I’d visited my mama’s trailer more since Junie’s death than I had in the entire time she’d been alive. It scared me how familiar it all felt, how I slipped back into it like I’d never managed to claw my way out. It fed into my horrified suspicion that this was where I was always destined to end up. That my time as my daughter’s mother had been only a momentary blip, a brief respite from my true nature. That what I really was, and always had been, was my mother’s daughter.
The rusted black pickup was still parked in my mama’s yard, but this time I got the dubious pleasure of meeting the man who drove it. Or at least I assumed the guy passed out on my mama’s ripped faux-leather sofa was the owner. One homemade-tattoo-covered arm thrown over his face, a sliver of hairy beer belly winking at me where his T-shirt failed to meet the waistband of his dirty jeans. He was so exactly my mama’s type she might as well have picked him out of a catalog.
He barely stirred when I let myself in, tattered screen door slamming behind me. “Mama?” I called. “You in here?” Too keyed up to be careful, forgetting all the protocols in place to keep things on an even keel. Don’t scream, don’t demand, don’t surprise. My mama was like a rabid dog that way, one mistake in the approach and you were as good as dead.
“Jesus Christ, quiet the fuck down,” my mama hissed from the direction of the kitchen. She came around from behind the fridge, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Got half a mind to kick your ass,” she said. “Barging in here like you own the place.”
The thing that had been nagging at me, plucking my mind like a violin string over and over until it about drove me crazy, had come rushing in as I’d left the Logans’ house this morning. The first time I’d let it go in what felt like forever, and suddenly there it was, my mind laying it out in front of me like a hog on a platter, ripe for the taking. I pointed at her, took two steps in her direction. “How did you know what Junie’s walk was like?” I demanded.
My mama’s brow wrinkled up. “What in the hell are you talking about?” She swirled her cigarette hand beside her head. “Has grief made you loony, or what?”
The man on the couch lowered his arm, squinted at me through bleary eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Shut up,” I said without looking at him, kept my eyes glued on my mama. “In my house the other day, in my kitchen. You said you knew about Zach and me because he and Junie have the same walk.”
My mama stubbed her cigarette out on the countertop, flicked it into the sink. “Yeah, so?”
“How’d you know? How do you know Junie’s walk well enough to recognize it in Zach? And don’t give me some bullshit about seeing her from a distance. You’ve never been that close to her, not for long enough to matter.” I wanted those words to be the truth, needed them to be, but I already suspected they weren’t, long before my mama opened her mouth and confirmed it.
“You got some nerve, coming into my home, accusing me.” She paused, took a swig from her beer. “What exactly is it you’re accusing me of, anyway? Knowing how your daughter walked?” Her voice turned high and full of fake panic. “Quick, someone call the cops. I should be arrested. I’m a goddamn menace to society.”
That’s how you always knew my mama felt cornered, backed against the wall by her own lies. She came out swinging, wild and mean, and she didn’t care who she took down in her wake.
I sank down into one of the wobbly chairs clustered around the scarred kitchen table, leaned forward until my forehead almost touched my knees. “You knew her,” I said, more to myself than to my mama. “You knew Junie.” It was my worst nightmare come true. Everything I’d tried to protect her from, insulate her against, walking right up and making itself at home.
“I was her grandma.”
I shot upward so fast tiny stars sparked in my vision. “I was her mother. And I told you no. I told you to stay the fuck away from her!” I slammed one hand down onto the table, wondered how bad a price I might have to pay for the startled jump it caused my mama. “Isn’t that what you always said when we were growing up, to anyone who tried to interfere, stick their noses in our business trying to help Cal and me? That you were our mama and you made the rules?”
She stared at me, even and calm now. “I did say that.”
“I always knew you were poison. And I’d made my peace with that, with the part of me that comes from you. But you weren’t supposed to touch her, none of your filth or your meanness or your awful decisions were ever going to get close to Junie.” I paused, a horrible thought bubbling to the surface. “Are you the one who introduced Izzy to Matt? Is that how she met him?”
“I got no idea what you’re talking about,” my mama said, brow furrowed. “I never even met Izzy.”
I believed her only because she wouldn’t bother lying, not about something she’d consider as unimportant as bringing Matt into Izzy’s orbit. I palmed tears off my cheek with the flat of my hand. I glanced around the trailer with blurry eyes, half-finished beer cans littering the counters, a scrum of suspicious white powder smeared at the other end of the table, the thick, hot smell of rotting garbage, the blare of idiotic voices from the television in the corner. Something like horror swelled in my chest. “Did Junie come here? Did you bring her here?”
“You ashamed of growing up poor?” my mama asked. “Is that what this is about?”
“I’m still poor!” I screamed. “Junie was poor every day of her life. It’s never been about that. It’s about you.”
“If I was so terrible, if growing up here was so bad, you knew where the door was.” She jutted her chin toward the front of the trailer. “Never saw you use it, though. Always seemed happy enough to keep on eating my food, sleeping under my roof.”
I rolled my eyes, wishing Cal were here to catch my glance. “Oh, here we go.” I braced myself for the big windup, the unappreciated, picked-on mother whose kids were ungrateful brats. It was a version of the story my mama never got tired of telling. A self-serving fairy tale studded with lies.
“What do you want me to say then?” she asked. “You want me to apologize for seeing my own grandchild? My own flesh and blood?”
“No,” I said. “Your apologies don’t mean shit. We both know that. You’ve never been sorry for anything in your entire life. Except maybe giving birth to Cal and me.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, her mouth twisting into a cruel little bow. “I never was sorry about Cal.”
It was nothing she hadn’t said to me before, but it still had the power to hurt. Not a full body blow the way it had been when I was a kid, but a quick, sharp kick to the heart. “Don’t worry, Mama,” I said. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
She turned away from me, tossed her empty beer bottle into the trash. “I ain’t in the mood for this.” She sighed. “I wanted to meet Junie, that’s all. I meant for it to be a onetime thing. But then I got to know her.” She paused, shoulder falling in a helpless shrug, the gesture you make before you admit something shameful. “I loved her,” she said finally.
Nothing she could have said would have shocked me more. It was like hearing your dog start a conversation or watching the sun fall out of the sky. Something so impossible that even seeing it with your own eyes didn’t make it real. “You loved her,” I said, voice flat.
“I did,” my mama confirmed. She sounded as surprised as anyone by the fact.
I’d known my girl was special, always had. But to unclench the tight fist of my mother? Not even Cal had ever done that. Special didn’t even cover it. My God, I’d had no idea. I shifted in my chair, wanting to be gone, but wanting the whole story, too. This was probably my only chance. My mama wasn’t one for dragging things out, peeling back the layers. Once she shut the door on this subject, it would be shut for good. “You what? Walked up to her on the street and introduced yourself? ‘Hey, Junie, I’m the grandma your mom warned you about. Let’s be friends’?”
“You know, I used to think I missed your real personality. The one you put on ice when Junie was born. At least that Evie had some spunk.” My mama shook her head. “But it turns out I don’t. Your smart-ass routine gets old quick.”
I laughed, a hoarse bark. “I learned from the best. Now stop avoiding the question.”
My mama leaned back against the counter, crossed her arms. “How do you think I met her? Use your brain. It ain’t hard to figure out.”
It took me longer than it should have, cycling through the possibilities and skipping over the most obvious one because I didn’t want to believe it. “Cal?” I said finally. Voiced like a question but one I already knew the answer to. It was like taking a punch to the gut, the knowledge that Cal had violated the one trust I’d relied on him to always keep. He’d promised me. And promised Junie. Cradled her newborn body in his arms and vowed she’d always be safe, which meant keeping her far away from Mama. And he’d betrayed us both.
“Yep. I told him I deserved to meet her at least. My only grandchild.” She smirked at me. “And he agreed. Didn’t even put up an argument.”
Of course he didn’t. Because as much as Cal loved me, as much as he hated Mama, he was loyal to her, too. He still showed up at her trailer once a month with food or an envelope of cash. He visited her on Christmas Day and Mother’s Day and Easter. Not like me, who before Junie died hadn’t seen Mama, except from a distance, in more than five years. She had some sick hold over Cal, even now. The ability to bend him to her will when he ought to have known better. Part of me could hardly blame him for it. For all my big talk, I hadn’t managed to sever that final connection, either. “If you had anything to do with what happened to Junie, if it comes back to you in even the tiniest way, Mama . . .” I let my words trail off.
“You think if I knew anything about what happened I’d be sitting here drinking beer and shooting the shit with you?” She lit up a new cigarette with a neon-pink lighter. “I don’t waste time making threats, Eve.” Accusatory squint through a scrim of smoke. “I don’t talk. I act. Whoever hurt her would already be dead in a ditch.”
I pushed my chair back hard, and it went over halfway, crashing into the wall behind me. “We’re done,” I told her. “Not for now or for today. For always. Pretend you don’t know me.” Even as I spoke, I had the sinking feeling my words were coming too late. Junie’s death had set events in motion that couldn’t be stopped. I crossed to the front door, paused before stepping out. “Pretend you never had a daughter. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.”
I wanted it to hurt her, but I knew with unflinching certainty that it hadn’t. As soon as I was gone, she’d open another beer, screw the guy on the sofa, and throw a frozen dinner in the microwave. End her evening with heroin between the toes. And the daughter she’d just lost, the daughter she hadn’t wanted to begin with, would never even cross her mind.