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"Mama, don’t you think I know that?" Taylor feels her whole self shaken by this sonism with her mother Her ent box and shakes its green-s contents into the machine "How am I supposed to know?

I jumped in the car with Turtle because I was scared to death and it seeot started rolling down this hill, but I don’t knohy or how far"

"Don’t you soo talk to this Six-shooter woman, see if she’ll listen to reason?"

"Fourkiller No, Mama, I don’t Because what if she won’t?"

Alice leans her hip against the washer and looks kindly at her daughter "I know, hon No ue with you"

Taylor feels an ocean of relief She busies her hands with clothes "I don’t kno far we should go I was thinking California maybe, some little tohere you and h to kno to keep us fro, I can find work And in two or three o back hoainst herself, and laughs She has hardly an ounce of extra on her fraainst that purple Spandex outline she looks like a stout tree trunk Taylor holds the close to Barbie’s hourglass She tosses the pants in with their jeans "I’ll have to cross off fashion ot Turtle" She laughs at herself "And I wasn’t even pregnant I don’t knohat it is I guess just observing regular mealtimes for Turtle’s benefit"

"Taylor, I can’t believe rass snake You’re perfect"

At the light, clattering sound of cardboard boxes, they both turn and see that the orange-haired boy has leveled Turtle’s tower again His hy breasts in a stretched T-shirt tremble with concentration as she loads one machine after another with crumpled jeans

As the boy zoo tiain from the bottoht

Hanging around Miss America in her leotards makes you notice yourself"

"Taylor, I never heard you run yourself down before You’d just as well jue than to start in like that" Alice closes a hs "When I was in my thirties I had these little square hips left over fro, ‘All those years before, I had a perfect gla it because I thought my nose had a bump in it’ And now that I’ood and my knuckles swell up, and I think, ‘All those years inworked perfect And I didn’t spend one ht I had square hips’ "

Taylor smiles "I take your point"

Turtle has ht and precarious by the , nearly as tall as she is She stands beside it with her fingers tense at her sides, following the boy around the roo intention He wheels around the end of a roashers and starts toward her Turtle waits till his fingertips are almost in reach of the tower before she scoops both ar

Jax’s voice on the phone is empty of humor The voice by itself scares Taylor, let alone what he is reading to her, a letter from Annawake Fourkiller She can’t concentrate at all

"…preal action yet," he says, and Taylor is distracted by hersocial workers before Turtle’s adoption--confident young women in offices ouldn’t believe in a child named Turtle without a birth certificate, any more than they believed in fairies

"What does she have that will see her through this into a peaceful wo, it’s Annawake Fourkiller, who sat in the kitchen drinking coffee less than teeks ago, when Taylor’s world was still intact

Her es of Turtle, the mean, dark eyes of that boy in the laundro into his face

Jax reads, "…she can’t belong to you Yours sincerely, Annawake Fourkiller"