Eli the Good Read Free Page B

said, looking at me by way of the mirror when I walked in. She never called me Eli, only this nickname she had given to me when I was a baby. She was leaned in to the mirror so close that her nose almost touched the glass. Her eyes were those of a lost girl. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had recently had her entire history called into question, and this had marked her, had made her harder and stronger. I did know that she was searching for something that summer.
    I pulled myself up onto the vanity counter and watched her. I loved the careful way she went about putting on her blue eye shadow, how she spent much more time and patience on this than on anything else. She mouthed the words to the song playing on the radio:
Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall?
    “Mom’s going to
die,
” I said, and left my eyes on her pants so she’d know what I was talking about.
    Josie had this pair of pants that was always causing trouble, and she had them on that evening. They looked like the American flag — each leg was striped in red and white, and above that was a blue block pecked with small white stars. Our mother hated these pants, which only added to Josie’s love for them. In fact, whenever she wasn’t wearing them, she hid the pants, afraid Mom would find them and throw them away. She had shared the hiding place’s location with no one else but me, and I knew how much this meant, to be trusted in such a way. She only kept three things in the hiding place: the pack of cigarettes she sometimes smoked from, the pint of Jim Beam she had stolen from Stella’s house, and the pair of flag pants that our mother hated.
    “She’ll get over it,” Josie said. “If she don’t, then tough.”
    “I hate it when you all fight,” I said, but Josie didn’t answer. She was putting on her lipstick, a frosty pink that was almost white. She didn’t wear much makeup — only eye shadow and lipstick — but she and Mom fought over that, too. Mom said that when she was young, girls didn’t wear makeup until they were grown. Josie’s reply was always that she
was
grown. She ripped off three squares of toilet paper, folded them, blotted her lips, and handed them to me without glancing my way.
    “Daddy’s never said anything about them,” she said. “And he’s the one who was in the war. Not her.”
    I looked down at the perfect bloom of her lips for a time before I realized that stillness had seized her.
    Josie was looking into the mirror as if transfixed. She sang one verse of the song —
beautiful loser, read it on the wall
— beneath her breath, concentrating on each word. There was a tight look of disgust on her face, a scowl that didn’t really change the shape of anything. Still, she looked awfully cool to me, standing there in flag pants and what she called a peasant blouse and her black hair so long that she could sit on it. The top of her head shone in the light of the bare bulb hanging over the bathroom sink.
    Josie stood there like one of the mannequins in the window of the Cato’s downtown, staring without blinking. The drip of the faucet grew louder. Finally, she let out an exaggerated sigh. When she put a hand into her hair and lifted it, the clean green-apples smell of her shampoo washed out over me and caused my mouth to water.
    Josie put a knuckle against my arm and let her eyes touch mine, her sign that she was finished. She took a step back as I slid from the counter, as if she didn’t trust that I would be able to get down properly. When I was smaller, she had slid her hands under my arms and helped me down, but I wouldn’t let her do this anymore.
    Just as I hopped down, Mom appeared in the bathroom door, which I had left ajar. She had a talent for magically appearing as if out of thin air. She held a cup of coffee with a fist of steam rising from the surface.
    “Josie, I told you plain and simple I didn’t want to see those old pants again,” she said.
    Josie crossed her arms. “Why?” She