Valerie left Edith alone with her mother for a few hours of the night. All the tablecloths hung out in the warm and windless dark. A choir of tree frogs filled the air. Edith found a bottle of cooking sherry in the back of a cabinet—the only alcohol in the house. It had been her first illicit drink when she was thirteen, snuck in the middle of a sleepover. It had been the first drink she and her mother had shared, three years later, while her father was off working as an AP exam grader.

This bottle, grubby with dust and its label peeling, could be the same one.

It’s good to have you home, love, her mother said.

Yeah, it’s good to see you.

You could do it more often. Her mother clicked on the radio. Satie’s slow furniture music. The sherry tasted terrible and both poured a second glass. You and Valerie, her mother said. Is it serious?

Ordinarily she’d lie. I don’t know.

Would you have children with her?

Well she can’t—no, Mother, I wouldn’t.

Not very serious then. They took turns thumbing a loose corner of the sherry label. You know, when your father and I met, he was engaged to a woman who already had a child. She’d gone through college with one foot in each world. Insane, every time, to think of this anonymous other child, almost her father’s step-daughter. From the time she first heard this story at fourteen, Edith had often imagined that she might meet that other kid out in the world. She had—if she’s being honest—imagined falling in love with them a little. Or at least kissing them on a bridge above a river full of starlight.

We met at a picnic, her mother went on, and I could see how he loved that little girl. How eager he was to share the world with her, and have her share it with him. And I knew—that was going to be my children’s father.

Child’s, Edith said.

You were enough, weren’t you. Though I always thought your father wanted a daughter. It was hard to believe her mother said this. It was surely only in the rewriting that this sentence came out—something Edith wanted or misunderstood, built from a jumble of half-heard phonemes. He adored that first child. That first child. His and not.

Drops splashed across the table as Edith refilled her glass. There were often moments like this. Brief points of conspiracy when she could talk about whatever she’d been putting off. The couch in Boston with Bing Crosby playing. The night-swathed Alabama bed. It was the emotive equivalent of a musical swell, a place where there seemed to be no choice in the matter, only a letting go.

Mom, she said. Look.

We were good to you, her mother said. We did what we could. What we had to. And soon I guess we’ll both be dead. She turned the glass this way and that, catching light in the syrupy liquid. Your father goes, I’ll go soon after. There isn’t any love in that, you have to understand. Only, at a certain point, that’s what life is.

Listen, Mother, I have to— But there was nothing left. Everything was slipping away like colored sand.