Acts of God by Mary Morris Page A

statues—dogs and one statue that we always laughed at of two lovers in an embrace. You had to be very careful when you played in Vicky’s house. Vicky had a big garden and once we got in trouble for eating green beans on the vine. We loved the taste of those green beans that we plucked, snappy and sweet. One day when we were eating beans, Vicky’s mother came outside. We tried to hide in the vines near the corn, but she found us. She stood in front of us, shaking that big finger of hers, telling us never to eat beans out of the garden again.
    Then Margaret showed up at Vicky’s uninvited on a Saturday morning and broke a porcelain dog. “My mother will kill you,” Vicky said, but Margaret just went calmly into the kitchen where Mrs. Walton was, the fragments of the porcelain dog in her hands. I’m not sure what we expected—screaming, Mrs. Walton’s shouting. We hovered by the kitchen door and I heard Mrs. Walton say, “That’s all right, dear. Accidents happen. You did the right thing by telling me.” When we peered into the kitchen, we saw Margaret munching on fresh-baked cookies and drinking milk.
    The next Saturday she showed up at my house. My father must have answered and let her in. He didn’t even ask who she was. He just assumed she was one of the gang, which she wasn’t. I don’t know how she knew the others were at my house, but she did. The gang and I were in the upstairs playroom, eating chips and drinking tall glasses of chocolate milk.
    The playroom was above the garage and in it there was the cedar closet. My mother was adamant about putting the summer clothes in the cedar closet during the winter, and winter clothes in the cedar closet during the summer. Inside it smelled like forests, the deepest parts of forests and ravines, the places you have to walk a long way to get to. There were shelves and cabinets inside the cedar closet and they made very good hiding places. When we played hide-and-seek, I always hid there.
    It was one of the rules of the gang that we made ourselves at home in one another’s houses. I could open a dozen refrigerator doors in Winonah and take anything I wanted and no one would think twice about it. Margaret wasn’t one of the gang, but still she was eating chips, changing stations on the radio.
    â€œLet’s play hide-and-seek,” Samantha Crawford said.
    Lori Martin wanted to play too and said she’d be it. She started counting to ten, but when I went to my spot in the cedar closet, Margaret was already hiding there. I looked at her, shocked. “Who said you could hide there?” I spoke in an angry whisper.
    She just shrugged. “It seemed like the best place,” she said. Then I hid behind the sofa and was found right away.
    When the gang went home, my sweaters lay on the bed; books had been taken down from the shelf. My collections so neatly arranged on the shelves were suddenly in disarray. Feathers were where the shells should be. I had a cardinal feather and a bluejay’s which I couldn’t find. None of the gang would do this. I yelled at Jeb and Art. “Did you guys go in my room? Did you mess up my stuff?”
    â€œTake it easy, Squirrel,” Jeb shouted back at me. “Who’d wanta mess with your things?”

7
    Jade was waiting at the airport when I arrived. Her hair was cut short and she’d spiked it with goo. She wore ripped jeans that were much more expensive than jeans you just buy and rip yourself. She had four rings in each ear and a new one in her nose. The blue lipstick gave her face an eerie, spectral air and I tried not to look at this concoction that was my daughter as she told me that our house was slipping down the cliff.
    It isn’t anything noticeable, she assured me as she stood there, tugging at the crystal amulet around her neck. She informed me matter-of-factly that the insurance company had sent an appraiser by while I was away who