cher little mind, his eyes fixed on a court show on TV. A woman was suing her ex-husband for stealing eggs from their parrot. “Your Honor, we have joint custody of the bird,” the man was saying. “I’m legally entitled to half the eggs and she knows it.”
Cher crossed through the kitchen and down the hall toward the faint sound of laughter in a back bedroom. She pushed on the door, peeking through the crack to see two gaunt-looking women smoking cigarettes on a futon. One of the women wore an American flag bikini and flip-flops, her lank brown hair still wet from swimming. The other wore slacks and a V-neck blouse in emerald green with rhinestone buttons. Cher stared at the women, noting the bong fashioned out of a Mountain Dew bottle at their feet.
“Shelter don’t pay but eight an hour,” bikini woman was saying, leaning over to tap her ash into a coffee cup on the dresser. “Plus they test you every two weeks just for the pleasure of cleaning dog shit.”
The other woman nodded, listening. “Mandy Folsom left Big Top. I don’t know how you feel about setting up tents.”
“Fuck tents.”
“That’s what Mandy said.”
Cher pushed open the door to reveal herself.
The women looked up but stayed seated. Cher squared her shoulders. She cleared her throat. “I’m with Clinch County Schools. I’m looking for Cherokee.”
Bikini woman grabbed her keys and climbed to her feet. “I’ll see you later,” she told her friend. She rolled her eyes at Cher as she left.
The woman in the emerald blouse sucked on her cigarette, relatively unbothered by the appearance of a stranger in her home.
“Cherokee’s at her granny’s in Ellaville.”
Cher looked around at the mess of the room. Take-out containers on the floor. Peeling wallpaper. Laundry piled on the bed with a beautifully beaded evening gown on top of the heap. Cher had danced in that dress after a prime rib dinner with sautéed portobello mushrooms—Brock had dipped her back and called her dumplin and they’d laughed like the carefree, jubilant couple Cher had seen in the Royal Caribbean brochure.
The emerald blouse hung off the skinny woman’s shoulders.
Cher struggled to stay calm. She dropped her voice to a near whisper. “Where did you get that top?”
The woman held her gaze. “Neiman Marcus.”
“You did not.”
“Fuck you care where I got it?”
Cher fought back tears. Why did everything have to be so ugly? Why did people have to be so disappointing? Cher pointed an angry finger at the pile on the bed.
“Those were for Cherokee,” she said. “Not for you to steal.”
The woman jumped to her feet and pushed Cher against the wall. “Who said you could come in here and tell me my shit?”
Cher’s head bounced off the vinyl on gypsum. She stumbled forward, kicking over the Mountain Dew bottle and spilling bong water across the carpet. Cherokee’s mother was shouting now, pulling clothes off the bed and throwing them. “My daughter gave me this shit. You think I stole it?” She whipped off the emerald blouse to reveal a loose satin bra, then yanked off the bra and threw the garments in Cher’s face. “Fuck you think you are, coming in my house? You think you know shit about other people’s kids?”
Cher tried not to look at the woman’s deflated breasts. One of them had a kind of boil or bug bite.
“I—”
“Half this shit don’t even fit, but I stole it?”
Cher steadied herself as the woman continued hurling clothes. “I’ll slap the fat off your motherfucking ass,” the woman was saying. “Ain’t nobody want your dated-ass slacks. I could stand in one leg of them motherfuckers.”
Cher grabbed the beaded evening gown off the floor. She clutched it to her chest. “You’re a drug-addled disgrace.”
The woman kicked a pair of penny loafers across the floor.
Cher continued. “People like you don’t deserve nice things. You live in squalor and you wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“You fuck yourself at Talbot’s.”
“Go lose another baby to CPS.”
The woman looked at Cher a moment. Cher took a step back. The woman’s eye twitched. Cher started to turn when the woman pounced, sending both of them crashing to the floor. The woman’s strong hands slapped at Cher’s face and ears. Cher pushed the woman off her, kicking her in the teeth.
Cherokee’s mother howled, cupping her chin. Blood gushed through her fingers and down her forearms. Cher scrambled down the hall on all fours, dragging the evening gown with her. At the end of the hall, she got to her feet and found the naked boy watching her silently from the couch. She smoothed her hair and straightened her cardigan, smiling politely. The boy held out an unopened sleeve of crackers. Cher opened the crackers and handed them back. The boy pointed at a commercial for Hardee’s patty melts. Two slabs of beef sizzled with onions on a grill. “Dat’s a good burger,” he said.
Cher nodded, steadying herself against a beat-up recliner. The whole room seemed to spin and contract. Down the hall, Cherokee’s mother wailed on the floor.
Cher folded the dress and draped it over the back of the chair. When the news came a week later that Cherokee would be transferring to a school near her grandmother in Ellaville, Cher submitted the girl’s grade for the semester as a B. Has potential, but lacks motivation, she wrote in her assessment. Struggles with linear equations, fractions, and gratitude.
The rain-soaked passenger slammed the door of Cher’s car.
“I thought it was you,” Cher said as the girl fastened her seat belt. “Your hair’s a different color but I could see it was you.”
The girl set her grocery bags between her feet and looked up, pushing the wet bangs out of her face. She smiled. “Do we know each other?”
Cher looked into the young woman’s face. Lip: unbitten. Eyes: a stranger’s.
“I’m sorry,” Cher said. “I thought you were someone else.”
The girl stared, embarrassed. She made a move to unbuckle. “OK, I didn’t realize—”
“It’s fine,” Cher said, quickly waving a hand. “Probably better you’re you and not her.”
“Are you sure?”
Cher nodded. It likely was better. Cherokee Fantasy McQuarrie could be anyone by now. A small-time drug chef. A serial killer. A negligent mother with six naked children of her own. All three, if she was committed enough.
Cher smiled warmly at her passenger, imagining what the girl might say to her family after arriving home that night. This woman picked me up in a downpour, out of nowhere. My own guardian angel! She saved my life.
Cher pulled back onto the county road, the windshield wipers wicking away rain.
“Now then,” she said, basking in this premonition of deserved appreciation, “tell me how to get you home.”