Earnest Ray found her in a restaurant stuffing oyster crackers into her purse. An hour after she met him, she was sitting on his lap, running her fingers through his hair; taking in the breadth and width of the big front porch that runs around his four-story house; playing up to his mama; and feeding tuna salad to his calico cat.
It’s best not to judge. Becky and her brother Eddie were abandoned, packed in a sour-smelling grapefruit crate, shoved under the hacked-up, thick-waxed, kid-initialed table by the big front doors of the Arrow Creek post office; twins, the two of them not a month old. Becky used to wonder why not a hospital or a church; was their mother too stupid to think of that? But it doesn’t matter now, because Becky’s got brains to spare. She’s here, and it beats the hell out of the last twenty-three years.
