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Before Daddy left, we all lived in a house in the country outside of Reynolds, just down the road a piece from where my cousin Ben and the seven goats named Otis live now.
I liked it out there. Daddy was home a lot, I suppose now that was because he didn’t have a job, but he and I were buddies, and there was always something to do in the big creaky house.
He planted a vegetable garden out back the first year we lived there. Mama is always amazed that I remember it, because I couldn’t have been more than two. And to be fair, I don’t remember much about it, except that it was there, and that my favorite thing in the garden was the big dark light bulbs that grew on a vine. The vines grew up on stakes, so the gourds hung down and really did look like big dark purple light bulbs.
“That’s an eggplant,” Daddy told me.
I was very excited. I always thought that eggs came from the chickens like Grandma Wells had at her farm. I didn’t know that you could get an egg off a plant.
He pulled one off the vine and took it into the house.
Daddy sliced the eggplant up, and I got suspicious of the eggplant right away. It was white and spongy inside with little tan seeds. “That doesn’t look like an egg,” I said. Eggs were supposed to be gooey and runny before you fried them. I decided that maybe an eggplant was like a boiled egg without the yolk inside.
Daddy breaded the slices of eggplant by dipping them in milk and then cornmeal. He fried the slices in a pan, sprinkling salt and pepper on them Again I was suspicious because this was the way Nonny cooked squash.
I didn’t like squash. I thought it was too, well, squashy. The seeds were slippery and the meat didn’t taste like anything. I thought the crunchy coating was good, though, so I always peeled the crispy part off the squash and ate it, leaving naked, pale, wilted disks of seeds on my plate that made Nonny fuss.
Daddy drained the eggplant slices and offered me one.
Eagerly, I ate one, expecting eggy goodness, but I discovered that eggplant was just squash with a prettier color and a nicer name. I felt like I had been duped, and I asked Daddy to make me a real egg instead.
He said he would in a little while and sent me off to my room to play.
There were dangers living in the country as well.
I used to stand at the screen door that led out to the carport and watch the big daddy longlegs spiders skitter across the concrete. They scared me, because I didn’t know what they were.
The cat liked to chase them though, so that was fun to watch.
Once the cat cleared out all the spiders, I could ride my Big Wheel around in the carport. The Big Wheel made a satisfying whooshing sound on the concrete that echoed on the two walls.
Sometimes the girls who lived in the trailer park across the road would come over and ride Big Wheels with me. They always talked about poop though, which I thought was kind of strange.

Not long after Daddy left, but before the sheriff came, Mama took a day off from work.
She liked to lay out in the sun when the weather was nice and she didn’t have to go to work. She set up her lounge chair in the backyard near my swing set.
“Don’t go out of the backyard, Molly,” she said. “Stay where I can see you.” She put on tanning oil that smelled like coconuts and closed her eyes behind her sunglasses.
The cat found something over by the big shade tree, and I followed over to help investigate. I started poking it with a stick, and it coiled itself up and started hissing. Mama must have heard the hissing, or the rattling, or maybe she noticed the cat dart across the yard in an orange streak and a flash of white feet.
“Get away from there right now!” Mama yelled at me, then ran over and scooped me up. She deposited me on the back porch and pulled on her rubber rain boots. She grabbed Daddy’s big gardening shovel and took the lid off the garbage can. “You don’t move from this spot,” she ordered. I saw her hands were shaking.
Mama looked like some kind of trailer park dominatrix, standing over the snake in her zebra striped bikini and rubber boots that came up to her knees. She threw down the garbage can lid and clutched the shovel with both hands. She raised it up over her head and brought the shovel down on the snake with such force that I saw a chunk of the yard come flying up about a foot.
She didn’t use the blade of the shovel to cut the head off the snake, which Pap says is the best way to kill a snake quickly and cleanly. She beat the snake to a pulp with the flat of the shovel. She pounded at it for nearly ten minutes, cursing and shouting and crying. She came back to the porch and put down the shovel. The cat came over and sniffed at the snakey bits clinging to the edges, but Mama shooed him and me into the house and locked the door.
She mumbled and cussed under her breath that the grown over garden patch, which Daddy hadn’t tended since the first year, “must be infested with the goddam things.” That was the closest she ever came to saying a bad thing about my father in front of me. I’m sure she said plenty more than that to Nonny, Pap and Uncle Ricky.
By that afternoon she was on the phone to a realtor, and I wasn’t allowed to play in the yard again until we moved. Even the cat, Patrick, had to stay inside.
We rented a little house in Reynolds a few streets over from Nonny and Pap’s. Our landlord and landlady were Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, friends of Nonny and Pap, who had built the little house next door to their own thinking that their own daughter would have a place to live when she finally came home. This year, though, Julie was living in Madagascar, working for the Peace Corps. I liked to visit with Mrs. Fisher because she showed me all the trinkets that her daughter, Julie, sent home from all the places she went. There was a lamp shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and some kind of mask from New Zealand, and prayer flags from Tibet. Best of all, though, were the picture postcards, which took up two big shoeboxes so far, and Julie wasn’t even thirty yet. I flipped through the pictures of Iceland and India and Brazil and Thailand. I wanted to go to those places. My three year old brain was jealous of Julie Fisher, and I thought maybe I could beat her one day and get to even more places than she did.
“I don’t think Julie is going to come home,” I said.
Mrs. Fisher was probably pretty mad that I had said that, but she smiled. “You never know,” she said. She also whisked the postcards back into the shoebox and served me a slice of pound cake. Mrs. Fisher made the best pound cake in the whole world. I miss it a lot, but I never thought it was enough to stay in Reynolds for, and Julie didn’t either.
I met Julie the next time she came home to visit, and she gave me a pair of red silk slippers decorated with beads and sequins that she’d picked up in a market in London. They were too big for me, but I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when I put them on. Julie wore baggy pants and a man’s button down shirt that were stained with road dust. She didn’t have on any makeup and she wore her long hair in a ponytail down her back. She chain smoked on the front porch of her parents’ house and she was the first grown up I ever met who swore besides Aunt Lily who was crazy.
“She’s never going to get a husband looking like that,” Nonny said.
I thought Julie was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen and I wanted to be just like her. Two weeks later she was off again, this time to pick fruit in New Zealand for a year.

The little house was pretty good for Mama and me. I didn’t like the basement, but you could only get into it from a door dug into the ground at the back of the house. It was a dark place, though, and I thought there were spiders in there. Worse than the spiders was the old oil-burning furnace, with its grill that looked like teeth.
We’d been living there for about three years, when Daddy finally decided to serve Mama with papers. He didn’t offer anything, but he didn’t want anything either. So Mama signed them and put them in the mailbox. Four days after that, a pipe in the yard burst, or got backed up and the basement started to fill up.
By the time Mama got home from work and picked me up from Nonny’s there was a layer of shit about six inches deep covering the dirt floor of the basement.
Mama wasn’t even sure who to call about a problem like that, but she figured Mr. Fisher was a good place to start.
Pretty soon, the whole street knew about it, not because anyone talked, or because the town trucks and workers were milling around in front of our house, but because of the smell. It turned out that Mr. Fisher’s homeowner’s insurance wouldn’t cover the pipe break if the section of pipe that burst was part of the town’s property—past the curb. And the town wouldn’t fix it if it was on the other side of the curb, on Mr. Fisher’s property.
So they proceeded to begin digging up the yard and measuring the distances. Even so, nobody seemed to know how to get the poo out of our basement.
But that wasn’t the worst part of it.
The worst part was that there were three or four kids in my class who lived on my street. And so the next day at school I was “The Girl Who Lives in the Poop House.” They called me Molly-Poo until middle school, when they found other reasons to call me names.
We stayed with Nonny and Pap while the battle between Mr. Fisher and Town Hall raged over on Forest Avenue. And in the meantime, nobody was cleaning up the shit that was still covering our basement and stinking up our house.
Another reason for Julie to not come home. I don’t think she’d have preferred picking fruit in New Zealand to living in the poo house.
I worried about all my dolls and stuffed animals that had been left behind. Mama went on a mission there to get them—cramming them into plastic garbage bags with a scarf tied over her face to staunch the smell as best she could.
She decided that was even worse than the time the guy’s brains fell on her shoes in the emergency room at the hospital where she worked.
Once the animals had been rescued, Nonny felt that they all needed to be washed. As the war continued, all our belongings slowly migrated to Nonny and Pap’s house, by way of Nonny’s washing machine and, as the volume increased, the Sudsbucket Laundrymat on Main street.
We had to get rid of our mattresses and our couch when we moved back in, so for a while, Mama and I had to share the one mattress we could afford. I stayed with Mama in her room, though, for the rest of the year, even after Pap bought me a new bed. I think it made us both feel better.