The Good Daughters Read Free Page A

performing magic tricks wearing a cape he’d evidently sewed himself. He had taught himself ventriloquism, so one time, at Plank’s, he made this pair of summer squashes talk to each other without moving his lips. Years before, when I was five or six, he pulled a silver dollar out of my ear, so for the next few days I was forever checking to see what else might be in there, but nothing ever was.
    One spring Ray Dickerson built a homemade unicycle using a few old bike parts he’d found at the dump. That was Ray for you. When other boys were outon the ball field, he rode that contraption around town playing his harmonica.
    At one point, he’d tried to teach his sister how to ride the unicycle, and Dana had taken a fall bad enough that her arm ended up in a sling. You’d think Mrs. Dickerson would have confiscated the thing after that—or that she’d be upset at least, but it didn’t seem to bother her, though my mother had a fit.
    Not much bothered Val Dickerson, or appeared to. She was an artist, and generally absorbed in that more than whatever might be going on with her children, was my impression. Where my mother kept close tabs on every single thing my sisters and I did, Val Dickerson would disappear into a room she called her studio for hours at a time, leaving Dana and Ray with an enormous bowl of dry Cheerios and some odd assignment like “go put on a play” or “see if you can find a squirrel and teach him to do tricks.” The strange thing was, they might. When Ray talked to animals, they seemed to listen.
    My father couldn’t ever take time off in summer, because of all the jobs that needed doing at our farm, but my mother established a tradition of making a road trip every year during February vacation, when there wasn’t so much that needed doing on the farm, and what there was he could, reluctantly, trust to his helper, a small, wiry boy by the name of Victor Patucci who’d first shown up at our door when he was only fourteen or so, looking for work. Victor was about as unlikely a person as you could have chosen to be a farmer—a smoker, who wore so much Brylcreem his hair reflected light, who followed race car driving and turned up his transistor radio whenever they played an Elvis Presley song, and never seemed to go to school. His father worked in the shoe factory, and my father said he wasn’t a good man—words that stood out for me because my father so seldom spoke ill of anyone.
    “The boy could use a helping hand,” my father said when he’d signed Victor up—and though initially my mother protested the thirty-dollar-a-week expense, it was Victor’s presence on our farm that made our annual Dickerson visit possible, and for that she was thankful.
    So every March we set out to see the Dickersons. Before embarking on our road trip, my mother filled a cooler with sandwiches and jars of peanut butterand things like beef jerky that didn’t go bad. Then my sisters and I would pile into the backseat of our old Country Squire station wagon with the fake wood paneling and a stack of coloring books and Mad Libs to keep us busy. We’d play I Spy or look for license plates from unusual states and now and then we’d stop at battlefields and historic monuments, and sometimes a museum, but our ultimate destination was whatever run-down house or trailer (and one time, a converted Quonset hut) the Dickersons were living in that year.
    The point of this, as always, was what my mother imagined to be my attachment to Dana Dickerson, but for me, the one significant attraction of the trip was knowing I’d get to see Ray Dickerson.
    Young as I was, I understood he was handsome, and the knowledge of that made me shy, though I was drawn to him too. The odd thing was that even when I was very young—eight or nine, and he twelve or thirteen—he seemed to take an interest in me over my sisters. On one of our visits, he had spotted a drawing I’d made in the car, of a camel I’d copied off an empty