Jo

Jo had an interesting sense of identity. Being a fraternal twin, she had seen what she could be, and so she didn’t think much of herself. Castor liked that about her, sometimes. He liked that her spine curved wrong because she’d spent her growing years hunched in the backseat of a car, although he didn’t care much for the insistent pain it caused her, the intensive physical therapy she could barely afford. Her mom, Miss Florida runner up, 1977, 1976, and 1974, had drilled her and her sister Joan on the finer points of competing in child glitz pageants. Every summer from 1990 to 1997 she doctored documents to make them seem younger than they were, dragging them across state lines and dressing them up in ugly frilly dresses the color of sour limes. But she only ever let Joan compete. Jo got to eat the roadside burgers and stay up late. Jo got to stay in the car, soak up cigarette smoke, and ruin her eyes reading under burnt orange lights. Spared her mother’s poisonous attention, she outgrew, albeit crookedly, the Ford Sierra, went to college, majored in English, and met a charmingly oblivious academic who did not pretend like she was pretty and did not mind tracing a unstraight line down her back. Her sister, meanwhile, was still in Florida, pawning dusty beauty pageant crowns and stripping.

Before her mom died, Jo flew from New York to Florida to pay her respects. Her mother, ungracious as she had ever been in a light blue hospital gown, with pock marks up her elbow where the new RN had missed her veins, plus balding, was in no mood to talk about a prettier past. She pretended like she was a whole other person instead. “My name is Naomi,” she said, with a horrendously affected British accent. Her hands were manicured still, and her eyebrows were done in outrageous arches that froze her face in an expression between horror and surprise. “Nice to meet you.” Jo said. The broken back of the thin white chair wouldn’t let Jo lean back as she sat next to her mother. “You have nice posture,” Naomi remarked, and Jo laughed all the way to the truck she had rented.

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