The Secret Sense of Wildflower by Susan Gabriel

commandment of all.
    Think of all the pictures those colored pencils could make, with their perfectly sharpened tips. This temptation, as Preacher would be happy to point out, puts me right in my very own Garden of Eden talking to the snake. A snake that has every intention of getting me to bite into that apple. Truth be told, I would not hesitate to take a hefty bite out of that wicked fruit if promised art supplies. A fact, of which, I am not particularly proud.
    “So what have you been doing all summer?” Mary Jane asks.
    “Staying clear of Johnny Monroe, mainly,” I say.
    “He’s disgusting,” she says. She uses her hands to smooth some of the creases in the dress.
    “Disgusting just about sums it up,” I say.
    “None of the boys in Katy’s Ridge are even worth looking at,” she says for about the hundredth time. “However, Little Rock is full of cute boys.”
    I listen for the next thirty minutes to Mary Jane describe different boys in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her report is so titillating, I start to doze off.
    “So have you been to the graveyard lately?” she asks, at the end of her litany.
    Her question startles me awake.
    “Nearly every day,” I say.
    Mary Jane is the only person in the world who knows why visiting Daddy is important to me: I’m afraid I’ll forget him. The longer he’s dead, the more I play moving pictures of him in my mind, anchoring his memory in place.
    Just this morning I remembered how when I was a little girl I’d pretend to shave with him. I played that memory over and over in my mind like I was memorizing a poem for school, except this poem wasn’t words but images. I’d use a stick as a razor, imitating him while he stood on the front porch. During the warmer months he always shaved squinting into a tiny mirror tacked up on the house. A basin of soapy water collected the tiny whiskers until he threw it out into the ivy underneath the pine tree beside the porch. He told me that whiskers would grow like pole beans under that pine, and for years I believed him, but they never did.
    “I think I’ll wear this one the first day back to school,” Mary Jane says. She holds up a yellow dress with a green belt. She admires it, her hands on her hips. Unlike me, Mary Jane has filled out instead of up.
    “I got a new dress for my birthday,” I say. “Amy sewed it.”
    “Amy’s the best seamstress in Katy’s Ridge,” she says. “Anything she makes is much nicer than these store bought things.”
    Mary Jane probably knows that if she ever rubs it in about how much more she has than me, we wouldn’t be friends. Her grandmother in Little Rock is rich and both my grandmothers are dead. My grandmother on my mother’s side died before I was born and the one from my father’s side died when I was five. Not to mention that with Daddy gone we barely have any money at all. The government sends Mama a little, but the rest she makes up by selling things in Rocky Bluff like quilts and canned jams and jellies.
    Most of the time, I can be happy about Mary Jane’s good fortune. But lately, since my birthday, at least, I’ve felt sorry for myself and thought more about what I don’t have instead of what I do.
    “Well, hello Louisa May. Did you have a nice summer?” Mary Jane’s mother doesn’t look at me but admires the dresses spread out across the room.
    “Yes, ma’am,” I say, wondering why grownups always ask questions instead of talking to you like a normal person.
    Even when she’s relaxed, Mary Jane’s mom stands rigid like she has a board strapped to her back and looks taller than most women. Mary Jane is so short you’d never think that they were even related. In my family, Meg and Amy look just like Mama and people say I look just like Daddy. Jo doesn’t look like anybody, except maybe a movie star. And as far as I can tell, Mary Jane doesn’t look like anybody, either, except maybe her grandmother.
    “Louisa May, would you like to stay for dinner?” Mary