“I feel upset now.” I took a deep breath and bent to cut a few orange-pink roses. “I know we’ve had this discussion before, but I don’t understand why me. You don’t have premonitions, Aunt Camellia and Aunt Iris don’t. Jules doesn’t. I’m all alone with this curse.”

My mother’s hands stopped for a second, and she took a deep breath.

“Mom? What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m admiring these roses. Aren’t they particularly beautiful this year? I love yellow roses with a touch of red, don’t you? And look at our Dr. Marie Curie roses. So delicate, and she was so brilliant.”

She wasn’t thinking about roses or Dr. Curie. I saw her hands shake.

“I don’t know why you have this gift slash curse,” she said, her voice pitching up, high and squeaky. “I don’t.”

“I wish I could go to a support group. We could call ourselves The Future Crazies. Or The Premonitioners. Or, We Know It All. I wish I knew someone else who I could talk to. It would be helpful to have someone in the family older than me, wiser, who saw these things, too. She could tell me how to be as normal as possible and not haunted all the time by the things I see coming down the pike and can do nothing to stop. How to deal with the guilt, and not being able to fix something, or to help. The knowing is hard. Plus, trying to help people on the fly is exhausting.”

The other night I had to sneak into Millie Coons’s barn. The only way to sneak up on her house was through her back fields. It was a long walk, and it was dark. I had had a vision of her falling off her riding mower and getting her leg run over. Somehow the seat became loose, and when she stood up to see what the problem was, she fell off, and whack. Her leg was a bloody mess. She was out in the field all alone, too, into the night, crying. So I went into her barn and fixed the seat. I didn’t want to tell her, because I don’t like advertising about my premonitions, even though we’re friends and only a couple of years apart in school.

Anyhow, it was a long walk, and I was darn tired when I got home.

My mother stood up, her head bent down.

“Are you okay, Mom?” I reached for her hand. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Not too wrong. Nothing wrong. Fine and dandy. Too much coffee. You know what too much caffeine does to me.”

No, I didn’t. What was she talking about? She drank six cups of coffee a day. It never had this effect. “Mom. Are you sick? You look pale.”