“Nothing,” I said.

We stood for a minute with our hands folded into our armpits. Matties gray bangs were more salt than they were pepper, cut high and straight across, and her skin always looked a little sunburned. The wrinkles around her eyes reminded me of her Tony Lama boots.

Mattie was like a rock in the road. You could stare at her till the cows came home, but it wouldn’t budge the fact of her one inch.

“Just don’t tell me you’re running from the law,” she said finally. “I’ve got enough of that on my hands.”

“No.” I wondered what exactly she meant by that. Out on the street a boy coasted by on a bicycle, his elbow clamped over a large framed picture of a sportscar. “I have a fear of exploding tires,” I said.

“Well, of all things,” she said.

“I know. I didn’t ever tell you because it sounds chickenshit.” I stopped to consider if you ought to say “chickenshit” in a place called Jesus Is Lord’s, but then the damage was done. “Really it’s not like it sounds. I don’t think there’s a thing you could name that I’m afraid of, other than that.”

“Of all things,” she said again. I imagined that she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We’d just thought it was allergies.

“Come over here a minute,” Mattie said. “I’ll show you something.” I followed her across the lot. She took a five-gallon jerry can, the type that Jeeps have strapped on their backs, and filled it a little better than halfway up with water.

“Whoa!” I said. While I wasn’t paying attention she’d thrown the heavy can at me. I caught it, though it came near to bowling me over.

“Knocked the wind out of you, but it didn’t kill you, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“That’s twenty-eight pounds of water. Twenty-eight pounds of air is about what you put in a tire. When it hits you, that’s what it feels like.”

“If you say so,” I said. “But I saw a guy get blown up in the air once by a tire. All the way over the Standard Oil sign. It was a tractor tire.”

“Well that’s another whole can of beans,” Mattie said. “If we get a tractor tire in here, I’ll handle it.”

I had never thought of tire explosions in relative terms, though it stood to reason that some would be worse than others. By no means did this put my fears to rest, but still I felt better somehow. What the hell. Live free or bust.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll handle it together, how’s that?”

“That’s a deal, hon.”

“Can I put this down now?”

“Sure, put it down.” She said it in a serious way, as if the can of water were some important damaged auto part we’d been discussing. I blessed Matties soul for never laughing at any point in this conversation. “Better yet,” she said, “pour it out on those sweet peas.”

There was a whole set of things I didn’t understand about plants, such as why hadn’t the sweet peas been killed by the frost? The same boy sped by again on his bike, or possibly a different boy. This time he had a bunch of roses in a white paper funnel tucked under his arm. While the water glugged out over the sweet peas I noticed Mattie looking at me with her arms crossed. Just watching. I missed Mama so much my chest hurt.

Turtle had managed to get through her whole life without a book, I suppose, and then had two of them bought for her in one day. I got her one called Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House, which showed pictures of Old MacDonald growing celery in windowboxes and broccoli in the bathtub and carrots under the living-room rug. Old MacDonald’s downstairs neighbors could see the carrots popping down through the ceiling. I bought it because it reminded me of Mattie, and because it had stiff pages that I hoped might stand up to Turtle’s blood-out-of-turnips grip.

While I was downtown I also looked for a late Valentine’s card to send Mama. I still felt kind of awful about leaving her, and changing my name just seemed like the final act of betrayal, but Mama didn’t see it that way. She said I was smarter than anything to think of Taylor, that it fit me like a pair of washed jeans. She told me she’d always had second thoughts about Marietta.

I found just the right card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, “Here’s hoping you’ll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids.” Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.

Lou Ann, meanwhile, had bought one of those name-your-baby books in the grocery checkout line. When I came home she had it propped open on the stove and was calling out names from the girl section while she made dinner. Both Turtle and Dwayne Ray were propped up at the table in chairs too big for them. Dwayne Ray’s head was all flopped over, he was too little to hold it up by himself, and he was wiggling toward the floor like Snake Man escaping from his basket. Turtle just sat and stared at nothing. Or rather, at something on the table that was as real to her as Snowboots’s invisible poop was to him.

Lou Ann was banging pot lids to wake the dead and boiling bottles. She had stopped nursing and put Dwayne Ray on formula, saying she was petrified she wouldn’t have enough milk for him.

“Leandra, Leonie, Leonore, Leslie, Letitia,” she called out, watching Turtle over her shoulder as though she expected her to spew out quarters like a slot machine when she hit the right combination of letters.

“Lord have mercy,” I said. “Have you been doing this all the way from the Agathas and Amys?”

“Oh, hi, I didn’t hear you come in.” She acted a little guilty, like a kid caught using swear words. “I thought I’d do half today and the rest tomorrow. You know what? Lou Ann is on the exact middle page. I wonder if my mother had a book like this.”

“The book our mothers had was the Bible, not some fifty-cent dealie they sell from the same rack as the National Enquirer.” I knew very well that none of my various names had come out of a Bible, nor Lou Ann’s either, but I didn’t care. I was just plain in a bad mood. I put Turtle over my shoulder. “What do you really expect her to do if you say the right name, Lou Ann? Jump up and scream and kiss you like the people on those game shows?”

“Don’t be mad at me, Taylor, I’m just trying to help. She worries me. I’m not saying she’s dumb, but it seems like she doesn’t have too much personality.”

“Sure she does,” I said. “She grabs onto things. That’s her personality.”

“Well, no offense, but that’s not personality. Babies do that automatically. I haven’t worked in a hospital or anything, but at least I know that much. Personality has to be something you learn.”

“And reading off a list of every name known to humankind is going to teach her to have personality?”

“Taylor, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but all the magazines say that you have to play with children to develop their personality.”

“So? I play with her. I bought her a book today.”

“Okay, you play with her. I’m sorry.” Lou Ann ladled soup out of the big pot on the stove and brought bowls over to the table. Her bowl held about two teaspoons of the red-colored broth. She was starving herself to lose the weight she’d gained with Dwayne Ray, which was mostly between her ears as far as I could see.

“This is Russian cabbage-and-beet soup,” she announced. “It’s called borscht. It’s the beets that turn it pink. You’re supposed to put sour cream on top but that just seemed like calories up the kazoo. I got it out of Ladies’ Home Journal.”

I could imagine her licking her index finger and paging through some magazine article called “Toasty Winter Family Pleasers,” trying to find something to do with all that cabbage I kept bringing home from Mattie’s. I fished out a pink potato and mushed it up in Turtle’s bowl.