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Show Go Love/133 backyard Dora's dogs want no part of her tree planting, both cockers hang back in the shade of a bent-limbed pear. Our window hasn't been washed in a real long time; what she's doing out there seems to happen in a gauzy far-off place. The heat's murder I imagine-what in hell's she thinking Dora, she's ever called Mama at three a m. to shoot the breeze, to dish the newest dirt about Brother Dellwood Walker or Deacon Meloy, whatever bucktoothed sixteen year old they'd been caught with now. How they've both been spotted in a sedan sitting either side of a dark man sipping a whiskey. O.W. calls her goddamn witch and worse. He one time ran outside in the middle of the late phone talk screaming, "You lesbian bitch, you lesbian bitch." Anybody that stepped in between O W. and Mama was either a lesbian or a man about to get his nose broken. Dora and Mama'd talked right through til daylight when O W. deadheaded off to Tennessee. Not long after that, O.W.'d paid to have every last tree in our yard cut down and hauled to the dump. Not even the pecans our apples were spared, one great swath of harsh summer sun burned down on the once shady piece of street Now she's planting a tree Dora can't see me see her, how she's got the tree holed now, hammering a shovel over its tap root, spurting the whole thing down with a water hose. A wand of white sage burns on the raw dirt of a manhole sized circle-what once covered the tree hole Her lips move, maybe pray a witch prayer. The tub thrums The room's not really supposed to be a bedroom, more like a sewing room or a place to put laundry, more like a jail cell or an eighteen wheeler cab. Ten-by-ten, a hundred square feet, it's a small room with bad light. The sort of dimness you might find in the cellar of a house long ago covered by a lake, so the doors all waft open and shut to the home of eyeless things. Burnt flesh mixes with sweet gardenia-White Shoulders cologne-the scent Mama'd been |